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| Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe's story "Descent into the Maelstrom" by Harry Clarke |
Steinbeck: California as both Zion and Egypt.
Apple: I'm specifically thinking of the US festival, which is a really interesting part of the story of rock and roll to me. So many bands got their big breaks there, but there really was no mythology surrounding it until a few years ago. It occupied the same place in the cultural narrative as Monsters of Rock, which only metal heads seem to remember today, and then only if they were there. I don't think it was nearly the cultural event that Lollapalooza was, not to mention Woodstock, but there has been a concerted effort to rewrite the narrative of rock history to make it the Woodstock of the early 80's. It was essentially a branding campaign for Apple computers. If Apple had flopped, the US festival would be a quirky footnote in the annals of rock, maybe like Goose Island in Detroit. It's also interesting to me that California has the tradition of Altamont, the West Coast Woodstock the flower generation had to repress, since it contradicted the message of Woodstock. The Concert for Iceland is perhaps Farthington's Concert for Bangladesh, but Steffi's US Festival. Incidentally, I'd love to have her date Steve Jobs, maybe even be his muse. Also, the phallic/cunnic stuff between Farthington and Steffi makes sense. Farthington is like Father Yod, performing (pardon my language) mind screws on people. That again is a California-ish tradition. Steffi, instead, seeks power by enveloping everything. This quest challenges the traditional associations of the male bring active and the female being passive. Her cunnic powers engulf rather than penetrate; they devour, which explains why Will, in trying to stop her, shoots her in the mouth. It's really not her mouth that he has to fear, though; Farthington is the one with the dangerous mouth. Farthington might be a type of Charybdis at first, but Steffi as Scylla has a bigger Charybdis than Farthington, and he is reduced to one of Scylla's dogs, submarine and all.
Motown: Even Motown had to go to California. Will couldn't make Arthur a star in Detroit. That doesn't mean he could in California, but the music industry in the 70's is mostly about California.
Lifestyle: "California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom." - Don DeLillo, White Noise
L.A.: We took a family trip to California two years ago, and I was really struck by how creepy L.A. is. You strip away everything Hollywood makes us think it is and it's just a gross, overpopulated, lame version of Detroit, but with palm trees. It's really the bizarro world version of Detroit, and like New York, nobody is really from there. They just siphon talent from the Midwest, which fits the cunnic themes of Steffi.
So Victoria Woolf is the result of my straining to answer an email amid a terrible fever, and I'm sure Victoria came from Victorianism, but who is she to you? A false name for Steffi?
"It's Adam and Eve, not Apple and Steve" is awesome. It's reversible, too...it might be more disturbing as "It's Apple and Steve, not Adam and Eve."
So now we are fully immersed in McLuhan's tradition of puns, which anchors us in his tradition, which is that of the Catholic trying to navigate the Maelstrom of contemporary culture. Poe's Maelstrom was central to his vision of finding a survival strategy for mankind. As a guy in a boat watches the whirlpool rise around him, he recognizes by watching the pattern of the whirlpool that he must jump out of his boat and hold onto a small trunk if he is to survive getting smashed to death. When he makes it to shore and tells his friends, nobody believes him.
So here again is Charybdis, and our legend is about pattern recognition as a spiritual survival story.
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