by Spitz, Marc
Especially in New York City, the knives came out. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times wrote: “It’s about the impulse to drain that day of its specificity and turn it into yet another wellspring of generic emotions: sadness, loneliness, happiness. This is how kitsch works. It exploits familiar images, be they puppies or babies—or, as in the case of this movie, the twin towers—and tries to make us feel good, even virtuous, simply about feeling. And, yes, you may cry, but when tears are milked as they are here, the truer response should be rage.” Lou Lumenick of the New York Post compared the film to one of “those framed 3-D photos of the Twin Towers emblazoned with ‘Never Forget’ that are still for sale in Times Square a decade after 9/11.”
Even Art Spiegelman, who took on the Holocaust and was so careful not to profit from his Maus series, lest he be criticized as exploitative, was compelled to address—carefully—the events of 9/11. In 2004 the artist issued In the Shadow of No Towers; an oversize meditation on the day, which seemed, especially when compared to his previous epics, somewhat tame. “I never liked those arrogant boxes,” he writes of the towers, “but now I miss those rascals, icons of a more innocent age.” He compares the air in the days after the attacks on New York, acrid and toxic, to his father’s description of the air at Auschwitz, but that’s as far as he’ll go. Foer, younger and perhaps braver, was willing to risk his reputation to really go there, through the eyes and heart of a scarred but plucky child, and in some ways his career has never recovered.
If there’s an invention of the 9/11 era of letters that’s critic-proof, or rather critic-oblivious, it’s McSweeney’s, which today feels more and more like both an empire and an important literary school on par with the existentialists and the beats. At a recent symposium at Laemmlein & Leah Buttenweiser Hall at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, a few hundred young men and women—slouching in their black vintage dresses, clunky shoes, nerd glasses, ski hats, and beards—filed in to hear some of the magazine’s key contributors over the years discuss the origins of the quarterly turned website turned publisher, once raggedy and prided on printing pieces that were rejected by other publications. This is where the movers and shakers of popular culture come to lecture, whether it’s Dr. Oz or Suze Orman, and in its own way, McSweeney’s has similarly imprinted its design for living on millions.
Founder Dave Eggers was himself a refugee from the standard publishing world, which was clearly too staid and catty for him. One can imagine him recoiling and devising ways to chuck all the rules. He was a student of the post-Punk British Indie scene of the early and mid-’80s, so the example was already there when it came to eliminating the middleman, staying true to an ideal, and operating with a social conscience. He was also a student of the heroic and rebellious Maurice Sendak, having read Where the Wild Things Are at age five. “I just reacted with pure terror. But then I used to hide under the couch during The Wizard of Oz. I think what frightened me the most was that I couldn’t work out if the Wild Things were nice or nasty. There was a moral ambiguity to them which really disturbed me,” he has said.
Eggers, then a new father himself, wrote the script to the Spike Jonze adaptation of Sendak’s classic, as well as a full-length novelization. “I wrote it between our two children being born,” he said. “I wanted to write something that might have the same sort of effect on a kid as the books I read when I was young had on me. I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach. It’s like the cement is still wet when you’re that age; every little mark can become permanent.”
Following the success of his 2000 memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which deals with him raising his younger brother, Christopher (Toph), following the back-to-back losses of both parents to cancer, Eggers could have benefited from the established publishing-business structure and committed himself no further than the delivery of a highly lucrative follow-up. Instead he invested in McSweeney’s and printed the next book, now hugely anticipated, himself.
McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, christened with Eggers’s mother’s maiden name, was founded in 1998 as a literary quarterly, a sort of new, modern version of Granta or Paris Review. By the release of 2002’s Eggers novel You Shall Know Our Velocity, it was regarded by Great Britain’s Telegraph as “the most influential literary magazine in the United States.” This was down to the talent, of course (contributors included Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, and Ann Beattie, among others), but also the presentation. McSweeney’s the publication felt like a fetish object, like an old piece of vinyl. David Foster Wallace famously wrote a short story on the spine of one issue. Some were packaged in boxes, others in letters. They were gilded and giftlike, and to read them was to carve out a small bit of identity for yourself as a McSweeney’s adherent.
Eggers, who seemed to know what to do with his new power, later founded the tutoring center 826 Valencia in San Francisco (and would establish outposts in cities across the country, as well as London and Dublin), applying his pragmatism to his social work by encouraging the creative writing and artistic skills of children ages six to eighteen. The programs were established with expediency and a kind of middleman cutting that called to mind the models established by Calvin Johnson at K Records or Ian MacKaye at Dischord. In a climate where people were growing further and further removed from each other thanks to the advent of social networking—and where even in art it was becoming increasingly common to muse, fantasize, or self-infantalize rather than tackle small problems incrementally with an eye toward a better world—Eggers, the literary child-rebel, did his networking on a person-to-person level.
“The tight-knit community we had is the foundation for what became 826,” says Sarah Vowell. “The only thing I know about the influence of McSweeney’s is that if you value your free time, do not take Dave Eggers’s calls. He’s a real roper-inner.”
“McSweeney’s as a publishing company is built on a business model that only works when we sell physical books. So we try to put a lot of effort into the design and production of the book-as-object,” Eggers has said. He found a printer in the Detroit area, Thomson-Shore, and took pride in the Made-in-the-USA-ness of it all. “The fact that they’re in Michigan makes it easier to communicate,” he has said, “to reprint, and to correct problems . . . I don’t mean to beat a made-in-America drum, but I would be lying if I said it doesn’t feel somehow right to be printing books in the U.S.”
Only Jack White rivals Eggers as a twenty-first-century Indie maverick, creator, and operator of his own idealistic microcosm. The former White Stripes leader founded Third Man Records in 2001, the year that the duo broke through with its third album, White Blood Cells. Today he owns and operates a self-contained record store, performance space, and record-company office in the same Nashville compound. It’s a throwback to the days of Sun Records in Memphis, Chess in Chicago, and even Motown in White’s own Detroit. There’s even a darkroom for developing promotional photos. Like Eggers, White hired an old-school factory crew (United Pressing) to locally press the vinyl that’s cut at the nearby studio. “We have a great relationship with them,” White told me in 2009. “We had a meeting with them before I even bought the building. I said, ‘Listen, I want to turn around records really fast. If I bring you a record, how fast can you do it? They can get us a hundred and fifty copies in twenty-four hours.”
The juxtaposition of sometimes-chauvinistic traditions of blues-rock lyrics and White’s more childlike and unaggressive tendencies was a bit trickier. As the White Stripes got bigger, they had to reckon with the Nirvana problem of drawing knuckleheads to the pit. I once saw White stop a concert midsong to lecture an overzealous fan with “This is a Marlene Dietrich song!” as if to imply that moshing to an old Weimar cabaret number was absurd.
By the time the White Stripes were winding down, White had relocated to Nashville and, like Calvin Johnson, divided up his talents and attention among several different recording and touring concerns, among them the Raconteurs
and the Dead Weather. It was there that he became, like Dave Eggers, a modern, real-life Willy Wonka, with an analog-is-better aesthetic and everything made in America.
The culture’s tendency toward crafting begins in the post-9/11 era. Movie stars can be seen with knitting needles in their Birkin bags. Anything tangible, perennial, “old school,” and pure—a book, an LP record—is akin to a kind of cultural comfort food. And while the Net sped this up, even the most marvelous of modern marvels would take a turn inward toward the personal, with blogs and message boards exponentially growing and vying with more corporate retail sites for space and attention.
“I never had WiFi at home,” Eggers has said. “I’m too easily distracted, and YouTube is too tempting . . . I’ve never read a page on an e-reader.” McSweeney’s saved paper the same way Wes Anderson’s Max Fischer saved Latin in Rushmore and Jack White saved the American vinyl presses. “I would like to set the computers on fire,” White told me in 2009. “We are in an age that is the antithesis of what I am trying to do artistically. It’s a constant battle.” The success of McSweeney’s and Jack White, both wildly popular, can be seen as a triumph of the older, slower, but truer way over modernity, speed, and economy. It was fueled almost entirely by a sort of cars-with-fins-were-better sense of romance, quickly becoming not only a subculture in the twenty-first century but a new kind of cause. “I’m the poster boy for gas-lamp technology,” White joked.
“I totally admire what he did,” Jonathan Ames, a McSweeney’s contributor, says of Eggers. “He was so exuberant. Like his generation’s George Plimpton [founder of the Paris Review].”
There is a website—McSweeney’s Internet Tendency—as well as an online store, but you won’t find the founder on it. “I can say that with regard to the Web, Dave was utterly befuddled,” says John Hodgman, another early McSweeney’s contributor. “He found the idea that there was going to be a website somewhat confusing, and indeed the Web McSweeney’s became a different animal. Dave’s passion is to create these beautiful, innovative books. McSweeney’s as a journal is about tremendous writing, but it’s also about the art of making printed materials. And at the same time that Dave was creating these beautiful artifacts, sewn with golden thread, on the other side the website was pointing to a different kind of future. One where people would put up short material to be read all over the world.” Faced with loss (Eggers’s sister was, for a time, publicly unhappy with her portrayal in Staggering Genius and committed suicide in 2001) and the start of his own family, Eggers might have remained solipsistic and precious, and indeed there are elements of that in his work. McSweeney’s, along with the worst of the Foer book (and film), is dismissed by some as too cute, given the times; a sort of catchall buzz word for everything clever and Twee in publishing. With The Believer, a monthly magazine; Lucky Peach, a culinary-focused volume; and the Wholphin anthology DVDs, it’s certainly a large enough multimedia concern to take fire.
“People hate whimsy,” Hodgman says. “I think people are suspicious of it—because it seems un-serious in some way. Whimsy, in my mind, is defined as a kind of playfulness and a pleasure in playfulness—wordplay or cultural references or inside jokes. It is controversial not merely because it’s disconnected from the hard social realities around us, but also because it doesn’t care and it is not going to feel guilty about it. And a lot of people have trouble with that. I don’t know that you could ever accuse Dave himself as a writer as being unconcerned with the world.”
Eggers’s subsequent books have taken on a sort of open-eyed global consciousness that will again hopefully find him leading by example. What Is the What, his 2006 novel, examines the crisis in Darfur, and Zeitoun is a 2009 nonfiction account of the displaced, post-Katrina residents of New Orleans. McSweeney’s still exists in a kind of grace state because of this balance of whimsy and taking on the big issues of the world. “Part of his life is profoundly concerned with the world around him,” says Hodgman, “but one of the reasons people still get mad is that he’ll create the drop-in tutoring center but he’ll also put a pirate-supply store in front of it. Or a superhero-supply store in front of it. It’ll be playful and it won’t apologize for being playful, and why should it?”
Chapter 13
Welcome to the Mumble
2003–2011
In which a trilogy of psychic salves—reality TV, YouTube, and social networking—alleviate the stress of a post-9/11 world and make stars of people without talent, connections, or even ambition. Simultaneously, a school of young artists with talent and ambition and sometimes an affinity for the oversharing that blights the new techno-driven world begin to connect. Soon they find themselves in the Hollywood game, having their purity challenged.
A would-be artist used to have to leave the bedroom in order to make an impact on the world around him. By 2003, all that had changed. All you needed was a laptop with an iCamera application, or a cell phone with high-definition video, and you could conduct a new kind of diary keeping—no pressed flowers between pages here—and you could become rich and famous doing so. You didn’t even have to be enrolled in art, fashion, or film school. And if you really had something to say, you became influential. Here was a generation that grew up with computers as pets, rather than daunting and frequently malfunctioning machinery. They were aggressively encouraged to “Think Different” with their candy-colored iMacs, which seemed like the hardware manifestation of Steve Jobs’s spiritual utopianism. Here were powerful but not cynical machines that could, it seemed, function as friends and creative partners. Jobs, a college dropout and adopted child who grew up poor, did not pass judgment but rather wanted the world, especially its children, to achieve spiritual, creative, and financial excellence with the help of his innnovations. He literally made it easier for someone like Ryan Schreiber and millions of other bedroom-bound, antisocial, obsessive, and passionate weirdos to excel and eventually prosper. In the new millennium, Twee Tribers could not only see themselves represented on film like never before and feel less alone, they could represent themselves without going broke and maxing out credit cards like Robert Townshend and Robert Rodriguez famously did in the 1980s and ’90s, respectively.
The rapid gains in visual technology—cameras on phones, digital cameras, easy-to-use film-editing software such as iMovie—marked the postmillennial school of cinema, which reduced the base budget of filmmaking to zero. Plot suddenly seemed unnecessary. The only thing required was to never, ever stop talking, and a message would eventually be hewn. Silence was deadly in the ’00s as the culture moved toward constant, twenty-four-hour self-documentation.
“It became an editors’ medium,” says Sean Nelson of the movement that became known as mumblecore by 2005. Nelson starred in director Lynn Shelton’s quasi-mumblecore offering, the charming country mouse–city mouse buddy flick My Effortless Brilliance. “Editors make those movies,” Nelson continues. “Basically what they capture on the set is a lot of rambling shit from actors who are not generally directed. Certainly not given language—they talk and talk and talk and talk and the editor finds the one minute of what they just said that’s useful. In a way you could make the case that it’s pure cinema. In another way you can make the case there is no intentional language in these films [and] that it’s a fake naturalism.”
Mumblecore was polarizing from the start. Its godfather is commonly considered Andrew Bujalski. Bujalski was at Harvard in the late 1990s, majoring in Visual and Environmental Studies. He looked the part of a modern, intellectual wallflower, with shaggy hair, big glasses, and inherent shyness. Bujalski was a fan of big Hollywood movies, but found that whenever he left the multiplex and the spectacle was over, he felt empty.
“I’ve always objected to the idea that if it’s a movie like The Avengers, you have to see it on a big screen, but if it’s a movie about people talking you have to see it on a small screen,” Bujalski says. “I think it’s the opposite. The big giant movies will kind of do what they’re doing in any format, whereas somethi
ng that is quieter really benefits from having your attention in that dark room.”
Why couldn’t the types of films that felt more intimate and real play on the giant screens? Didn’t a good conversation with another person who really got you give you a more sustainable sense of satisfaction? Bujalski also grew weary of the classical modes of storytelling, where characters telegraph their desire and everyone has to have a conflict to overcome. Why couldn’t people just hang out and be sweet to each other, help each other through this screwed-up existence? He didn’t want to surround himself with schemers. Schemes were tired.
“I certainly know a lot of polite people, and I find that there is a lot of drama in those interactions,” Bujalski says. “It’s obviously less broad and less explosive. But I think the struggle to be nice when conditions don’t seem to support it—when you don’t know how to do it, or when your being nice rubs somebody the wrong way—there’s a lot of story there.”
“He knew he wanted to make movies,” says Justin Rice, a fellow Harvard student who would work on Bujalski’s early films. “But he didn’t want to move to Hollywood.”
Bujalski began seeing his friends as characters, specifically a spacey, young brunette woman named Kate Dollenmayer. He’d observe her, write down things she’d say that inspired him, and find himself fashioning a story around her personality, much in the way Annie Hall was an amalgam of Diane Keaton’s mannerisms, family history, and relationship with Woody Allen. “I wrote [Funny Ha Ha] with Kate in mind to do it,” Bujalski says. “I had the idea of putting her in a movie before I wrote a word of script.”
Funny Ha Ha, shot with no budget in the Boston area, is the story of Dollenmayer’s character Marnie, a kind of postslacker beauty who is a bit lost after college. Marnie is Lena Dunham’s Hannah Horvath, ungentrified. There’s also a bit of Keaton’s doomed Theresa Dunn from Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Every man Marnie meets is smitten with her, and she has absolutely no idea what she wants. Even Bujalski himself, cast as a sweaty, stammering potential suitor, tells her, “You know, ninety percent of the guys you know are head over heels in love with you.”
