--- Rob Schaap <rws at comedu.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
> We're in the age of spectacle's triumph over
> meaning, as Jameson sez, and
> this is the only way it can go. That relates the
> new Nascar tracks to M&M
> to PissChrist to Madonna to Benneton ads to XFL to
> Pulp Fiction to the fact
> people are actually seriously considering McVeigh's
> request to whatever
> 'reality' fabrication Fox will bring us next to the
> implosion of society.
Apropos of which, my Book of the Month is "Have A Nice Day!", the autobiography of Mick "Cactus Jack" Foley, the recently retired professional wrestler, and I have to say it's rather good, as a certain sort of blue-collar narrative goes. Two passages come to mind. The first is when Foley is beginning to make his name for taking bigger risks than anyone else, jumping off the edge of the ring and being hit over the head with chairs. The veteran wrestler Ole Andersen relates this parable:
"Say it's like you've got a soldier walking through a war zone, and he comes across this little girl who's been killed by a falling building and he drops to his knees and says, Oh my God, I can't carry on. But he walks on, and a mile down the road and sees a car with four kids in it that's been bombed, and they're all burnt up, and he bursts into tears, but he keeps on walking. Then a mile after that, he comes across a whole school full of a hundred kids that have been chopped up and dismembered and by then, well, he just shrugs his shoulders and says fuck that shit, I don't have time. That's how it's going to be with you; you start by jumping off a six foot ring, then it's a twelve foot cage, then what's next? Off the ceiling of Madison Square Gardens? By the time you're thirty, you're gonna be in a wheelchair and nobody will care."
The second is when Foley, aged slightly more than thirty and not in a wheelchair, has just completed his legendary Hell in a Cell match against the Undertaker and is covered in cuts and bruises. He's sitting at a table signing pictures as the fans congratulate him, when he realises that the queue of people to buy his merchandise has finished, and everyone else in the hall is there to see the newly added glamourpuss lady wrestler Sable.
"I realised that compared to big tits and a pretty face, fourteen years of dedication to the sport didn't count for shit. A lifetime of broken bones and torn muscles didn't count for shit. And maybe, Mick Foley didn't count for all that much either."
Of course, since Foley's retirement, the WWF has gone steadily downhill; these days his famous bodyslam-through-the-announcement table is reproduced pretty much every week, as it's the only thing that can get the fans to pay attention to anything other than the fancy women who we are, rather incredibly, asked to believe are wrestlers.
>
> A lion eating a Christian is a spectacle for a week
> or two, but everybody
> knows you're eventually gonna have to have someone
> (preferably a relative)
> publicly violating the Christian first, after that
> mebbe someone doing the
> lion first ... and then, eventually, well,
> afterwards, I guess.
Bugger, same anecdote. Could have saved myself ten minutes typing. Ah well, not gonna delete it now.
>
> Anyway - economists'll be on hand to talk about the
> expression of revealed
> preferences, the utility function of putting
> criminals to good redemptive
> use, and the importance of the industry to economic
> growth and the funding
> of public services (a salient cost centre in which
> will be to keep the rate
> of criminality up to industry requirements).
Interestingly, economists tend to really, really, shy away from the entertainment industry, for a lot of the reasons discussed earlier. It's not like a steel mill where you can happily assume that inputs are transformed into outputs, and that everyone's preferences about steel are independent of everyone else's. Instead, you have all this clustering, bandwagon effects, uncertainty about what's the relevant characteristic, and all those things that the sociologists can model and we don't. The fact that "there's no accounting for public taste" is actually a source of huge embarrassment to the profession; as is the fact that despite its huge size as an industry, there is no economic theory of advertising which is worth a shit.
That's what I'm interested in about Barkley's theories on social flaring &c -- financial markets is where the data is, but the really interesting use would be to try to model public tastes in things. Because while it took Visigoths to wean the Romans off their public executions, the English just decided that they didn't want to have them any more. What happened there and why?
dd
===== "Imagine the Duchess's feelings You could have pierced her with swords To find her youngest son liked Lenin And sold the Daily Worker near the House of Lords" -- Noel Coward
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