TY - JOUR
AU1 - Tracey, Potts,
AB - Abstract This year’s chapter focuses upon the sights, sounds, shadows, and apparitions of modernity, in books mainly published in 2017. Beginning with popular music before moving on to a tour through the bright lights of the twentieth century and ending with a ghostly tale of a talking mongoose, the aim is to illuminate titles that place a premium upon new ways of seeing what have come to be perceived as standard features of pop culture. In particular, studies that provide attentive archival accounts of phenomena that tend to lack academic appreciation are foregrounded: elements found especially in American popular culture—the blinding spectacle, the seemingly formulaic jingle of commercial music—are re-examined against the enduring presuppositions of homogeneity, flatness, and sameness that have long tended to accompany apprehensions of the popular. Over the past few years, rumours of the death or, at least, of the unstoppable decline of popular music have gained pace. The untimely loss of David Bowie, of Prince, of George Michael, of Mark E. Smith alone have prompted much public discussion pointing toward pop’s end of days. Is it the Rapture?, we asked on Twitter. Is there a supergroup, at this very minute, forming in the sky? As pop music icons appeared to ascend to heaven, here on Earth technological changes connived to strengthen the narrative. From blaming it on the download, the X Factor, auto-tune, or Ed Sheeran, or else succumbing to the more wistful idea that they just don’t write them like they used to, there has been a gathering gloom over popular music’s future. David Quantick (inventor of the phrase ‘pop will eat itself’) sums up the mood in his review of Simon Reynolds’s book Retromania: ‘The X Factor and its ilk is the last gasp of pop, which has almost certainly eaten itself now.’ Reynolds’s Retromania, likewise, sees the originality of pop as in its past: twenty-first-century music is all pastiche, consisting in the main of remakes, cover versions, and tribute acts. There is nothing new anymore, and now all the old geniuses are dying, leaving behind an underwhelming and insipid popscape played through tinny smartphone speakers, where the bland lead the bland, allowing Sheeran and his mates to hog the charts. On the contrary, where the likes of Quantick and Reynolds hear the same old song—without even the recompense of a different beat—Robert Loss finds plenty of sonic variety in contemporary pop, even taking care to dismiss the denigration of young people’s musical taste as ‘a crap argument’ (p. 95). Taking Reynolds’s pessimism by the horns, Loss curates a ‘festival of musicians’ (p. 13), who are, like himself, in pursuit of newness. Nothing Has Been Done Before: Seeking the New In 21st-Century American Popular Music thus sets out to transform the ways in which we listen to and appreciate today’s artists across a vast array of styles and genres, subverting the defeatism and nostalgia of recent music journalism in the process. For Loss, what marks out the new in pop is less an element of novelty—that somehow belongs to the song or else to the means of its production—and more a quality to be found in performance. The old Marxist chestnuts of commodification, standardization, Tin Pan Alley business models, and mass consumption are exposed as profound misrecognitions of popular music as Loss digs deep into the idea of the performed pop song. Beginning in the recording studio, the record as object is pulled apart to reveal the performance at its heart: ‘The performance creates the song. Even the process of composing a song requires a performance of it. Without performance, there is nothing for a recording to record. The performance creates the recording’ (p. 7). Performance is, then, ‘the being of music’ (p. 7). Live performances are, thus, but one species of performed music and are not to be thought of, as Bob Dylan once implied with his ‘Tin Pan Alley is gone’ comment, as more authentic or real: live performances tend to have the most variability: slight variations in elements like tempo, dropped or changed lyrics, certain instrumental parts deleted because the band can’t afford a horn section on tour. Even for prerecorded music, there’s a tremendous difference between performing or hearing it privately (i.e., in a studio or through headphones) and experiencing it publicly. The chosen variables of a song—words, rhythm, tempo, melody, the instruments used, et cetera—do not cease being variables once the performed song is recorded. (p. 9) So-called definitive versions of songs maintain their infinite variability not only because live performances are expected (and so artists, to avoid boredom, may speed up or slow down hit songs on stage) but also as a result of their ineluctable historical situation: ‘History is a randomizer in the spectrum of chance a song already contains’ (p. 9). In other words, a song is never an object or a commodity (the classic mistake made by Marxist critics, Adorno especially) but rather ‘a singular multiple’ (p. 9). The cultural life of any song is, then, impossible to demarcate, as Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young well know, given their recent altercations with Donald Trump around the use of their songs in his presidential campaign. ‘Born in the USA’ and ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’, like all pop and rock songs, are recordings on the move, in space and time, and therefore always contain ‘the potential to be new’ (p. 9). Whether through amateur covers of Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’, attendance at legendary concerts, or simply the profound worldliness of our listening habits (spookily, as if to prove a point, ‘Purple Rain’ has just started playing on the radio as I go to finish this sentence), pop songs are constantly made anew, re-energized and revivified. While some, as the millennium approached, were rocking out to Prince and the Revolution, others were partying like it was 1899. The popularity of old-timey American folk music at the turn of this century—not to mention the success of the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, together with its bestselling soundtrack, tour, and live concert album, recorded at the Ryman theatre—offers the first case in point: a vehicle for exploring, to take the subtitle of the first section of the book, ‘the past in the present’, the new in the old. Loss thus begins his search for newness by exploring what he sees as the ‘revivalist spirit [that] marked the first two years of the millennium’ (p. 18). Gillian Welch, the opening act of Loss’s festival, in looking to the past, even so, soundtracks the American present: Time (the Revelator), she insists, is a record that ‘reflects Nashville, April, 2001' (quoted in Loss, p. 23). Together with her partner Dave Rawlings, Welch takes elements of the earliest popular music: field hollers, fiddle tunes, blues riffs, hillbilly and cowboy ballads, combining them to provide a decisive, above all fresh, intervention in the millennial folk scene. Loss comes across as an extremely attentive listener of Welch and Rawlings’s music, anatomizing the dissonant opening of ‘Revelator’, the first track on the album, discerning the mood of its chords and Time’s song cycle as one of contemporary alienation and disappointment. The meandering, directionless drift of ‘I Dream a Highway’, the gloomy history lessons of ‘April the 14th Part 1’ and ‘Ruination Day Part 2’, and the comparative directness of ‘Elvis Presley Blues’ forge connections between images, texts, melodies, and events that Loss refers to as ‘recombination’, a form of bricolage where ‘unprecedented relations between existing elements’ might result in ‘new entities’ (p. 21). The new of Welch and Rawlings is, then, not the shiny, exhilarating new of the American mid-century, but rather one built out of the wreckage and detritus of broken dreams: What makes Time (the Revelator) so powerful, so singular, and so new is what it says about America circa 2001: the continuing saga of an ambitious but disappointed country afraid that its greatest deeds might be in the past. […] Welch and Rawlings sound like they’re […] picking their way through a new millennial America that was promised flying cars but instead got Bush v. Gore. (p. 22) The kind of revival orchestrated by Welch and Rawlings stands in marked contrast to any kind of nostalgia, or return, or comeback gesture, exemplified by what Loss sees as the rather ‘chipper Smithsonian’ (p. 24) journey presented by the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack: to him, a ‘weak revival’ (p. 24). Strong revivals, on the other hand, rather than augmenting ‘an already official version of a country’s history’ (p. 24) or acting as if the past can be innocently transported into the present intact, do important cultural work. What happens ‘when a revival truly feels like an intervention’ (p. 26) can also be heard in the music of Rhiannon Giddens and her band the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Paying attention to the misremembered and, more often, un-witnessed past, the Drops’ repertoire revives the music of black string bands, wresting the banjo from the grip of white bluegrass. Despite black banjo players preceding their white counterparts by at least 100 years and despite the profound influence of black string band music on all forms of American folk and roots, there has been precious little acknowledgement in official narratives. Listening to one single track from the album Genuine Negro Jig, Loss unpacks the way that Giddens goes to the deep past of American popular music to revise and ‘intervene on tradition’ (p. 29). This kind of folk revivalism and reclamation, involving the naming of an ‘unrecognised and forgotten event’ (p. 29), renders old tunes entirely new, and, more, confronts Smithsonian Folkwayish complacencies head on. Spirit dampener: there is no guarantee, of course, that any of these cadences will reach the ears of all of Welch’s or Giddens’s listeners: as if any proof of Loss’s argument about the unpredictable life of songs were needed, David and Samantha Cameron are reportedly—and, to my mind, dismayingly—fans of Gillian Welch, or at least of Time (the Revelator). From the deep past, Loss immerses himself in the exorbitant present by watching Katy Perry’s 2015 Super Bowl appearance: ‘yet another ritual of American excess, glamour, and consumerism—but what a ritual!’ (p. 85). For Loss, Perry’s ‘Roar’, here performed on the back of a gold, human-powered animatronic lion, is the epitome of the spectacle, and the Super Bowl its main stage. In stark contrast, though, to standard commentators on novelty and the spectacle (the usual suspects: Debord, Adorno), who tend to perch, loftily, on its sidelines, Loss attempts to discern its appeal with a bowl of pretzels in hand. Mainstream American pop, what he terms the American Wow, being these days a gigantic composite of celebrity, consumer culture, techno-fetishism, and more, is, for all its apparent sameyness, not adequately thought through the vocabulary of the Culture Industry thesis: standardization, mass production, mass consumption, et cetera. While Loss does not find very much that is radically new in Katy Perry, he is extremely careful not to fall into the predictable traps of Debord and his fellow-travellers. Critical of Debord’s ‘naïve absolutism’ (p. 102), the philosopher is declared an outright fool when it comes to considering Prince’s Super Bowl show in 2007. Even Badiou, Loss’s main theoretical ally in the book, is castigated for his ‘bad habit of entirely writing off popular music as being formally derivative of “serious music”’ (p. 103). And if Perry’s performance nevertheless ‘capitulates to the American Wow’s values; it represents and reproduces them’ (p. 102), the possibilities for working within the spectacle are identified—in abundance—in Janelle Monáe, whose Afrofuturist creations jump cut to a ‘revolutionary, political, utopian new’ (p. 149): ‘As much as she gives the American Wow exactly what it wants—a bold identity, fashion, celebrity, hits—Monáe’s use of an Afrofuturistic persona complicates the spectacle’s very narrow concept and tradition of identity’ (p. 150). But what happens if the spectacle is not given what it wants? When it comes to protest and political speech in the American Wow, it might seem that there is no place for the more direct political expressions of artists like the Dixie Chicks (who performed the National Anthem at the Super Bowl in 2003), Bruce Springsteen, and Kendrick Lamar. Going by the experience of the Dixie Chicks, in the aftermath of their remarks about President Bush on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, the Wow’s gold animatronic lion would appear to demand a certain degree of feeding (there were calls for the Chicks’ lead singer, Natalie Maine, to be assassinated, and many country music stations dropped the group from their playlists). The book’s final section centres on the question: ‘does music that seeks a political new need to sound new?’ (p. 168), to which the answer is a firm ‘no’. Here the argument returns to the importance of history and to the idea of a transformative relation between present and past. Loss clearly appreciates music that pays its dues, that acknowledges its lineage. With its focus on the experience of listening to women country singers, Holly Gleason’s edited collection Woman Walk the Line might well be thought of as an entire volume fleshing out of the idea of the social and cultural life of songs. Gleason and her contributors set out to redress the chauvinism that besets the official story of country by privileging a personal narrative approach: one that roots itself implicitly in the feminist idea of the personal as political. The collection’s twenty-seven essays, each centring on a particular artist, work in constellation to push women to the front of the country music stage to stand with rather than by their men. Ranging from under-appreciated, largely invisible singers like Lil Hardin and Hazel Dickens to figures whose looks and personalities are fixated on at the expense of their music (Dolly Parton especially) to American Wowers like Shania Twain and Taylor Swift, Woman Walk the Line endeavours to get at the elusive power of women’s country to get under the skin of the listener. The Smithsonian Folkway (Dickens) to Nash Vegas (Swift) sweep of Gleason’s collection, combined with its methodology of narrative enquiry, works to show how women singing country music open up lines of flight and escape in everyday life. This form of narrative knowing frays the clichéd ‘three chords and the truth’ version of country into countless singularities—Robert Loss would say ‘singular multiples’. The beauty of Woman Walk the Line lies in the fine grain of its storytelling: the detailed accounts of listening to Bobbie Gentry’s ‘Ode to Billy Joe’ while holding a cassette recorder against the radio; of hearing grief in Emmylou Harris’s ‘Red Dirt Girl’; of being overwhelmed at Alison Krauss’s contribution to the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack; of finding the chords and words to represent life’s ‘contradictions’ and ‘in-betweens’ (p. 192) on Kacey Musgraves’s Same Trailer, Different Park; of finding the courage to come out after seeing k.d. lang sing ‘Miss Chatelaine’ live. k.d.’s signature style of ‘a tomboy version of a cowgirl’ (p. 124) queers a look that had its heyday in the Las Vegas of the 1940s. Stefan Al’s lavishly illustrated account of Vegas architecture traces its history to its earliest incarnation as a fake frontier town, where, despite there being ‘no cowboy history’ (p. 5) to speak of, provocatively dressed cowgirls and honky-tonk angels greeted guests eager for a taste of the Wild West. Both the Last Frontier and the El Rancho Casino complexes, between them forming the original coordinates of what was to become known as the Strip, exploited Western themes to attract visitors to what threatened to become yet another American ghost town. The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream offers a much-needed historical approach to a city that is renowned for routinely tearing down its history—earning it the nickname ‘implosion capital of the world’ (p. 2)—one that is situated within the bigger story in America itself. Al’s real achievement in this coffee-table-sized book is to carefully document the architecture of the Strip while resisting some of the more clichéd views of Vegas: as a carnivalesque space of excess, as Sin City, as playground, as altogether exceptional. Depicting the evolution of the Strip’s architecture in a timeline allows a different picture to emerge, one that sees the story of Las Vegas as entirely in keeping with that of American capitalism: ‘From self-invention to cutthroat competition to risky “casino capitalism,” Las Vegas is a microcosm of America’ (p. 2). The architectural blueprint of Vegas, Al notes, could well have been drawn by Joseph Schumpeter, whose notion of ‘creative destruction [as] the essential fact about capitalism’ (p. 2), was authored, he observes further, in the year following the building of El Rancho, the Strip’s inaugural casino resort. As k.d. lang well knows, though, even cowgirls get the blues, and the early days of Wild West-themed motels, licensed outlaws, and papier-mâché madams soon gave way to new architectural styles. While the Vegas version of the Old West always came with all mod cons—one of Al’s best coinages is that of ‘the air-conditioned cowboy’ (p. 13)—giving rise to a fake-fronted version of modernity that took some of its techniques from Hollywood, the suave sophistication of corporate modernity can be seen to have taken over by mid-century. Out went the wagon wheels and Stetsons and in came the suits, glass facades, golf clubs, and underwater cocktails. The age of the pseudo hi-roller—the ethos of the mid-century modern casino was one of ‘we are all rich, that money means nothing’ (p. 29)—found itself in turn being replaced by pirate ships and fairy-tale castles in the Disney phase, when family values reasserted themselves and the Strip cleaned up its act. The city’s signature neon signs, likewise, fell out of favour in the 1970s—with lucky survivors of that period of creative destruction finding a new home in the Neon Boneyard—as the buildings themselves became signs. Soon Vegas was replicating entire cities, as reproductions of Venice, Paris, and New York formed ‘a permanent World Exposition of global culture’ (p. 195) offering a Grand Tour on the cheap. These days, the replica competes with the genuine article as so-called starchitects move in to claim their bit of the Strip. The ‘Bilbao Effect’, named after the impact on Spanish tourism of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim, has led the city’s developers to attract celebrity architects to lend a more cosmopolitan edge to the bright-light city and to make it more appealing to urban sophisticates. As Al’s story unfolds, what becomes clear is the ways in which all of this change marches in step with the rhythms of twentieth- and twenty-first-century capital. As the world learns from Las Vegas architecturally and the Strip exports its blueprints globally, it also learns from its risk-society, high-stakes brand of finance capital and astute sense of the experience economy, in which it always has been ahead of the game. It is in this sense, then, that Al can confidently claim that the Strip ‘shaped both American and global urbanization, setting a template for practices of city branding, spatial production and control, and high-risk investment in urban spaces. The Strip is both a promoter of hypercapitalism and a paragon of modernity in which “all that is solid melts into air”’ (p. 222). David Nye’s American Illuminations: Urban Lighting 1800–1920 can be read as a prehistory of Las Vegas, especially when it comes to its detailed account of the evolution of the commercial landscape. The communicative aspect of Vegas’s neon signage certainly comes as no surprise when considered in the context of the history of illumination. As Nye details, the glamorization of the city had already begun by the 1890s, with ‘giant advertising signs, scintillating downtowns, and the dramatic lighting of skyscrapers, bridges, and public monuments’; come the turn of the century the illuminated landscape had become ‘a hallmark of popular culture’ (p. 5). The effect of spectacular lighting, then, not only turned night into day, it shaped urban culture dramatically, with America developing its own specific approach to illumination. Nye takes major issue with Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s influential account of the history of public lighting, on the grounds that it overstates its case that industrial illumination brings with it disenchantment. The invention of modern nightlife following that of gas, and then electric, lighting, Schivelbusch contends, banished fear of nightfall and of the dark, thus disenchanting spaces that were previously off-limits. The trouble with the ‘artificial suns’ argument, according to Nye, is its lack of nuance: Schivelbusch tends to provide something of a grand narrative—where industrialized light delivers ‘uniform effects in Europe and the United States’ (p. 3)—which glides over cultural differences and historical details, not to mention the divergent economic effects that greeted the introduction of electricity and gas. Watching the world light up from a satellite perspective—as Nye does in his engaging opening paragraph—is a useful move, and broadbrush, macro arguments are important, but not if they are neglectful of moments of intensity. Schivelbusch’s rather cavalier treatment of the archive is contrasted with Nye’s careful reconstruction of America’s divergent and bumpy road towards electrification and illumination. First, the idea that electricity simply replaced gas is shown to be inaccurate. Likewise, Schivelbusch’s claim that the Paris Exposition of 1900 was ‘the epitome of early electrical development’ (p. 4) is revealed to be false, as the event is explicitly documented as being reliant ‘to a considerable degree on gas lighting’ (p. 4). Tracing ‘transatlantic cultural differences’ (p. 4) allows Nye to illuminate the ways in which American lighting plans and designs, despite their hegemonic intentions, often constituted ‘a mosaic of social worlds’ (p. 6), and were patchy and individualistic rather than uniform and coherent. Nye’s careful and attentive account is also helpful in offering a corrective to ahistorical ideas of the spectacle. In place of the usual Marxist argument, where neon light equals capitalist light, the book maps the uneven development of commercial lighting in the American city. While electric signs were exploited for advertising purposes, they simultaneously contributed to processes of place-making and, in locations like Times Square, did away with any need for street lighting. Where street lighting was installed, in retail spaces and commercial districts, storefronts were often, paradoxically, thrown into shadow and, as a response, lit up their windows illuminating their goods. The spirited complexity of the lighting up of New York, Chicago, St Louis, Seattle, San Francisco, Detroit, and other cities across the United States is, thus, evidenced as something of a battleground between individualism and commercially driven aesthetics, on the one hand, and the pursuit of harmonious vision on the other. Either way, American streets were certainly not governed by any unified style: ‘Each skyscraper and electric sign had its own form, and any harmonies that resulted were happenstance’ (p. 156). The ‘great variety in illumination’ (p. 209) had the effect of ‘cast[ing] others into the shadows’ (p. 220). The intensification of lighting, together with the concentration of the best lighting in the more well-off areas, produced classed differences in the illuminated city. Rather than disenchanting the night, this disparity made darker spaces even ‘more mysterious’ (p. 138), encouraging practices of slumming and proto dark tourism: ‘Small groups paid guides for nocturnal tours, where they might glimpse gamblers, pickpockets, ladies of the night, drunks, and con-artists’ (p. 138). The more the light floods into the city, the more darkness proliferates at its edges and corners, and the more the darkness proliferates, the greater the desire to venture into the night. The dynamic play between light and dark is the precise subject of Tim Edensor’s recent book, which, like Martin Creed’s Turner Prize-winning piece Work No. 227 (a piece that lights up the opening of the book’s introduction), switches the lights on and off again. From Light to Dark: Daylight, Illumination and Gloom pursues a neglected geography of light—to build upon the substantial historical focus on the subject. Certainly, questions of the shaping of space and place have tended to proceed without much consideration for illumination, whether through daylight or artificial means. The eternal presence of light and dark as qualities that inform the everyday—in particular, our sense experiences—is something that Edensor sees as missing from his own discipline of geography. The book is organized into three parts, which, to my mind, work collectively to orchestrate three major reappraisals: the reframing of discussions around commercial illumination; the rethinking of atmospheres, including the methodological question of how to capture an atmosphere; and, finally and most significantly, a thorough overhaul of the way that darkness is imagined and conceptualized. Following a delightful journey in Part I through the Scottish Highlands and Kielder Forest via Stonehenge and other Neolithic sites—where summer and winter solstices can be seen to have organized the stones—alongside various artworks exploring natural light, Edensor flicks the switch at the centre of the book to consider the bright lights of modernity. In identifying a ‘growing disenchantment with an overilluminated world’ (p. xi), he refuses, nevertheless, the standard—and aggressively classed—narratives attributing the lighting spectacle to mass (hence, indiscriminate) audiences. Such linkages, he argues, are no more than ‘distributions of the sensible’, ways of vilifying popular taste, securing the identity positions of the tasteful, middle-class self by casting aspersions on its ‘others’. Building on his collaborative work with fellow-geographer Steve Millington, Edensor stands on the prom at Blackpool and under the canopy at Freemont Street in Vegas and enjoys himself, allowing their ‘complex contestations’ (p. 103) full rein. In participating so wholeheartedly in the spectacles of Blackpool and Vegas, along with various festivals of illumination across Britain, the United States, France, and Australia, Edensor presses hard upon prevailing ideas around ‘festivalization’ projects, in particular, the rather dismissive script where neoliberal economic forces orchestrate ‘aestheticized place[s] of consumption’ (p. 111), or else an ‘attention economy’ (p. 113) where experiences are peddled in place of commodities. Without wishing to reject such critiques outright, Edensor nevertheless ruffles their certainties—what he sees as their rather ‘one-sided’ (p. 114) perspectives—by pursuing the difficult work of retrieving the atmosphere of illuminated festive spaces. What results is a sensitive and nuanced study (via participant observation and auto-ethnography) of what happens—atmospherically—amid the multi-coloured displays of a British seafront in autumn, in the cosy glow of the Danish domestic interior in winter, or when participating in a commemorative installation to mark the centenary of the First World War. Both the sense experience of apprehending the radiance of light together with the spillages and diffusions of light itself thus form the basis of Edensor’s challenge to the one-sidedness of the Debordian emphasis. The scattered qualities of lit space, the subtle plays of the spectator’s involvement, will never result simply in a straightforward victory for governance or ‘society of the spectacle’ scenes of control. Instead, ‘Light possesses a particularly rich capacity to defamiliarize familiar places, transforming what is well known into an uncanny realm and thereby suggesting that place may be apprehended otherwise’ (p. 115). It is in thinking of darkness in a different light that the book proposes a significant challenge to modernist narratives which equate light with civilization and see it as a cleansing, ordering force in the street and the home. Continuing with the auto-ethnographic approach, Edensor dines in the dark, walks through a dark sky park, visits a simulated New York cityscape designed to encourage empathy for blind and partially sighted people, attends a concert performed entirely in darkness, and participates in a relational artwork in a disused section of a metropolitan railway station. What he discovers in his dark travels sits in stark contrast to Nye’s portrait of the prurient interest in shadowy corners that marks the birth of the modern, illuminated landscape. Having progressively lit up and disenchanted the night over the twentieth century it seems that, in the twenty-first, a ‘search for gloom’ (p. 179) is well under way. More than a morbid pursuit of ghosts and ghouls or else of the dodgy human characters that are said occupy the night, experiences of the dark are pursued for their sensory and other qualities. Dining in the dark, for instance, not only increases appreciation of taste and smell but also allows for greater intimacy between diners and waiting staff, whereas apprehending the night sky, minus the orange glow of street lamps, sharpens both vision and the ‘tactile senses’, say of the foot striking the ground (p. 194). Dark exploits and adventures, in Edensor’s experience, then, can be accounted for as something of an antidote to what is perceived by many to be an over-illuminated world. We are, to borrow from Nye, blinded by the light and, paradoxically, held apart from each other. Under the cover of darkness, Edensor discovers, we not only begin to appreciate the possibilities of a more ecological and sustainable illuminated future, we rediscover subtle intimacies ‘augmented by touch and the sonic qualities of voices’ (p. 210). What emerges, then, as the big subject in Light and Dark is one of conviviality, sociability, shared discovery and enjoyment, elements that are entirely overlooked by the majority of critics of the spectacle. The luminescence of the department store at night is evocatively drawn in Matthew Newton’s Shopping Mall: ‘Behind her the entrance to Gimbels glowed bright against a hazy blue-black sky. The sales floor was empty but still illuminated, a thousand fluorescent tube lights humming in unison as the last of the cashiers tallied their receipts for the night and emptied their registers’ (p. 25). Waiting for his mother to finish work, sitting in the passenger seat of his ‘father’s gold Plymouth Duster’, listening to the baseball game, Newton opens his exploration of American consumer culture with poignant use of auto-ethnography. Described as part-memoir, part-case study, Shopping Mall, to be sure, is brimming with enchanting vignettes taken from the author’s own experience of shopping, waiting and hanging out in retail parks over a period of thirty or so years. Divided into three parts—childhood, adolescence, and adulthood—the book sets out to investigate the mythology of the mall as a space of fantasy and imaginative play as well as of consumption. It is its attention to the affective charge of the mall that makes Newton’s contribution to Ian Bogost and Christopher Schaburg’s Object Lessons series such an enjoyable read (and a compelling rebuke to Augé’s notion of non-place). Whether catching a glimpse of the backstage of everyday retail life while waiting for his mother to end her shift or, as a teenager, finding a white denim jacket on sale at TJ Maxx or, years later, treating his son to a ride on the coin-operated ice-cream truck—and eating the invisible cone offered to him as part of the deal—there is a tangible sense of place throughout the book. Interleaved in these recollections is a brief history of the rise and fall of mall culture, from its heyday in the 1950s to its radical expansion in the 1980s (when we were first encouraged to shop ’til we dropped) through to its present-day state of obsolescence. As the neon lights go out and the roll call of dead and ghost malls increases year on year (becoming likely subjects for photography projects and online ‘museums’ such as deadmalls.com), Newton finds himself pondering what it is that is being lost. Beyond shared nostalgia, it seems that by far the greatest sacrifice is community and the sheer vitality of life at the mall. Recalling his sister greeting his mother at the end of the working day, Newton gives us a tiny glimpse: ‘“Tell us everything”, my sister pleaded, her eyes wide with anticipation. “We want to hear about crazy customers, all the gifts you wrapped, and the weird things people tried to bring back to the store”’ (p. 36). There is, then, more than a hint of melancholy as Newton concludes his study: in his failure to find not just the malls of his childhood and teenage years—which is to be expected—but, more, any trace of their histories. The death of the mall—and, in the UK, of the retail high street—has been attributed, in part, to the rise of the robots. The shift in recent years from assembly-line to supply-chain work, characterized by the growth of companies like Amazon, makes the robotic system a force to be reckoned with. A new breed of robot worker, flexible, untethered—thanks to their programmable capabilities, of following bar and QR codes for instance—has entered the workplace, creating revolutions in logistics, distribution, and workflow in its wake. John Jordan’s Robots provides a much-needed field guide to such developments, taking the story of robotics out of the hands of roboticists (who tend to underestimate the cultural implications of technology) and, equally, out of the realm of science fiction (where overestimation is often a feature, whether of the technophobic or technophilic variety). The fast-developing world of robotics tends to be understood either through highly specialized technological discourses, which are, by definition, inaccessible to the majority of us, or else through popular forms, which present the opposite problem of misconstruing the science. An informed, intelligible account, taking in both engineering science and its cultural context, is, then, largely missing from the extant literature. As Jordan notes, few technological inventions are as thoroughly over-imagined as robots, and the way towards a comprehensible and level-headed appreciation of robots and their systems is bestrewn with fictional images. The robot, precisely as a cultural figuration, nevertheless has a good deal to tell, and so the book begins with a survey of robots in popular culture, the majority of which come from the genre of science fiction. Starting with Tom Hanks’s character in Polar Express, the reader is directed straight into uncanny valley (the zone of creepiness where human/robot distinctions are too close to call) before moving through a catalogue of familiar titles from Metropolis and The Wizard of Oz to George Lucas’s Star Wars saga to Blade Runner and the Terminator series, Jordan highlights the blurring of lines, and even the cross-fertilization, between science and fiction. Shades of Fritz Lang’s Maria can be seen in Westinghouse’s ‘Elektra’: a cigarette-smoking robot presented at the New York World’s Fair in 1939; Isaac Asimov’s short-story collection I, Robot is the source of both the coinage ‘robotics’ and a set of ethical codes governing human–robot interaction that exerts its ‘influence in the robotic community’ still (p. 33), despite its having been written as ‘the premise of a fantasy’ (p. 32). Asimov’s ‘Three Laws of Robotics’ (his zero law, which makes for four laws in total) were thus intended as a guide to budding sci-fi writers designed to redress what was emerging as a bipolar dynamic between technophobic and technophilic portraits. (Asimov was ‘tiring of robots that were either unrealistically wicked or unrealistically noble’ [p. 32].) Having cleared the path of fantasy, Jordan outlines contemporary developments in robotics in key spheres of human life, including warfare (e.g. drones), autonomous transportation (e.g. driverless cars), and social care (e.g. personal-feeding robots). Placing his emphasis largely upon questions of ethics, Jordan draws out the human side of the question ‘why robotics matters’, teasing out distinctions between artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics along the way. The distinction between ‘domain-specific algorithms’ (p. 8), which are task-oriented, and a gigantic general intelligence is well drawn and is extremely helpful in dispelling some of the hyperbole peddled by the likes of Elon Musk (who sees AI as our ‘biggest existential threat’ [p. 7]). Jordan thus manages successfully to deflate ‘rise of the robots’ rhetoric while taking seriously threats like the hackability of robotics (drone or unmanned aerial vehicle [UAV] hacks, for instance, where the UAV is carrying goods or weapons) and the effects of roboticized supply chains, as in the case of Amazon. Human–robot interaction (HRI), similarly, is explored, with a number of surprising results. If robots make good soldiers or bomb-disposal operatives because they lack emotion, are unlikely to desert or present bias, and can even be programmed to self-sacrifice, human combatants cannot be relied upon not to attribute emotions to robot squaddies. For example, the case of ‘Scooby Doo’, a bomb-disposal unit deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, details the ways in which the unit was treated like an injured child when it was sent for repair after an unsuccessful mission. The length of the queues at Universal Studios, where people lined up waiting to speak to a talking car (David Hasselhoff’s KITT from the TV series Knight Rider), testifies further to the willingness of humans to cultivate affective relationships with robots. As Jordan identifies, anthropomorphism is rife in HRI. People can both feel sorry for robots, as in the case of Snackbot, a vending machine that greeted and conversed with its customers, and be vulnerable to the phenomenon of the mechanical Turk, a hoax played on an unsuspecting public involving an ‘intelligent’ machine, usually with a human hiding, in Wizard of Oz-style, behind the scenes. (The original mechanical Turk, a chess player that hid a chess master inside it, defeated Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon in 1770 [see p. 28]. KITT functions very much in this way, ‘via a human connected to a remote microphone’ [p. 215].) If humans are capable of animating and generating feelings towards a vending machine, or believing in talking cars, it is, maybe, less of a stretch to suppose that they might be capable of conjuring up a mischievous talking mongoose. Christopher Josiffe’s Gef! The Strange Tale of an Extra-Special Talking Mongoose is one of those captivating books that, at least among my friends and colleagues, generates research envy. The story of Gef, aka the ‘Dalby Spook’, aka the ‘Man-Weasel of Doarlish Cashen’, who haunted the Irving family in inter-war Britain, became something of a cause célèbre in 1936, when the question of belief in the talking creature formed the basis of a libel case between two high-profile figures who were both on the board of the National Film Library, which was soon to become the British Film Institute (BFI). To have chanced, as Josiffe did while at work in the University of London’s Senate House Library, upon an archive collection of papers containing diaries, letters, newspaper cuttings, investigations by paranormal psychologists, court transcripts, and fur samples, is the stuff of academic dreams (again, at least for those who find themselves intrigued by the idea of paranormal zoology). Reading Josiffe’s account, it is clear that the research process was a labour of love, and what emerges is an act of careful curation of the Harry Price papers, resulting in an epic and, in many places, gorgeously deranged narrative not only of the occult but, more broadly, of esoteric modernity. (Price was something of a celebrity ghostbuster who became involved in what he later termed the case of ‘The Haunting of Cashen’s Gap’ for his reputation as a scientific investigator of the paranormal). The relationship and struggle between academic, scientific psychology and psychical investigation is, then, especially fascinating and forms a central theme of the book. Much of the joy of Gef! lies in the singularity of its detail. From the spelling of his name (Gef is pronounced with a soft ‘g’ and the ‘o’ expected of one of the common spellings is omitted, as the mongoose, it is said, tended to spell phonetically) to his dietary preferences, the catalogue of Gef’s idiosyncrasies makes for a laugh-out-loud reading encounter. Gef lived on a diet of ‘air’ (p. 34), while at the same time consuming large quantities of lean bacon, sausages, bananas, oranges, cream cakes, and chocolate. He did not like milk, bread, or eggs, however, despite reportedly stealing sandwiches from workmen’s pockets. He was a prodigious swearer who spoke his mind, sometimes prompting censorship from James Irving, who recorded Gef’s antics in meticulous detail in his diaries. ‘Nuts!’ (p. 128) ‘Hard boiled eggs!’ (p. 129), he would shout while thumping the walls. Or, intrigued by the content of his host’s newspaper, he would demand that Irving share the events of the day—‘Read it out, you fat-headed gnome! (p. 119). Gef was also a foul-mouthed crooner, who, when in moods of ‘high glee’ (p. 127)—‘put the bloody gramophone on!’ (p. 134)—would sing hymns and popular songs, sometimes accompanying himself with ‘a small mouth organ’ (p. 133). Despite being wilfully obnoxious (‘for devilment’, p. 54) he could be a polite thief (‘I hope you don’t mind, I have eaten the bacon’, p. 145), and was a loyal protector of the Irvings, for whom he offered to slaughter the lambs and turkeys of their enemies. He killed rabbits, which were offered to the family as presents, but never out of season. He spoke at least eight languages—‘I know tons of Hindustani!’ (p. 141)—and had a handle on a number of local dialects, including Lancashire and Gaelic, aside from his native Manx: one of his favourite insults was ‘sleech!’, which is Manx for ‘sly or cunning person’ (p. 137). He eavesdropped and gossiped, danced, bounced balls, lit matches, and told jokes. He would run errands, do basic arithmetic, and impersonate dogs. He was interested in technology and spoke of owning ‘magic phones’ (p. 168) and a ‘rectophone’ (p. 169), which was his word for a mathematical calculator. Once, he is alleged to have given betting tips to a newspaper reporter. (The bet, for the 1932 Grand National, was never placed.) Another time, he attempted a self-portrait, partly to demonstrate his dexterity and perhaps to correct what he saw as the misrepresentations of a sketch commissioned by Harry Price during his investigations—‘That ain’t me! It looks like a llama!’ (p. 39). Both grandiose—‘I am the eighth wonder of the world!’—and timid—he was allegedly scared of ghosts and ‘did not want publicity’ (p. 106). Gef’s impudent personality leaps off each page. That Josiffe takes no one entirely at their word, allowing the voices of his varied sources to speak, makes the book more than a curious episode in popular culture destined for the pages of Fortean Times. Following the involvement of various academic and scientific institutions, a fascinating tale of authority and epistemology emerges, one where science repeatedly fails to gain the upper hand. Gef appears at a particular moment in British history where the paranormal had yet to be abjected decisively into the realm of occultism. Price’s bid to the University of London for a fully equipped Department of Psychical Research was granted in 1934. More improbably, the BFI became entangled in the story of Gef, which tipped off the popular press, as the mongoose features prominently in the aforementioned libel case involving key figures in broadcasting history, where Richard Stanton Lambert, editor of the BBC publication The Listener, pursued a case of defamation against Lord Cecil Levita, who claimed that Lambert believed in the occult, ‘notably in the talking mongoose’ (p. 2). Lambert, as co-author of The Haunting of Cashen’s Gap, Price’s report on the Gef investigation, had become subject to ridicule on account of the book’s refusal to definitively deny Gef’s existence, a detail that Levita exploited in his defence. That Price himself was concerned to avoid a libel case involving the Irvings shapes the Gef story further. So, even when London Zoo gets drawn into the case, when fur samples—the first set allegedly clipped by Gef himself—are sent to Julian Huxley (then Secretary of the Zoological Society and an associate member of Price’s Psychical Research project), who forwards them for analysis, the conclusions are carefully articulated in order to sidestep any direct accusation of fraud on the part of the Irvings. Despite the fact that the fur samples are declared to be identical to hairs taken from the Irving’s collie Mona, Price’s verdict still leaves room for doubt: ‘perhaps, Gef in one of his freakish moods was playing a crude practical joke upon his landlord; we cannot say’ (p. 274). Josiffe thus treads a watchful path between scholarly investigation and caution and, in being so careful not to simply side with the sceptics, allows the story of the struggle between science and the occult to emerge without prejudice. This accounts for much of the comedy of Gef! as the mongoose is given his say, even against the authority of Price, whom he distrusts profoundly: ‘he puts the kybosh on the spirits!’ (p. 82). Refusing to be tricked into appearing by sleeches and ‘spook men’ (p. 80) (his name for Price and his assistant), Gef leads visitors to Doarlish Cashen a merry dance, always absenting himself just before the arrival of company. Josiffe thus refuses to put the kybosh on his own account, preferring to leave Gef in the realm of undecidability. Was he a ghost or, as James Irving held, a curious hybrid flesh-and-blood creature, a man-weasel? Was he a hoax, a furry mechanical Turk: the figment of the imagination of Irving’s daughter, Voirrey, who was said to be skilled in ventriloquism? Was Gef cooked up by both Voirrey and Mrs Irving as a monumental practical joke against James, with the innocence and unwitting tone of James’s diaries then helping to add credibility to the hoax? Was he the symptom or expression of a collective family delusion? The book’s value lies both in the care Josiffe takes in laying out all of the evidence for the reader and in his own glee that ‘the magical, mysterious “mongoose” remains elusive and uncatchable’ (p. 368). What is clear is that the Gef case continues to fascinate, which perhaps says something about a modern collective need for enchantment, for magic and mystery. In Josiffe’s words: The elusive Gef is only to be found in the gaps. He lurks—just out of view—behind the hedges in the fields […] He himself is the confluence, the meeting point, of traditional Manx folklore and technological modernity, the world of buses, planes, Voirrey’s Kodak camera, the Irving’s gramophone, Gef’s Rectophone and Magic Phones. (p. 366) In the grand narrative of technological modernity, disenchantment only goes so far, as even the professional disenchanters like Harry Price illustrate. The case of Gef thus amplifies the existence of what has been termed an ‘esoteric modernity’, a far less rational account of the modern world, one more tolerant of spirits, enigmas, and fairy stories, which allows a place for magic as essentially modern (see Meyer and Pels, Magic and Modernity). Likewise, in dealing with themes of enchantment and disenchantment, of newness, wonder, history, and nostalgia, this year’s collection excels in refusing the easy gesture of allowing disenchantment the upper hand. The charm of a sustained minor chord or of artificial light as a department store prepares to close; of a friendly vending machine or a cheeky ghost weasel might be impossible to pin down, but maybe that is exactly the point. Enchantment, much like Gef (who today lives on with his own Facebook page), is something that simply refuses to be disciplined, tamed or explained away. Books Reviewed Al Stefan , The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream ( Cambridge, MA : MIT Press , 2017 ). ISBN 9 7802 6203 5743. Edensor Tim , From Light to Dark: Daylight, Illumination, and Gloom ( Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press , 2017 ). ISBN 9 7808 1669 4433. Gleason Holly , ed., Woman Walk the Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives ( Austin : University of Texas Press , 2017 ). ISBN 9 7814 7731 3916. Jordan John M. , Robots ( Cambridge, MA : MIT Press , 2016 ). ISBN 9 7802 6252 9501. Josiffe Christopher , Gef! The Strange Tale of an Extra-Special Talking Mongoose ( London : Strange Attractor Press , 2017 ). ISBN 9 7819 0722 2481. Loss Robert , Nothing Has Been Done Before: Seeking the New in 21st-Century American Popular Music ( New York : Bloomsbury , 2017 ). ISBN 9 7815 0132 2020. Newton Matthew , Shopping Mall ( New York : Bloomsbury , 2017 ). ISBN 9 7815 0131 4827. Nye David E. , American Illuminations: Urban Lighting, 1800–1920 ( Cambridge, MA : MIT Press , 2018 ). ISBN 9 7802 6203 7419. References Augé Marc , Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity ( London : Verso , 2009 ). Meyer Birgit , Pels Peter , eds, Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment ( Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press , 2003 ). Quantick David , ‘Pop Has Eaten Itself for the Very Last Time’, Telegraph ( 3 June 2011 ), <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopmusic/8555646/Pop-has-eaten-itself-for-the-very-last-time.html> [accessed 6 August 2018]. Reynolds Simon , Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past ( London : Faber & Faber , 2011 ). © The English Association (2018) All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - 17Popular Culture
JF - The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
DO - 10.1093/ywcct/mby017
DA - 2018-11-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/17popular-culture-j8G0QNffax
SP - 327
VL - 26
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -