Karaoke Culture

1. WHY KARAOKE, AND WHAT’S CULTURE GOT TO DO WITH IT?

It needs to be said upfront: I’m not a karaoke fan. This essay was not only conceived, but also half-finished, when it occurred to me to go and catch a bit of real karaoke. They say Casablanca is the most popular karaoke bar in Amsterdam. My companion and I, both neophytes, arrived at eight on the dot, as if we were going to the theatre and not a bar. Casablanca was empty. We took a walk down Zeedijk, a narrow street packed with bars whose barmen look like they spend all day at the gym and all night in the bar. Muscles and baggy eyelids — that pretty well describes our barman at Casablanca, to which we soon returned. On a little stage, two tall, slender young women were squawking a Dutch pop song into a couple of upright microphones. A concert featuring Dutch pop stars played on the bar’s TV screens but was drowned out by the evening’s young karaoke stars. The girls sang with more heart than the guys, and for a second I thought there must be an invisible policeman standing over them. The whole thing was a deaf collective caterwaul: deaf insofar as nobody actually listened to anyone. Amsterdam is definitely not the place for a karaoke initiation. I’m not sure why I even thought of going to see karaoke in Amsterdam — maybe because of the paradox that sometimes turns out to be true, that worlds open up where we least expect.

I was watching the film Lost in Translation for the third time and had stopped at the part where Bill Murray, with fatalistic forbearance, does his karaoke number. I sat down at the computer and opened YouTube. Trailing a few words behind and holding out little hope that I’d ever catch up, I gave singing “I Will Survive” a go. It was an invigorating experience. I had a go at opera too. I managed to warble along with a popular aria from The Phantom of the Opera, but on Andrea Bocelli’s “Con Te Partirò” I could only get my tongue around the first line of the chorus. That song definitely has too many unpronounceable words.

I thought about buying the karaoke version of “Ti Voglio Tanto Bene” for $2.99, but gave it a pass. I didn’t buy Cantolopera either, which would have let me sing operatic arias accompanied by a whole orchestra. I didn’t even buy a teach-yourself pack, a virtual coach for classical singers. But when I saw an Internet ad for a karaoke program that promised to recreate the joys, sorrows, ecstasy and anguish of opera—while I was having my morning shower — I very nearly caved. It’s not that I like warbling in the shower; it’s just that I’m a sucker for emotionally charged ads with rich vocabularies. And I almost forgot, I also listened to a few karaoke singers on a site called Singer’s Showcase. My favorite was the sad Mr. Sandy and his bear-like growl through “Georgia On My Mind.”

What is karaoke in actual fact? Karaoke (Japanese for “empty orchestra”) is entertainment for people who would like to be Madonna or Sinatra. The karaoke machine was invented in the early seventies by the Japanese musician Daisuke Inoue — who forgot to patent his invention, and so others cashed in. A few years ago Inoue apparently won the alternative Nobel Peace Prize (the Ig Nobel), awarded by The Annals of Improbable Research. They praised him for “providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.”

Cultural critics are people who are prepared to see more in the craze for tattoos than just a passing fashion fad. I’m a member of this dubious guild. In karaoke I’m ready to see more than just desperate squawking to the backing track of “I Will Survive.” Karaoke supports less the democratic idea that everyone can have a shot if they want one and more the democratic practice that everyone wants a shot if there’s one on offer. The inventor of karaoke, Daisuke Inoue, is a humble man, most proud of having helped the Japanese, emotionally reticent as they are said to be, change for the better. As Pico Iyer wrote: “As much as Mao Zedong or Mohandas Gandhi changed Asian days, Inoue transformed its nights.”[1]

What is the attraction of karaoke, which having first taken off in Japan (apparently it’s still going strong) then made its way around the world? I suspect it is firstly its simplicity and stupidity, and secondly, the ambivalent position of the participant. Singing a song that someone else made famous, the amateur publicly declares his or her love for his or her idol (Sinatra or Madonna), while the inevitably flaky performance simultaneously devalues this same idol. This theft of the star’s aura, or inadvertent subversion of a hierarchy of values, remains in the sphere of the innocent, empowering, and transformative. It’s just a bit of fun. The performer is anonymous, and most often remains so.

Letting one’s imagination run wild, it’s not difficult to imagine various other forms of karaoke-like fun. Someone with a bit of cash, for example, might hit upon the idea of hiring the ballet ensemble of the Bolshoi Theatre, commission a performance of Swan Lake, and insert his wife, mother-in-law, or even himself in the main dance section. The variants are endless. But the bottom line, it seems, is anonymity. Why? If we signed our first and last names, our gesture would have a completely different message. Our squawking along to “Mamma Mia” wouldn’t be interpreted as a submissive imitation of the original, but as subversion, homage, parody, and so forth. An authorial gesture, as opposed to an anonymous one, sends a rather different message out into the world — Marcel Duchamp painting a mustache and beard on the Mona Lisa or Andy Warhol and his giant celebrity portraits come to mind. Were it not for an authorial signature, and general agreement that this signature be respected, much contemporary art — the product of an inseparable symbiosis between someone else’s original model and an interventionist authorial gesture — could easily be filed under less flattering labels such as symbiotic art, appropriation art, or karaoke art. Because karaoke is an activity that belongs to those who don’t sign their names — or don’t do so for now. For the time being, karaoke-people stick within their communities, their fandoms.

There are of course inverse examples, where famous people do karaoke. The film Romance & Cigarettes (2005), a kind of karaoke-musical, stars superb actors (James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, and Steve Buscemi) who ham it up to the sound of others’ booming voices, not least that of a certain Tom Jones. Mamma Mia! (2008), the hit film based on the West End musical, features equally superb actors (Julie Waters, Meryl Streep, Colin Firth) singing the evergreens of the Swedish pop-group ABBA. Like a karaoke session, both films are propelled by the spectator’s recognition of the original hits; by the energy of the evergreen, and not, incidentally, by their poor imitations.

When did a harmless bit of anonymous fun grow into a culture? Should these two celluloid examples be considered karaoke culture, or are they simply examples of celebrity culture, a culture in which stars can do whatever they like — from clowning around in an onscreen musical to writing crappy books? Let’s not forget: Karaoke is entertainment for ordinary people, who, within given codes (shaped by technology and genre), and protected by the mask of anonymity, fulfill their suppressed desires within their own communities, or fandoms. Karaoke-people are everything but revolutionaries, innovators, or people who will change the world. They’re ordinary people, readers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, consumers and conformists. All the same, the world changes and ordinary people have their part to play.

The very foundation of karaoke culture lies in the parading of the anonymous ego with the help of simulation games. Today people are more interested in flight from themselves than discovering their authentic self. The self has become boring, and belongs to a different culture. The possibilities of transformation, teleportation, and metamorphosis hold far more promise than digging in the dirt of the self. The culture of narcissism has mutated into karaoke culture — or the latter is simply a consequence of the former.

The market on which the ego can be paraded is open to all comers, everyone and every variant is welcome. The ego, which for centuries lay buried in the subsoil, has seeped out onto the surface and, having changed its properties, become unusually strong. Metaphorically speaking, it’s lucky that Andy Warhol, the inventor of karaoke in the visual arts, died when he did. Otherwise he’d have to look on in horror as a Campbell’s Soup Can moved in to slurp him up. Today the humble Daisuke Inoue sells eco-friendly detergents and cockroach-killing insecticides, cockroaches being the very creatures that crawl down into the karaoke machine and chew on its electric wires. When we think about it a little more, everything runs on wires now. Without healthy wires, there wouldn’t be karaoke culture.

Every text is sustained by the changing relationships between Author, Work, and Recipient. Modern technology has radically altered the structure of the text, whether this be literary, visual, or cinematic. The balance of power, formerly dominated by Author and Work, has been flipped in favor of the Recipient. This tectonic shift has changed the cultural landscape and wiped out many cultural species (while, truth be told, giving birth to new ones), transforming perception, comprehension, and taste — in fact, the entire cultural system. And we’re not even conscious of it all, and neither are we in a position to articulate what has actually happened.[2]

That’s why we’re making a start with the awkward metaphor of karaoke. In the text that follows we’re interested in the human activities in which an anonymous participant, assisted by new technology, uses an existing cultural model to derive pleasure. (And it has nothing to do with sex, if that was what you were thinking!) The models are most often drawn from popular culture (television, film, pop music, comics, computer games), but some belong to what was once considered “high culture” (film, literature, painting). Most often the anonymous participant derives pleasure and gets his kicks by simply getting to be “someone else, somewhere else.” Amateur and anonymous, participants don’t go in for artistic pretension, nor are they overly concerned with the authorship of their creation or their activity, but the desire to leave their mark is beyond doubt. Their creation can’t be called plagiarism, nor can their activity be called imitation, because both terms belong to a different time and a different cultural system. Easily applicable to non-musical activities such as film, literature, and painting, karaoke is the most simple paradigm, hence the hasty and perhaps not completely apposite title of this essay, “Karaoke Culture.” This soft term is less restrictive than those which are currently in use, such as post-postmodernism, anti-modernism, pseudo-modernism, and digi-modernism. All of these terms, including mine, are inferior to the content they try to describe. The content is new, and it’s changing from one second to the next, so what we try and articulate today can disappear tomorrow, leaving no trace of its existence. We live in a liquid epoch.

Apart from “culture” this essay makes frequent reference to “wires.” I admit that I don’t know anything about “wires.” The fact that I don’t know anything about them doesn’t prevent me from writing about them. Until yesterday these two sentences were in contradiction. Today they’re not. Freedom from knowledge, from the past, from continuity, from cultural memory and cultural hierarchy, and an inconceivable speed — these are the determinants of karaoke culture and the leitmotifs of the text that tries to describe them.

[1] www.time.com/time/asia/asia/magazine/1999/990823/inoue1.html

[2]Here’s a quick anecdote. A teenager and I watched the “ancient” film The Silence of the Lambs together. There’s that terrible scene in which Buffalo Bill’s victim is trapped in an unused well. “The chick is dumb, she doesn’t have a mobile” was the teenager’s comment. “What do to you mean?” I asked. “If she had a mobile on her she could call the police.” The teenager, a child who grew up with the mobile phone, watched the film in his own way — as a story about a “dumb chick” who got into trouble because she didn’t have a mobile phone.

2. IT ALL BEGAN SO INNOCENTLY

On my first visit to America in 1982 I found myself in Los Angeles, and of course I didn’t pass up the chance to visit Universal Studios. The photograph of Clark Gable dates from this time; Clark in an open white shirt, a black curl falling on his sweaty forehead, a blazing orange fire in the background, and in his arms, my lithe body. Actually the body belongs to Vivien Leigh, but the head is definitely mine.

The pleasure was one I repeated on a visit to St. Petersburg, where in front of the Winter Palace, poking my head through a painted mural, I appeared in a photograph as Napoleon. Since then the idea has made its way into computer programs and on to the Internet. For Valentine’s Day 2009, ScanCafe.com offered a bit of free fun: people could send in a photo of themselves with their partner and would be sent one back with a minor intervention. Instead of their partner, Barrack Obama was now in the photo.

Who knows, maybe this innocent fairground attraction, having one’s picture taken with a painted mural, was the embryo of karaoke culture. The invention of the camera satisfied our desire to immortalize ourselves the way we actually are, but a painted mural, this hokey technological innovation, offered a better option: Why wouldn’t we be someone else for a moment? We could have our photos taken with our idols (me and Clark Gable!), take someone’s place (hey, I gave Vivien Leigh the shove!), fabricate the personal history we leave to our grandchildren (that’s me kids, with Clark Gable!), enter a fictional world (hey, there I am in Gone With the Wind!), reshape oneself (ahh, look at my slender waist!), travel through time, or change one’s class, race, or sex (hey, there I’m a man, Napoleon!). All in all, it gave us the chance to intervene in reality, in which we are held back by our first names and last names, not to mention our genes, class, race, sex, religion, and ideology. The experience of having one’s photo taken with a painted mural was not only a bit of fun (which we knew), it was also transformative (which back then we didn’t know).

But a lot of other things had to happen for the Pandora’s box of our repressed desires to open. God had to die, so that our interventions in his work would go unpunished. The Time of the Great Inventions had to come to pass. Communism had to be born, and humanity, or least a part of it, had to be reset and convinced that the happiness of the collective would bring happiness to the individual. Freud had to appear, and humanity, or at least a part of it, had to be reset and convinced that the happiness of the individual would bring happiness to the collective. Modernism, radio, television, consumerism, the computer, mass media culture, postmodernism, feminism, postcolonialism, the mobile phone, the Internet, all had to step out into the light.

The Internet is the final, most explosive powder keg strewn on the eternal flame of our fantasies. The Internet is the cornerstone of both the new democratic revolution and the computer user’s evolution into a free man, a man forever transformed (Never again a slave!), eyes fixed ahead on the screen (a “window to the world”), whose hands self-confidently control an emancipatory mouse: a proletarian-man, an amateur-man, a man finally worthy of the name.

The Internet has not only democratized but also internationalized the consciousness of its users. As if in one of Mao Zedong’s nightmarish dreams, the Internet is a field on which a thousand flowers really bloom. What has happened to society in the intervening time is, however, difficult to say. It’s entirely possible that in the democratic deluge of realizing individual desires society has dissolved and fragmented into millions of little pieces, into millions of virtual communities, or fandoms, held together by various obsessions — from Gobelin embroidery to the protection of earth worms. Having absolutely nothing in common, Gobelin enthusiasts and those worried about earth worms are two virtual communities that will never communicate. In this respect, sticking to our primitive karaoke metaphor, the Internet can be understood as mega-karaoke, a place with millions of microphones, and millions of people rushing to grab the mic and sing their version of someone else’s song. Whose song? That’s not important: amnesia is, it seems, a by-product of the information revolution. What is important is that we all sing.

There is little dispute that the Internet is a revolution, and as they say, every revolution occurs in the name of an enlightened idea. In his book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Culture Is Killing our Culture, Andrew Keen claims that “the noble abstraction behind the digital revolution is that of the noble amateur.” As Keen maintains, in this case the amateur has raised a revolution against “the dictatorship of expertise.” Keen uses T. H. Huxley’s infinite monkey theorem as an example; it holds that if an infinite number of monkeys sat down at an infinite number of typewriters, sooner or later one of the monkeys would come up with a masterpiece to rival Shakespeare. On the Internet “amateur monkeys” create “an endless digital forest of mediocracy.” The forest is growing rampantly, and Keen predicts that by 2010 there will be five hundred million blogs “collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics, to commerce, to arts and culture.” Keen assails the notorious fact that Wikipedia is the work of amateurs, of anonymous contributors, the end result being that “it’s the blind leading the blind — infinite monkeys provide infinite information for infinite readers, perpetuating the cycle of misinformation and ignorance.” Things being as such, no one can be called to account, and what’s more, attempts by experts to intervene and assist amateurs usually end in failure. The Internet is a battleground for power, and the “children” (often literally children) are in the control room, “hackers” of one kind or another, their identities fluid and slippery. There is a famous New Yorker cartoon in which a dog, sitting up at a computer, explains to another dog that, “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” This thesis, suggesting the existence of a global conspiracy of nameless amateurs, is one Keen supports.

Amateurs, Keen claims, devastate systems that are based on expertise and destroy the institutions of author and authorship, information (newspapers are slowly disappearing, blogs are taking over), education (Wikipedia, the work of anonymous amateurs, has replaced encyclopedias, the work of experts), and art and culture (amateurs create their own culture based on borrowing, expropriation, appropriation, intervention, recycling, and remaking; they are simultaneously the creators and consumers of this culture).

Alan Kirby, an Oxford professor of literature, maintains that this new culture is in need of its own “ism,” and as a provisional term suggests “pseudo-modernism.” “This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterizes the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance—the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved,’ engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free; you are the text: the text is superseded.”[1]

The exact nature of the revolution that has occurred is difficult to put one’s finger on, because the revolution happened yesterday. Our lives are too fast and we don’t have time to look back at what happened yesterday. Our biographies are little more than a history of stuff we bought and threw out, most of it stuff that helps “power” us through a little faster: typewriters, answering machines, fax machines, scanners, desktop computers, printers, laptops, mobile phones, video players, CDs, DVDs, cameras, iPods, iPhones, microwave ovens, televisions, CD players. . We’re barely able to catch our breath and get a handle on all this stuff, when just around the corner there’s something new, the Kindle for example. One thing is certain. From the very outset the Internet has been accompanied by revolutionary rhetoric, from McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker’s Manifesto (which follows the form and language of The Communist Manifesto) to the widely accepted term “the digital revolution.”

In 2006, Business magazine compiled a list of the fifty most important people in the financial world. YOU topped the list: “You — or rather, the collaborative intelligence of tens of millions of people, the networked you — continually create and filter new forms of content, anointing the useful, the relevant, and the amusing and rejecting the rest. . In every case, you’ve become an integral part of the action as a member of the aggregated, interactive, self-organizing, auto-entertaining audience.”[2] Interestingly, the same year YOU also won TIME magazine’s person of the year: “Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.”

This aggressive YOU reminded me of Soviet posters, the most well-known of which shows a soldier pointing at passersby, accusingly demanding: Ty zapisalsja dobrovolcem? (Have you registered as a volunteer?) The YOU from the poster belongs to a completely different time, and a completely different political, ideological, and cultural context, and at first glance it would seem that my association is inappropriate. But maybe it isn’t?!

[1]Alan Kirby, “The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond” (Philosophy Now, November/December 2006). Available at: http://www.philosophynow.org/issue58/The_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond

[2]Ibid., Keen.

3. KARAOKE IS A COMMUNIST INVENTION!

It Certainly Is!

In the Soviet Union there were postcards that were about the size of a 7” single, and they had recordings impressed on them that one could actually play. One of these postcards turned up in my mail. I put the postcard on the record player and heard a friend’s voice quietly singing away, wishing me all the best from the city he was visiting, Odessa I think. This quirky technological possibility actually existed; the voice of whoever bought the postcard could be recorded on it. This was the first time I ever heard karaoke, and it was in a time when karaoke, officially a Japanese invention, didn’t even exist.

In the seventies and eighties many Yugoslavs would go abroad to buy whatever they couldn’t get in Yugoslavia, or whatever was cheaper abroad. In Trieste, they bought fashionable clothes, jeans, and coffee; in Graz, or in Austrian shopping centers just over the border, they bought food; in Istanbul, fur coats and leather jackets. Eastern European countries weren’t popular shopping destinations. Most of the Yugoslavs who went to the Soviet Union worked for Yugoslav construction firms. They brought home beautiful wooden chess sets, cameras, movie cameras, musical instruments (violins, accordions, trumpets, saxophones), sheet music, classical music records, and easels, canvas, and paint. Particularly sought after were these little wooden chests with oil paints and brushes that you could wear on your shoulders like a pack. Everything was dirt-cheap.

The first time I went to Moscow in the mid-eighties I also bought a little paint set. The amateur painter sitting on a stool at an easel was part and parcel of the Russian Soviet landscape, apparent confirmation of Marx’s utopian vision that under communism people would throw off the chains of exploitation, enjoy their work, and dedicate their free time to the things they loved. A creek and patches of greenery, a chapel in the snow, a snow-laden hill, a frozen lake or lilac in bloom — these scenes were unthinkable without one compulsory detail: the amateur painter capturing them all at his easel.

In the Moscow of the mid-eighties, they thought of me as a “Westerner.” An elegant coat and soft leather boots rising up above the knee from Trieste, Shetland wool sweaters and a cashmere one from London, a good quality Yugoslav overcoat (in Russian a dublyonka), a passport and hard currency (which got me into “Beryozka,” where I bought a fox-skin cap for myself, and Stolichnaya vodka and copies of The Master and Margarita for friends); all of these passed as irrefutable evidence of my “Westernness.” My Russian friends and acquaintances were what we might call fashion “incompatible,” but unlike me, they all had hobbies. Most of them played an instrument, most often the guitar. At evening gatherings they’d take turns playing Okudzhava and Vysotsky chansons, or their own chansons in the style of Okudzhava and Vysotsky. Most wrote poetry or dabbled in painting, and I didn’t know anyone who couldn’t take a decent photo. To me, a “Westerner,” this whole world of artistic amateurism was on the one hand quite delightful, but rather old-fashioned on the other. The truth is, there were all sorts in the underground Russian arts scene of the mid-eighties: amateurs without ambition, amateurs with ambition, swindlers, art lovers, informants, alcoholics, foreigners, political junkies, dissidents, losers, and not least, those who were sniffing around and hoping to be offered membership in the official state artistic organizations, which granted one “freelance” status.[1] There were also those such as Ilya Kabakov, who but a few years later would become darlings of the international art world.

The world of Soviet artistic amateurism seemed old-fashioned to me because by the mid-eighties the Yugoslav culture of amateurism (ham radio operators, choirs, community theatre, film clubs, amateur painters) was on the wane. Yugoslavs had passports and travelled. American films were in the cinemas, everyone had a TV, and these TVs showed popular American shows. Local cultural centers were slowly abandoned, “workers’ universities” offering adult education began to close, and slogans such as “Knowledge Is Power” and “Workplace Education” had simply lost their credibility. Many ham-radio operators had become professional technicians, and many of those involved in amateur film and photography circles, formerly weekend dabblers, had established themselves as artists, most of them as “conceptualists.” Amateurism kept its longest foothold in half-forgotten Esperanto clubs and the lively Haiku poetry scene, whose poets would send their work off to a mysterious Japanese commission, competing for an international Haiku poetry prize. Emerging out of the culture of amateurism, in the 1970s works by Yugoslav primitive artists were elevated to the status of “art,” attracted international attention and the accompanying big bucks, and then together with buyer interest vanished just a few years later.

I remember bits and pieces from the time of Yugoslav cultural amateurism. The small town in which I grew up had a “House of Culture” with a library, a movie theatre, a music school, and an amateur theatre with an impressive number of productions under its belt. My friend Alma’s father, a printer by trade, always played the leading man, and Ivanka, a typist and local beauty, the leading lady. In one production my father, who really didn’t have a clue about acting, had a bit part as an American — because he was tall. The general consensus in our small town was that only Americans were tall. The audience was particularly enamored with the Hawaiian shirt he wore. We called it a havajka (a “Hawaiian”) because it was brightly colored, the general consensus being that only Americans wore colorful shirts. The local audience enjoyed the performances, mainly because everyone had a personal connection to the actors. People often laughed in the wrong places, or commented loudly on this or that scene, but, having forgotten that the actors were their next-door neighbors and friends, they cried in equal measure.

All in all, alongside the cult of “technological progress,” culture itself was a “cult” ideological tenet under socialism. Education and self-education were the obligations of every progressive socialist individual, and love of the fine arts went hand in hand with humanism and the development of the well-rounded socialist personality, all of which found expression in “artistic” amateurism.[2]

With the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia in the early nineties and the emergence of new states and the ideology of nationalism, the practice of amateurism has seen its re-articulation. Today, as before, institutional, financial, and media investment is geared towards nurturing local folk traditions (songs, dance, customs), there being both ideological and commercial imperatives at work. On the one hand, local folk traditions are useful in cultivating regional identities, and on the other, they’re handy in developing regional tourism. Under communism, folklore festivals offered symbolic support for the brotherhood and unity of the nations and nationalities[3] of Yugoslavia, and today these very same festivals offer symbolic support for the particularities of national and ethnic identities. The thing is, communism or post-communism, Eastern European amateurs dance their ring dances and pluck their tamburice[4] in exactly the same way they have danced and plucked down through the ages. It’s just that every now and then the ideological pretext changes.

Although the beliefs that culture was a matter for the people (and not just the elite), and that one day everyone would get to try his or her artistic hand, were firmly rooted in the practice of the communist culture of amateurism, the practice was never intended to undermine the canon. Amateur and “professional” art (literature, painting, ballet, opera, theatre) existed alongside each other. Amateur art tried to imitate professional art, but never set out to take its place. Amateurs knew they were amateurs and left the power games, turns, shifts, and battles over the canon to professional artists. Technology, market principles, globalization, and the death of communism have radically altered the order of things. The utopian cliché that one day everyone will get to try his or her artistic hand has actually become the dominant and completely chaotic cultural practice that we know today. Communism came to power with the Great October Revolution and ended as fiasco. But communist ideas (Technology for the people! Culture for the people! Art for the People!) have risen from the ashes, successfully realized in the Great Digital Revolution.

Karaoke for Comrade Tito

Let’s imagine that in the future archaeologists will be able to put geographical regions through scanners, like the ones airport customs officers use to check our suitcases. Imagine the relief — no more futile digging in the wrong places! Now let’s imagine putting Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists, through this kind of scanner. Millions of mysterious phallic objects would show up on the imaginary scanner’s giant screen. “What the hell is this?” the shocked archaeologists would ask. “What kind of relic could this be? What kind of civilization? A civilization that worshipped the phallus?”

It was a country that worshipped one man, not necessarily his phallus, although from a (psycho)analytical perspective we probably shouldn’t exclude the hypothesis. The mysterious phallic object was neither a phallus nor a police baton. It was precious cargo. The object was known as the relay baton, was made mostly of wood, and in the middle had a hollow, and in this hollow, just like in a bottle, there would be a letter — containing birthday greetings for Tito. Yes, the man’s name was Tito. And yes, the catchy brevity of his name contributed much more to his popularity than commonly thought. On this score, there isn’t a president, not even Obama, who has ever come close. If this kind of thing weren’t important, Bono would have called himself Engelbert Humperdinck.

The relay baton — both a letter and letter box in one — was shaped like a torch, easy to hold, and easily passed from hand to hand.[5] In May of each year every village, town, and city in the former Yugoslavia would organize a youth relay (Tito’s birthday was also Youth Day), and the baton was passed from one pair of hands to the next. The baton was meant to symbolically link all Yugoslavs, all the country’s nations and nationalities, and on May 25th, Tito’s birthday, the baton would finally arrive, to much fanfare, in Belgrade. The boy or girl of the year would run the final stretch and solemnly hand the baton to Tito himself. The relay batons were unique handicrafts, and competition was fierce to make one’s baton more original, beautiful, and impressive than the rest.

The day after Tito died (May 4th, 1980), the photographer Goranka Matić began taking pictures of the displays in Belgrade shop windows. She called the series “Days of Pain and Pride,” the cliché on which the Yugoslav media seemed to have agreed. Overnight, ordinary people — hairdressers, butchers, and bakers — became artists. Tito’s portrait with a black mourning crepe was the connective element in the many fantastic, touching, and grotesque amateur art installations. In one window display Tito’s photo is happily set among fresh fruit and vegetables. In another Tito’s portrait is among funeral candles. Then there is Tito’s portrait with typewriters. Tito with sporting apparel (a tennis racket levitating from the side of the frame). Tito in the window of a hairdresser’s, wedged among photos of young beauties who are showing off the latest styles. Tito in a cake shop window, among the cakes. Tito in a butcher’s window, surrounded by legs of lamb, the butcher wiping his tears. Tito in a barbershop window (an enormous comb suspended overhead). Tito’s picture on the wall of a hardware store, the photo taken through the glass display, on the left a board reading Signs for Public Display (the kind hung in public spaces), on the right, the shop’s advertising slogan—A Man Doesn’t Have Spare Parts—and in the middle, Tito’s portrait and a mourning crepe.

In April 2009, Belgrade’s 25th of May Museum hosted an exhibition of gifts given by Yugoslavs to Tito, the majority dating from the early seventies. Only a fraction of the diverse collection was actually exhibited. In Tito’s lifetime, staff at the Museum of the History of Yugoslavia had diligently archived, classified, and numbered the items, and in the automatism of their jobs probably never thought that this “rubbish” would ever see the light of day. Following Yugoslavia’s disintegration the archive gathered dust, and only today, thanks to enthusiasts, is this enormous collection slowly having its time in the spotlight. The overwhelming visitor interest was propelled by a number of factors, including the twenty-year stigmatization of communism, Tito, and Titoism; the tacit prohibition of “everything Yugoslav” (particularly in Croatia); the aftershocks of the nationalist hysteria and war; and finally, by the fiasco of the nationalist-inspired state projects and the inability of today’s leaders to create “respectable,” and at least semi-reliable, states.

The “women’s” gifts include embroidered pillows, hand towels, knitted sweaters, gloves, tapestries, cushions (in the shape of a red star!), stocking caps, dolls in folk costume, children’s slippers and clothing, Tito’s portrait imprinted on silk, and hand-woven rugs bearing Tito’s image, among them a bizarre specimen with the motif “Josip Broz’s Sons Žarko and Miša Visit Their Father after His Operation.” The many embroidered messages bear congratulations, little verses (The bee belongs to the flower, Tito belongs to the world!), and political slogans (Let’s go the unaligned route!). The “men’s” gifts are more “sturdy,” either cast in metal or carved from wood, often representing the sender’s trade. The gifts include a stuffed trout (from a fisherman); a stuffed snake (!); die-cast figurines of workers, cranes, cars, trains, yachts, boats, planes, ovens, ink pots; ash trays (Tito was a smoker); car-shaped cigarette lighters; and even oddities such as a mini artificial leg (from an orthopedic factory), a mini dental surgery (from the Yugoslav Dentists’ Association), and a false tooth mounted on a plinth (from the Yugoslav Dental Technicians’ Association). Some gifts distill the essence of Yugoslav ideology at the time, as understood by the sender, the amateur artist. Carved from a tree trunk, Ivan Demša’s “Trunk of Peace” is emblematic in this regard. Tito’s head grows out from the top of the tree, or, in other words: Tito is a tree, and his branches wrap themselves around the globe. Birds sit on the branches of the “Trunk of Peace” and build their nests, symbolizing the strength, fertility, and global reach of his pacifist politics.

Visiting the exhibition it occurred to me that this heap of “artistic” objects which were anonymously gifted to Tito was a kind of symbolic mega-magnet that had held Yugoslavia and Yugoslavs together. The most popular Yugoslav slogan was We are Tito’s, Tito is Ours, but with the death of Tito, Yugoslavia fell apart, and nobody belonged to Tito any more, because in the simple, physical sense Tito no longer belonged to us. “The art of Josip Broz was called Tito. . Tito is a romantic pop star, above all he is the realization of the romantic ideal that our life is a work of art.”[6] As far as his media image goes, Tito was a kind of star, a communist James Bond. He wore a white suit, was a man of learning, had a lot of women, was a snappy dresser, smoked expensive Cuban cigars, liked fine wine, adored his two white poodles, and had famous actresses (Sofia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, Gina Lollobrigida) and famous actors (Kirk Douglas, Richard Burton, who played Tito in the film Sutjeska) as his house guests. Tito was a “playboy” who dared to say “no” to Stalin. Tito founded the Non-Aligned Movement, played golf and tennis, was a keen photographer, and, judging by the many photos, liked to dance; he even had a yacht. All in all, “he could sit down at the piano, but he could shoot a bear just as well.”[7]

A quick glance at the hundreds of miniature exhibits, and the thought of the thousands and thousands of similar objects stored in the basement of the Museum of the History of Yugoslavia, makes one’s head spin. I asked myself what drove people to embroider, crochet, sew, and braid, to craft replicas of everything and anything, and then send their amateur “installations” to a single recipient, to Tito. And then I thought of the rituals of contemporary pop culture and tried to visualize the millions of letters, gifts, and artifacts that are sent to today’s megastars. At rock concerts girls throw their lingerie on stage, their bras and knickers, in the hope that in a given moment their idol will use their knickers to wipe the sweat from his forehead, and in doing so, symbolically become one with his fans. For the same symbolic reasons, at concert’s end a star strips off a T-shirt soaked in sweat and throws it out into the crowd. Famous tennis players do the same with their sweatbands. Let’s rewind the tape. The grandmothers and great-grandmothers of today’s young girls sent their mothers’ slippers and bodysuits (from when they were babies), the most intimate things they owned, to Tito. Absorbing the sweat of thousands of runners, the relay baton passed from hand to hand and ended up in Tito’s. Symbolically the people became one with their idol, and the idol one with his people.

And so, in the end, why are gifts sent by the anonymous masses karaoke? They are karaoke because the whole point of the gift is symbolic rapprochement with one’s idol. Like the legion of Elvis impersonators who both idolize and carnivalize their “King,” the anonymous singer sidles up to Elvis by doing a karaoke version of “Only You,” but inadvertently soils his aura in the process. The amateur portraits and miniature wooden sculptures of Tito exemplify this symbolic idolatrous “cannibalism,” the idol transformed into his own farce. The gifts sent to Tito are collective karaoke, a mute collective song.

[1]Membership in the official Soviet literary, fine arts, film, and translation organisations gave one the prized status of freelance artist. In the absence of this status anyone who was unemployed could be prosecuted for parasitism (tunejadstvo), the law under which Joseph Brodsky was sentenced to five years of forced labor in 1963.

[2]The Croatian writer Ivo Brešan’s play Performing Hamlet in the Village of Mrduša Donja (Predstava Hamleta u selu Mrduša Donja) is a brilliant comedy about an amateur company in an isolated Croatian village. The company performs Hamlet in its local rural dialect, changing the meaning of Shakespeare’s text to suit local ideas and the ideological principles of the (communist) time.

[3]Translator’s Note: In the former Yugoslavia the terms “nations” (narodi) and “nationalities” (narodnosti) had particular meanings. The constitutive nations of the former Yugoslavia were those named as such in the constitution: Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, (Bosnian) Muslims (from 1971), and Montenegrins. The “nationalities” designated what in other languages would be referred to as “national minorities,” in this case, Hungarians, Italians, Slovaks, Czechs, Albanians, and others.

[4]Translator’s Note: A stringed instrument similar to a mandolin used to accompany folk songs, particularly popular in former Yugoslav regions along the Danube River basin and on the Great Pannonian Plain.

[5]“As opposed to the sceptre in the hands of kings and religious leaders, which could not be touched by anyone else, the relay baton gained its symbolic political power from the very fact that it passed through many hands. While the sceptre, one end pointing down towards the earth, and the other upwards towards the sky, is a symbol of its bearer’s connection to a heavenly power and his authority to represent this power on earth, the relay baton was a symbol of the connection between leader and people, of his legitimate power exercised in the name of the people.” (Ivan Čolović, “O maketama i štafetama” [On Maquettes and Relay Batons] in VlasTito iskustvo past present (Belgrade: 2005)

[6]Rastko Močnik, “Tito: majstorstvo popromantizma,” [Tito: the Mastership of Pop-romanticism] in VlasTito iskustvo past present (Belgrade, 2005).

[7]Ibid.

4. KARAOKE PEOPLE

Doubles

Pulsing in the very idea of karaoke is the old legend of the doppelgänger, of the double, the lookalike, the twin and the surrogate. Karaoke-people are wannabes.

Legends about doubles have always fired the human imagination. With the epochal birth of Dolly the sheep, the first live clone, not to mention the recent first full-face transplant, this intriguing subject has left the unfettered sphere of the romantic and slipped into the domains of ethics, medicine, and the entertainment industry. Worried about the real possibility of the production of doubles, contemporary medicine moralistically trumpets that in life we are all one-offs and that we have but one life. The entertainment industry blares back that the market has room for everyone, secretly hoping that an anonymous karaoke singer will efface Elvis’s performance of “Only You” from the collective memory, while simultaneously doubling sales of his CDs. The entertainment industry lives on recycling, and hailing its significance, theoreticians of popular culture dignify the profits.

As a child I was riveted by Mark Twain’s novel The Prince and the Pauper. To me it was a story about risk, and it fueled my childlike fantasy that a little girl, my double, might appear and take my place, prompting a feeling of freedom that was both terrifying and exciting. (What if my double were to usurp my place in my parents’ hearts for good?! What if I could never come home again?!) Whispered among the adults, stories about Tito got my child’s imagination going, especially the one about Tito not being the real Tito, but his double. These rumors were given legs by the fact (real or imagined) that apart from speaking several languages, Tito also played the piano. People could never get their heads around that piano. How, for Christ’s sake, did a poor kid from Zagorje complete a locksmith’s apprenticeship, set up the Partisan movement, defeat the Germans, establish the Yugoslav state, and learn to play the piano?

Rumors about doubles have often accompanied kings, dictators, presidents, and generals. Irakli Kvirikadze’s film Comrade Stalin Goes To Africa (Poezda tovarišča Stalina v Afriku, 1991) is a bitter comedy about an ordinary Soviet worker, a Jew, who as a result of his striking physical resemblance to Stalin is arrested by the NKVD and drilled for months in how to impersonate Stalin. When the luckless worker finally completes his secret training, news of Stalin’s death arrives from Moscow and the NKVD puts a bullet in his temple. It might seem quite by the by, but today, successfully cloned embryos are destroyed in laboratories when the embryos are between twelve and fourteen days old. For the time being that is apparently the allowed lifespan of a human clone.

In his 2008 autobiography Feliks Dadajev confirmed the rumors about Stalin’s doubles. Dadajev, an old man pushing ninety, a former dancer and juggler, was Stalin’s lookalike (apart from the ears, “My ears were smaller” claims Dadajev), his official double. Doubles served as targets for potential assassins (apparently there were two attempts on Stalin’s life), stood in as Stalin’s surrogates at parades, and traveled to and from airports to confuse the assassins. Trailed by journalists, in 1945 Dadajev traveled to the famous Yalta conference. The real Stalin was already there.

Literature and film have frequently exploited the motif of the double, the twin, and the lookalike. Alexandre Dumas (the story of Louis XIV and his twin brother), Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Anthony Hope, and Bolesław Prus are but a handful of the writers who have been fascinated by the theme. Anthony Hope’s novel The Prisoner of Zenda has seen endless movie remakes. Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece The Great Dictator is a story about a double. Karaoke-people, wannabes, fans, they buzz around famous people like flies. Give me a celebrity and I’ll give you a double; it doesn’t matter if it’s Paul McCartney, Elvis, Princess Diana, Paris Hilton, or even Bill Gates.

Želimir Žilnik’s film Tito A Second Time Among the Serbs (Tito po drugi put među Srbima, 1994) is an intelligent work of cinematic provocation. An actor who physically resembles Tito appears on the streets of Belgrade, and passersby, ordinary people, spontaneously get in on the joke and have a chat. During the course of the conversation, the game takes an unexpected turn. For a second people forget he’s an impostor and, as if in a kind of regressive psychotherapeutic séance, some accuse Tito of being “guilty for everything” (for the war, for the disintegration of Yugoslavia), while others urge him to return, because “everything was much better” when he was alive.

There is an anecdote about Charlie Chaplin, apparently true, that underscores my childhood nightmare about doubles, the one inflamed by Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper. The story goes that sometime in the thirties Charlie Chaplin entered a Charlie Chaplin lookalike competition. They say he didn’t even make the final.

Fans

Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 (and let’s not forget François Truffaut’s screen adaption) depicts a bleak future of a world without books. A forest-dwelling group of “outlaws,” book-lovers, are humanity’s only hope for salvation from total cultural amnesia. They are book-people, a living library, each having memorized a book by heart.

Visiting Moscow for the first time in the mid-eighties, I was invited by friends for a walk in a nearby forest. Given what I saw, my literary-orientated imagination promptly made associations with the community of book-lovers in Bradbury’s novel. It was mid-winter and people sat on makeshift stools playing chess, their breath hanging in the air, others were just out for a stroll, and many (and not just in the forest!) recited Russian poetry by heart. My political imagination was inculcated with Tito’s historic “NO” to Stalin, anti-totalitarianism, Zamyatin’s novel We, Orwell’s 1984, dissident underground culture, and the Soviet everyday (many books really were banned), and so like everyone else I had read Bradbury’s novel as a fierce critique of a totalitarian (of course Soviet) regime. Much later, Bradbury rejected this interpretation, and he claimed that his criticism was targeted at the totalitarianizing influence of television. In the early sixties Bradbury had believed that television would wipe out books and literature.

If we were to try to translate a few things from Bradbury’s novel into today’s language, Guy Montag (played in Truffaut’s film by the unforgettable Oscar Werner) would be a newly-initiated fan, and the people huddled in the forest would be fans. Their community would be a fandom, bound together by their common fascination with books. For those outside the community — particularly those who write, produce, or sell books, the forest-dwellers would be a much-valued fanbase. Within their fandom, fans often communicate in slang, fanspeak. The forest in which Guy Montag meets the book-lovers would be called a convention (or con). If some of the book-people were dressed as literary heros, this would be called cosplay.[1] Given that people from the forest learn by heart and recite fragments out loud, this would be called fanac (fan activity). If the book-lovers were to offer Montag a publication that details their activities, it would be a fanzine.

Bradbury’s novel was published in 1953, in a time when television (in black and white) had just begun its historic invasion of American homes. The idea of television as opium for the people (Bradbury uses the word opium) would appear just a few years later. The commercialization of the Internet, a phenomenon of the past decade, has given the culture of fandoms and fans an unprecedented boost. Today almost every pop culture “product” has its own fandom, irrespective of whether this product is a TV show, film, cartoon, comic strip, video game, or book from any of the popular genres (horror, fantasy, romance, science fiction, vampire, gothic, etc.). If we take science fiction as an example, there are numerous forms (film, cartoons, comics, TV series, literature), genres within these forms, and within these genres, sub-genres. Further divisions run along the lines of age (children, teenagers, adults), gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Fandoms themselves are broken down into groups, subgroups, and sub-subgroups, structured in complex communities.

Being a fan and member of a fandom means being an expert. A fan of the film Planet of the Apes, for example, particularly one with designs on becoming a Big Name Fan (a supreme authority, an initiator, a fandom leader) has to know that Pierre Boulle is the father of the fandom and that his novel La planète des singes was published in 1963. As a consequence, this ambitious fan will learn French and travel to France, finding out all he can about the author. The fan will watch Franklin J. Schaffner’s four-part film adaption ad nauseum. The fan will know the name of the screenwriters who adapted the book, the names of the actors (both lead and supporting), and will memorize the smallest of details, from the music and costume design to dialogue lists. He’ll know all the key lines by heart; he’ll know everything about the television series and the “monkey” films that followed; he’ll have boned up on the graphic novels and be able compare them with the book and the films; he’ll be an expert on monkey TV series, cartoons, comics, and video games; he’ll know his way around monkey websites; he’ll chat on forums, Facebook, and by e-mail with other fans; he’ll go to conventions, buy signed souvenirs, posters, and photos, adding them to his monkey collection; he’ll buy a monkey suit and, all dressed up, haunt the convention corridors; he’ll meet the actors, authors, graphic artists, and costume designers of the “monkey planet”; he’ll meet other fans, swap addresses and experiences, and exchange all kinds of trivia on monkey products.

Science Fiction has the oldest and largest fandoms, and apparently their conventions draw the biggest crowds. Anime and manga fandoms are pretty popular too. Among many others, there are fandoms for karaoke, Tolkien, Star Trek (fans are Trekkies), Harry Potter, and something known as a “furry,” whose fans are into comics, cartoons, literature, painting, and other forms of cultural production that feature anthropomorphic heroes and motifs. A “furry” possesses both animal and human characteristics, whether mental, physical, or a combination of both. A “furry” can also simply refer to a “furry” fan.

Fandoms use all available forms of media — websites, podcasts, song videos, fan art. At conventions they work out schedules of activities, which include everything from promotional events to specially organized tourist trips and foreign language classes. Manga and anime fans go to Japan, the popularity of both having made learning Japanese cool again. Although informal communities, fandoms become more and more complex, developing their own language (incomprehensible to a non-fan), codes, rituals, and etiquette. A Big Name Fan, for example, has the right to give his autograph to other fans, meaning that he can create his own personal fandom within the larger community. Fandoms are also gender conscious: there are fanboys and fangirls.

As far as Bradbury’s anxieties about literature go, not all is completely lost. Although coined a century ago, today the word Janeite denotes a person who displays a voluntary idolatrous enthusiasm for Jane Austen. First adopted as a badge of honor by Austen lovers within the academic and cultural elite, the coinage has undergone a recalibration. When Austen was canonized in the 1930s, and her place within the upper echelons of English literature put beyond doubt, the coinage simply came to mean — a fan. In more recent times film and television adaptions of her work have made Austen a cult writer, and as such, today’s Janeites engage in ever more elaborate fandom activities: reading clubs, outings, dress-up parties, tea parties, discussions, trips to where Austen or her heroes and heroines lived. Janeites practice their “mad enthusiasm” in every which way, studying everything from her characters’ genealogy to the fabrics of the era.

Fandoms allow for a random, unstructured, and chaotic self-education. Fascinated by the films of Aki Kaurismäki, a young woman I know started learning Finnish. A friend of mine who is an actress has starred in two popular American TV series. The head of her fandom is a shy Canadian office worker, who, knowing that her idol is originally from Croatia, has spent the past several years diligently learning Croatian.

While unschooled and disadvantaged by his low caste, the boy hero of the film Slumdog Millionaire unexpectedly wins a television quiz show, the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” Everything he knows he picked up through random life experiences. Today, millions of adolescents acquire knowledge in a similarly wild, unstructured, and random way, owing everything they know to “playful enthusiasm” and technology. The wave they surf is popular culture. Injected with popular culture, few will become astrophysicists. The majority will just become fans.

Avatars

We live in a time in which fantasies of the surrogate are no longer reserved only for the famous. Today the Internet disseminates, enriches, and popularizes fantasies of the surrogate. The surrogate is no longer our replica, but a second, third, fourth, and fifth self, one we design and redesign, model and remodel, one we control or make disappear with the touch of a fingertip.

The Guardian article “Second Life Affair Leads to Real life Divorce” (November 13, 2008) reports the case of an English couple, Amy Taylor and David Pollard, who met in an Internet chat-room, fell in love, and got married. In Second Life, an Internet computer game, both had an avatar, and these avatars, “Laura Skye” and “Dave Barmy,” were lovers. Then Taylor caught her then lover in flagrante: Pollard was watching his avatar make love to a prostitute. In virtual life, the embittered Taylor broke off the relationship between her and Pollard’s avatars, but in real life she and Pollard remained a couple. Some time later Taylor decided to test Pollard’s fidelity and went back into Second Life as a virtual private eye, setting a honeytrap, which “Dave Barmy” (i.e. Pollard) successfully avoided, claiming that he was in love with “Laura Skye.” “Laura Skye” and “Dave Barmy” then got married, a marriage soon followed by the real life nuptials of Amy Taylor and David Pollard. The final twist was when Taylor again caught Pollard cheating in virtual life and so in real life applied for a divorce. Pollard admitted to the virtual ex-marital affair but said it hadn’t even gotten as far as cyber sex, and that he hadn’t done anything wrong.

Created by Linden Lab and launched in 2003, Second Life is but one of the numerous online virtual worlds, which users, or residents, enter through their avatars. Avatars can take whatever shape or form a user chooses, and although most often human, they can actually be animal, mineral, or vegetable. But few choose to be a plant in their second life. Avatars can be completely different or strikingly similar to their real life users. In the virtual world, avatars do more or less the same things as their real world users. They buy virtual goods (land, houses, cars, clothing, jewelry, works of art), they hang out, go to Sexy Beach, visit virtual sex shops, play computer games, spend special Linden dollars, and apparently, some also earn real American dollars. Second Life is home to companies, educational institutions, libraries, universities, and religious groups. Avatars can sign up for different classes and pray in the virtual temples of every faith. Embassies are located on Diplomacy Island. The Maldives was the first country to open a virtual embassy, followed by Sweden. The Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carl Bildt, announced that he hoped to get an invitation to his embassy’s virtual opening. Serbia bought and created its own diplomatic island as a part of another virtual project known as “Serbia Under Construction.” Visitors can visit the Nikola Tesla Museum, the famous trumpet festival in Guča, and the Exit music festival in Novi Sad. Estonia opened an embassy in 2007 and was followed by Columbia, Macedonia, the Phillipines, and Albania. Avatars can play sports, visit museums and galleries, and go to concerts and the theatre. In 2008 the Second Life Shakespeare Company gave a live performance of the first act of Hamlet. Many companies flocked to advertise on Second Life and many got burned. Coca Cola allegedly pumped big money into opening Coke’s Virtual Thirst Pavilion, which attracted fewer than thirty avatars. All in all, it seems that Second Life is conceived as a paradise built to human dimensions. The only thing missing is funeral services.

Avatars fulfill our fantasies of being someone else, somewhere else. Adult users return to childhood, by definition a comfort zone. The virtual world is also a comfort zone. Adult users of Second Life experience life free of risk or consequence — they fly without falling, have unprotected sex, make risk-free acquaintances, and teleport themselves free from the risk of forever remaining in a virtual world. Users have the world under absolute control; they are Gods, able to connect and disconnect at will. Through this simulation game young users of Second Life learn about the world of adults. A young girl made her Second Life avatar a prostitute. It wasn’t so bad, she said. And besides, she wasn’t prostituting herself, her avatar was.

Can we live two lives? The American documentary Second Skin follows the lives of several players of the online game World of Warcraft (WoW). WoW is a “massively multiplayer online role playing game” (or MMORPG) situated in the fantasy Warcraft universe. Statistics suggest that some fifty million people, of whom sixty percent are between twenty and thirty years old, play the game. The documentary follows four addicts who live together; each spend about sixteen hours a day on the game. Asked why the “synthetic world” is better than the real one, the gamers reply that in the synthetic world the starting line is the same for everyone and that everyone has equal opportunities. They maintain that with their avatars they feel a greater freedom (the word they use most frequently) than they do in the real world, that the game is an extension of themselves, and that in the world of the game they are more than they are in the real world. Coming from someone who is confined to a wheelchair, these reasons would be understandable, but they are terrifying when offered by healthy adults. Most of the gamers live with the consequences of their obsessive connection to a fantasy world and disconnection from the real world — unemployment, divorce, suicide, alienation — the very things that accompany any kind of severe addiction. Obsessive gaming changes one’s perception, hearing, sensation, sense of color, and perspective — one addict confesses that in his first days of abstinence it was the real world that seemed fake. Other gamers say that in the virtual world they’ve struck up partnerships and friendships that are more enduring than those they have had in the real world. “We’re alienated,” says one gamer, “but connected, because the game is a safe place to get more intimate.” The gamers band together, meet new people, set up associations and virtual unions, and sometimes even meet in real “parallel” life. Gamers share an intimate bond with their avatars, which they experience as the better part of themselves.

A Wired Magazine article entitled “How Madison Avenue is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life” and published in mid-2007 claims that eighty-six percent of Second Life users have abandoned their avatars, and that corporate investment in the venture has been a fiasco.[2] “It’s really the software’s fault,” said the president of Linden Lab. Users returned to their First Life, impatiently waiting for better software solutions in their Second Life. In the now deserted Second Life a user could only have a single avatar. But Sybil had sixteen.[3]

Who’s What to Whom?

Woody Allen’s story “The Kugelmass Episode” revolves around a middle-aged professor of humanities who teaches at The City College of New York. Bored with his life and marriage to Daphne, Kugelmass wants a romantic escapade. At Kugelmass’s request, and assisted by a magic cabinet, the magician Persky teleports Kugelmass into the virtual world of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Kugelmass meets Emma Bovary, wanders the streets of Yonville with her, and falls in love. Emma, however, wants to see New York, and with the help of Persky and his magic cabinet is teleported there. After a while she starts to tire Kugelmass, and so he asks Persky to send her back into the novel. Insatiable, Kugelmass soon requests Persky to get him into Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. There is an explosion during transmission, the cabinet catches fire, Persky dies of a heart attack, the whole house goes up in flames, and Kugelmass is forever stuck — not in Portnoy’s Complaint, but in a Spanish language textbook, chased by the irregular verb tener (“to have”).

Allen’s story was first published in The New Yorker in 1977. Today, thirty years later, its anticipatory charge is startling. Like Kugelmass’s, our time is stuck, hounded by the irregular verb tener. In the story, as in interactive virtual worlds, no one is left unaffected. Every time Kugelmass is magically transmitted into Flaubert’s novel, anyone reading the novel anywhere in the world has to read pages of bizarre dialogue between Emma Bovary and a character that wasn’t even in the novel, a certain Professor Kugelmass. In his little comic caper Woody Allen has neither the time nor inclination to ask questions about the nature of the interaction, which in the intervening time has become known as “participatory culture.” Allen’s story was written in a different, pre-Internet context, when postmodern artistic practice (film, literature, visual art) toyed with the concepts of metatextuality, intertextuality, citationality, and the canon. Artistic and aesthetic canons still existed back then, their subversion a legitimate part of artistic practice. Today, thirty years later, the Internet, like a giant vacuum cleaner, sucks up absolutely everything, including the canons. The complex dynamics of turns and shifts take place in the interaction between the marketplace, the Internet, and the Internet user. In this process the market isn’t a producer of goods, and neither are Internet users passive consumers. One feeds the other, and one feeds itself on the other. In spite of their incompatibility, Emma Bovary and Professor Kugelmass are still “old school” lovers. Today they both are Wikipedia entries. Whether anyone will ever bring them together or separate them depends on the good will of AA, the anonymous author. Because AA is this beginning of a new cultural alphabet. Whether this alphabet will also be called “artistic” is hard to say.

Incidentally, as far as karaoke goes, there’s a new gizmo on the market, the Vocaloid, a vocal synthesizer application that was developed by Yamaha. For the time being the anemic digitalized voice seems best suited to anime characters whose eyes are twice as big, round, and moist as Bambi’s. But, any day now, imitating cutesy synthesized voices will no doubt be all the rage, all over the world. Maybe some plastic surgery clinics already offer clients eye-enlargements and socket sculpting so they can look like their anime heroes. Professor Kugelmass on the other hand — he’s out of luck. He lived in postmodernism, in the pre-Internet age, at the very dawn of the digital revolution.

[1]The cosplay craze appears livelier in Japan than anywhere else. The following is an invitation to humanities scholars to present papers at a conference entitled Cosplay: Media, Identity and Performance in Japan and Beyond at the Institute of Comparative Culture at Tokyo’s Sophia University: “A vibrant fan culture has developed around manga, anime and videogames, and perhaps the most visible indicator of its presence is ‘cosplay.’ A portmanteau combining ‘costume’ and ‘(role)play,’ cosplay is for some people almost synonymous with Japanese fandom, but its roots are in sci-fi conventions in the United States. Connected with the rich media scene in Japan, the practice of costuming as favorite characters took on a life of its own. Conventions can draw 14,000 cosplayers, and websites over 200,000 users. The annual ‘cosplay market’ is estimated at $350 million. For a short time there was even a ‘professional cosplay course’ offered by a trade school. And this enthusiasm is fast spreading around the world, as evidenced by the annual World Cosplay Summit. The quality of costumes and passion of their wearers continues to draw media attention around the world. Unfortunately, cosplay has yet to draw much academic attention, despite the potential wealth of insights to be gained. This conference brings together scholars from a variety of backgrounds to consider not only cosplay, but also intersections with fashion, subculture, performance, identity and gender.”

[2]Second Life might currently be a fiasco for investors, but it’s fertile ground for academic research. Zoe McMillan and Steorling Heron recently proposed a collection of essays entitled Challenging the Virtual: Women’s Cultural Experience in Second Life and sent out a call to fellow female academics to contribute chapters on the following topics: SL Economic and Business; SL Artistic and Creative Expressions via Building, Scripting, Animation; SL Subculture Identities (for example, Gorean, Furry, Neko, Sci-fi, Borg, Tinies, Roleplay, Child Avatars, etc); SL Relationships/Defending Personal Boundaries (Intimacy/Privacy in Digital Environment). Concerned as it is with these two diligent academics this footnote is not meant to be ironic. The fact is that from the beginning of time humanity has used religion to passionately and devotedly live parallel lives. The mere 2.2 billion Christians currently on planet earth believe in the story of the Second Life. The fact that Second Life the computer game differs slightly from the religious concept is quite irrelevant. The heart of the matter is that the human mind has always been ready to teleport itself into other worlds. And in this respect, the thesis that Google is actually the Heavenly Father is also more plausible.

[3]In the early seventies the psychiatric case of Shirley Ardell Mason, better known as Sybil Isabel Dorsett, aroused unusually widespread interest, her rise to infamy helped by a bestseller written by her psychiatrist, Cornelia B. Wilbur, and two movie adaptions of the book. Sybil’s diagnosis was “multiple personality disorder” (now known as “dissociative identity disorder”), and she was reported to carry sixteen different female identities within her. Interestingly, Sybil’s case inspired the computer security term “Sybil attack.”

5. POST-COMMUNIST PRACTICE: VALENTINA AND EMIR

Valentina Hasan: Ken Lee

Who is Valentina Hasan? Valentina Hasan is a Bulgarian who auditioned for Bulgarian Idol in February 2008. She told the jury that she was going to sing the Mariah Carey song “Ken Lee” (the song’s real name being “Without You”[1]). Valentina Hasan, a stumpy young woman in a cheap peach satin dress and glammy make-up, bravely sang the song in a completely unrecognizable language. To the jury’s snippy question about the language in which she was singing (as if Henry Higgins himself had appointed them!), Valentina, taken aback that they didn’t know, replied: “English.”[2] A video clip with Valentina Hasan’s appearance started doing the rounds on the Internet, and a regional war erupted on chat-forums soon thereafter. Bulgarian commentators distanced themselves from Valentina, claiming that she was Turkish, or maybe a Gypsy, but certainly not Bulgarian; the Macedonians and Turks jumped in and accused the Bulgarians of racism; the Greeks defended the Bulgarians and accused the Macedonians of themselves being “Gypsies” and having stolen the name Macedonia for their non-existent state. These anonymous outbursts, nationalist and racist, soon descended into a tedious Balkan soap opera that was comprehensible only to Bulgarians, Macedonians, Greeks, Turks, Serbs, and Roma. While all this was going on, a million-strong global audience watched “Ken Lee.” Within a month the clip had four million hits and Mariah Carey had tipped her hat to her Bulgarian imitator on French television. Valentina Hasan’s unexpected popularity forced the Bulgarian producers to invite her back for a repeat performance. Dolled up like a real star this time, Valentina sang the song in a slightly more comprehensible English, but to the audience’s delight performed the chorus in her mangled English as she had the first time. On their feet and holding hands, the audience joined Valentina for the chorus of “Ken Lee.” By the first half of May 2008 the video clip had thirteen million hits. Then a hit remix appeared. To this day Internet forums are full of people trying to imitate Valentina Hasan’s unique brand of English.

Valentina Hasan became much more that an ordinary karaoke singer. For a brief moment this anonymous young woman was a “princess.” A Bulgarian, whose appearance, figure, voice, and English had the jury rolling its eyes, won an unprecedented moral victory. Millions of YouTube viewers ruled in her favor.

Emir Kusturica: Drvengrad

Emir Kusturica is a Yugoslav film director with a deserved international reputation. On a hill called Mećavnik in southwestern Serbia, Kusturica has built his own town called Drvengrad or “Kustendorf.”[3] Drvengrad really has tongues talking. Few people in the world get to build their own Graceland, Neverland, or Brioni, and very rare indeed are those who get to raise a pyramid to themselves in their own lifetimes.

On a trip to Serbia in April 2009 a friend talked me into visiting Drvengrad. Built on the crest of a hill and with its own gate, Drvengrad is just like a medieval village, but visitors need to buy an entry ticket. Everything is made of wood, the ground covered in wooden decking, the scattered wooden houses connected by flights of wooden stairs. The houses themselves are perfect examples of wooden architecture. In Drvengrad there is a movie theatre named after Stanley Kubrick, a swimming pool, a cake shop, two or three restaurants, a souvenir shop (in which the only DVDs and CDs on sale are Kusturica’s films and their Goran Bregović-composed soundtracks), a library with a reading room, and an art gallery. The streets are named after Kusturica’s idols, including Matija Bećković (a Serbian poet and member of the Milošević-era political elite), Ivo Andrić, Bruce Lee, Charlie Chaplin, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Maradona, Nikita Mikhalkov, and Jim Jarmusch. The restaurants and cake shop are named after Ivo Andrić characters or works (for example, “Aska and the Wolf” and “At Ćorkan’s”). I don’t think any of the street names are permanent; they change on Kusturica’s whim. All the signs are written in Cyrillic, so the names are lost to many visitors.

Kusturica has successfully managed to become not only the owner of a “feudal estate” built on protected public land, but also the director of a national park. He is both a private landowner and a high-ranking public servant. Expensive “ranger” jeeps line the car park. The uniformed park rangers look like a cross between bodyguards, security guards, and the “rangers” one sees in American films. Kusturica’s transport fleet also has a helicopter, which is often seen flying above the local peasants and Drvengrad’s many visitors. At the foot of the hill lie the renovated Jatare railway station and an excellent restaurant. With Kusturica’s helicopter nervously buzzing overhead, destroying the idyllic rural silence, my friend and I could barely exchange a word, let alone take a mouthful of our meals in peace. Kusturica has also put a short abandoned railway line into service. He doesn’t own the tracks, but they work for him. The train is a typical tourist attraction, and over a one-hour journey travelers complete a “figure 8” and enjoy the untouched beauty of the surroundings.

The peasants who live as neighbors to this modern and modish feudal estate complain about Kusturica. As soon as he finished building an entire village out of wood, in his capacity as director of the national park Kusturica banned the peasants from felling trees for firewood or building wooden houses like his own. “With the forests I safeguard, I am part of the oxygen you breathe” is what he told them. At least that’s what the Serbian papers reported. Others worship him, saying he’s “brought tourism” to a God-forsaken region and employed many locals to help build and maintain his “dream.” A friend recently crossed the border between Republika Srpska (the Serbian part of Bosnia) and Serbia proper and apparently had to pay a special toll for passage through Drvengrad National Park. The customs officers weren’t able to explain whether this little “tax” was enshrined in national law, a local council regulation, or a tithe payable to Kusturica himself.

There are a fair few things about Drvengrad that remain unclear, but Kusturica was obviously gifted his estate by the Serbian authorities. He publicly supported Milošević and passionately supported Vojislav Koštunica, effectively making him a supporter of the entire Serbian nationalist political and “entrepreneurial” elite. Kusturica has assets and revenue that directors of a similar international status can only dream of. At the same time he incessantly mouths off about liberalism being the scourge of the earth, and that art, honor, and spirituality matter, not money (woe is us when the market becomes the measure of all values!), railing against globalization, and publicly urging a return to nature. Judging by the earthworks and foundations being prepared for new houses, Drvengrad is set to expand down towards the foot of the hill.

As a true auteur Kusturica has played with concepts of the authentic and the fake. Not far from Drvengrad lies the museum village of Sirogojno, which was well-known in the former Yugoslavia and overseen by leading ethnologists. The village is home to many authentic wooden houses, an excellent souvenir shop (with carefully crafted replicas of village implements), and a restaurant with a modest selection of local dishes. Under the leadership of a number of fashion designers, the women of Sirogojno have for decades won international acclaim for their decorative sweaters, which are hand-knitted from local wool, and a special museum documents how the sweaters have made their way as far as Japan. Sirogojno has been deserted since Kusturica built Drvengrad. Today even school trips skip Sirogojno and head straight for Drvengrad. So the kids will get a sense of “authentic” village architecture.

Kusturica is a capricious ruler. Drvengrad has a prison, a little joke to amuse visitors I guess. The time I visited a painting of George W. Bush’s head hung behind the metal bars on the prison’s wooden doors. A glance at Bush’s head prompted a fleeting smile, and then an immediate feeling of unease. It occurred to me that, depending on Kusturica’s mood, anyone could (and can) end up there. The village has its own painter-in-residence, a full-time employee who works on the various wooden surfaces, changing details per Kusturica’s instructions. I assume there isn’t a special advisory board to decide on whom to symbolically imprison.

Kusturica is the absolute ruler of a village he himself invented, symbolically honoring people (with street names), symbolically imprisoning them, and symbolically burying them. The 2009 Kustendorf Film Festival opened with a spectacular funeral. The YouTube clip shows Kusturica demonstratively throwing a tape of the Bruce Willis film Die Hard into a wooden coffin, a burial of “cinematic rubbish,” with Kusturica’s No Smoking Orchestra bandmate Nele Karajlić in the role of priest, and a crowd of friends (some of them famous) and acquaintances standing in as mourners. During the later burial of Willis himself, an actor playing Willis bursts from the coffin, and in flames, flees into the distance, the burial candles having set his suit on fire. According to Kusturica this symbolic artistic gesture is meant to illustrate the apparent invincibility of the industry that produces “cinematic rubbish,” and that, given the inevitably of a new Die Hard sequel, again starring Bruce Willis, both will again need to be buried at next year’s festival.

Kusturica chooses his guests in accordance with his own political and artistic preferences. Among others, Nikita Mikhalkov (a Russian director, cultural oligarch, and key Putin supporter), Vojislav Koštunica, Peter Handke, and the young Japanese director Kokhi Hasei have all put in appearances. Hasei was so taken by his experience at Drvengrad that he converted to the Serbian Orthodox Church and was baptized in the village’s church of Saint Sava.

“I’ve created a place that looks like it was once inhabited. But it wasn’t,” said Kusturica in an interview. In another interview he says that he has created a mythical place in which the spirit of authorship will be reincarnated. Kusturica’s website is called Kustopedia and is “the online encyclopedia on the universe of Emir Kusturica.” He might not have dreamt up the name, but he surely approved it. Kusturica uses a hypermodern form (a fully-realized simulation game) and an antiquated authoritarian-utopian rhetoric (I invented a village; I built a mythical place; the reincarnation of the spirit of authorship, the universe of Emir Kusturica, Kustopedia).

Opposites

Valentina Hasan’s is a textbook case in popular culture. Culture is a living, active process; it develops from the inside and can never be imposed from the outside or from on high. Valentina Hasan is both an active consumer of this culture and a potential participant. She is a representative of the millions of people all over the world who not only communicate via popular culture, but who also increasingly control it. Television is today dominated by “reality” TV (variants of Big Brother), local and imported soap operas, and local and imported series (the majority being sit-coms). With transition cultures having adopted the infotainment model, real news and current affairs programming is very rare. Today untrained actresses not only act in soap operas, but also write and produce them, while memoirs and autobiographies are inevitably a by-product of the “celebrity business.” In Croatia an anonymous young man became famous for being the first man (at least in Croatia) to have his lips pumped with silicon. Today he is a celeb and hosts his own popular TV program. Even local models and porn stars have their own programs. The examples are simply too numerous to go into — and they are no longer the exception, they are the rule. The media — newspapers, television, the publishing industry, the Internet — live off these “automatic-for-the-people-pop-stars,” and these “people’s pop stars” live off the media, together shaping and controlling popular culture. As exemplified by Valentina Hasan, this culture is no longer confined within local borders. Transitional post-communist cultures no longer ape American and Western European formats. They are early adopters; they imitate, embrace, communicate, and participate, never missing a beat. Like Valentina Hasan, popular culture is ideology-free, an empty screen on which consumers and participants together locate and inscribe meaning. But Valentina Hasan is no Cinderella. Like the many Bulgarians who headed west in search of work following Bulgaria’s accession to the European Union, Valentina Hasan lives with her husband in Spain. Her unexpected popularity on Bulgarian Idol and the video clip that made its way around the world led to an appearance on Spanish television, where she impressed with her more than competent Spanish. As a consumer of popular culture, Valentina Hasan pushed all the right buttons: in the marketplace of popular culture everyone is welcome, everyone has the right to their five minutes of fame, and this five minutes of fame is a lottery — it all depends on the very second in which millions of people, themselves just like Valentina, choose their “star.” The first time, silicon pumped lips might do it, a second, poorly pronounced English, the third time it might be exceptional talent. Valentina owes her five minutes of fame to inadvertently breaking the rules (her mangled English), to the jury who appointed themselves linguistic authorities (everyone in the jury began their careers like Valentina), and, most of all, to the audience who recognized this. The carnivalization of imposed values and of authority has always been a driving force behind popular culture. Valentina, “the people’s princess,” inadvertently carnivalized a body of authority (a Bulgarian television jury), inadvertently knocked a “queen” (Mariah Carey, the queen of pop) from her pedestal, and then made one final gaff: like a modern Eliza Doolittle, she knocked the English language off its pedestal.

As opposed to Valentina Hasan, Emir Kusturica is not only a representative but also a champion of “high culture.” The Drvengrad project is very similar to computer simulation games such as SimCity (a “city building simulation game”); it’s as if Kusturica followed SimCity’s promotional catchphrase—“Design, build and run the city of your dreams.” With its toys for little boys — helicopters, rangers’ jeeps, a railway park and old train — in its very realization Kusturica’s Drvengrad resembles SimCity. Kusturica, however, is not a player of emancipatory-empowering computer games. He’s a different kind of player, a transition mutant, a modern version of the communist state artist par excellence. In Serbia this position was long reserved for Dobrica Ćosić, who, known to his friends (including Kusturica) as the godfather, was in Milošević’s time briefly president of “rump Yugoslavia” (consisting of the republics of Serbia and Montenegro). Kusturica is a new, neoliberal godfather, a landowner and entrepreneur, who has bundled his entrepreneurship into a personal ideological mishmash that includes anti-globalization, anti-liberalism, Serbian Orthodoxy as new spirituality, environmentalism, and the elitism of art. Kusturica could only realize his utopia with the help of the Serbian political and “entrepreneurial” mafia. He didn’t have a choice; he built it in Serbia. The kindly hearted will intone that every state has a mafia, and this is true. But in Serbia — and the same goes for Croatia, Bosnia, and several other countries in transition — the mafia has a state. And that’s how and why Kusturica has his Drvengrad.

Post-communist cultural practice blossoms between these two poles, between “Valentina” and “Emir”; between the ever more exuberant and dominant pop culture on the one hand and cultural representatives on the other, who, although they don’t have their own Drvengrad, have heads buzzing with ideas that are similar to Kusturica’s. There are the legions of “academics,” covered in historical dust, who every now and then let out an epileptic kick in the hope of reinstating the canon. There are writers who are retouching their self-images in the hope of winning back the audiences they lost in the historical change. And there are writers who have figured out that the media is king, who successfully combine roles (as writers of newspaper columns and owners of newspapers, as publishers and owners of publishing houses, as TV personalities and TV show hosts, as bloggers and “twitterers”), having taken lessons from the media strategies of politicians and pop stars. For this reason we needn’t bat an eyelid when we see the writer T. T. appear on Russian television dressed up as Catherine the Great (cosplay!), her wig clumsily falling on her sweaty forehead. Nor should we be surprised to see the respected Russian writer L. P., in her twilight years (she’s over 70), dressed up like a cabaret singer, performing her sad Edith Piaf karaoke. Nor should we worry when other prominent Russian writers use musical accompaniment (usually drums!) to liven up their showbiz-like appearances. And the last thing to startle us should be the Croatian writer V. R. practicing cosplay on television, appearing dressed up as a nun, a “woman in mourning,” or a “beaten woman,” visually underscoring whatever she has written or said.

Within the general karaoke culture, post-communist culture also wants the right to a voice. And that’s why we really shouldn’t be surprised that — just like Valentina — the aforementioned L. P. wanted to finally have her time under the bright lights, a right which, hand on heart, she truly deserves. The old dame woke from a dream, and having cottoned on that times have changed, she chose well: she went for a — hmm—“unique” karaoke gesture.

[1]The song isn’t actually a Mariah Carey song. It was written by Pete Ham and Tom Evans of the British band Badfinger, and first made famous by Harry Nilsson in 1972.

[2]Listening to a recording of the song Valentina noted down what she thought were the words. Here’s how her version of the chorus went:

Ken lee (I can’t live);

Tulibu dibu douchoo (If living is without you)

Ken Lee (I can’t live);

Ken Lee meju more (I can’t give anymore).

[3] Translator’s Note: In Croatian and related languages “drven” is the adjective for “wood,” and coupled with “grad,” which means town or city in many Slavic languages, “Drvengrad” roughly translates as “wooden town.” Kustendorf, on the other hand, pairs the (possesive) first syllable of Kusturica’s name with the German “dorf,” meaning “village.”

6. THE FANTASTIC FEELING OF OVERCOMING EMPTINESS

Gobelins

I remember my distant relative Žana as a short delicate girl with a nacreous complexion and big grey-green eyes. I remember how she would lower her head to avoid direct eye contact with the person she was speaking to. Her body movements gave her away as a person who sought out the shadows in the hope of making herself invisible. If it hadn’t been for her smile, one would have said she was a beauty. But when she smiled her mouth would contort into an awkward toothy grimace, more the imitation of a smile than an actual smile.

I met Žana again after about thirty years. She had graduated as an engineer and gotten married. She and her husband weren’t able to have children, so they had adopted a boy. At the time I met him he must have been about thirteen. Žana had packed on the pounds since I last saw her. She looked like a monk seal. But the whiteness and glow of her complexion were unchanged. I noticed that she no longer lowered her gaze, but bored it right into you like a drawing pin. At first her husband seemed like a nice guy, but his voice made me uneasy, soft and arrogant when speaking to his wife and son, condescending when speaking to me.

Žana never worked in the profession for which she trained; the home was obviously her kingdom. The dining room table was heaving with food. The way she had set out the dishes, different cheeses, and ham decorated with vegetables, was sadly magnificent. She is our artist, said her husband. Mom is a real artist, the boy repeated after his father.

Before we sat down at the table, Žana gave me a tour of the house. Apart from the bathroom and kitchen, every room in the house was covered, almost wall-to-wall, in Wiehler Gobelin tapestries.[1] The entire catalogue was there: the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, Our Lady of Kazan, Constable’s landscapes, works by Francois Boucher, Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and Thomas Lawrence’s Pinkie, roses, autumnal landscapes, winter landscapes, motifs of German cities, birds, children with goats, children with cats. .

“How many years did it take you to embroider all these?”

“It’s not hard once you get going. .” she replied noncommittally.

My visit was briefer than that demanded by courtesy. All of a sudden I had an attack of tachycardia and a dizzy spell. I don’t know why, but it seemed that a terrifying emptiness gaped from every corner of the house. My host, Žana’s husband, suggested that he drop me back to my hotel, an offer I accepted with relief.

Armed with needle and thread, Žana has fought her own battle down through the years: what kind of battle, I can’t say. Whether those millions of stitches have meant victory or defeat. . I don’t know that either, but the bitterness that used to gather in her lips, the awkward toothy grimace where a smile should have been, has disappeared. The truth is, the bitterness has been replaced by a doll-like stare, and it’s enough to make you shiver.

Later I checked out the whole Gobelin thing on a Croatian “recreational forum for creative people.”[2] Half-heartedly I read the advice given to a woman who had decided to embroider a picture of her daughter based on a photograph, but hadn’t been able to find a suitable fabric and was thinking about using mosquito netting. Forum users suggested the woman buy the fabric in Italy, or at the Unitas shop in Croatia. Some suggested she go to Slovenia, and someone else suggested Zweigart’s Hardanger 100. Others warned that the Unitas cotton wouldn’t capture the natural nuances of the face, and that Anchor or DMC would be better. Someone else suggested Cross Stitch Professional 2003 as the best computer program for printing her daughter’s photo on the fabric, because it was used by the Austrian artist Ellen Maurer-Stroh, a noted reproducer of Berlin School works. The “thread” was joined by a Montenegrin who had been doing cross-stitch all his life, because he loved the fantastic feeling of seeing a picture coming to life before my eyes, the feeling of creating something. The Montenegrin explained a heavy stitch known as the “Gobelin stitch”: You do two diagonal stitches across two counts until you get a life-size image, just like the old master painted it, but the motifs look a bit rough, like when RTCG[3] has problems broadcasting and those big squares show up on the screen, that’s what a Gobelin stitch picture looks like when you get a bit closer.

Cross-stitch is a mute song, a kind of “empty orchestra” or karaoke. (In the Balkans there is also a mute kolo or ring dance, which is danced in silence, unaccompanied by music.) The anonymous cross-stitcher who completes a pattern with needle and thread is filled with the “fantastic feeling of seeing a picture born before one’s eyes, of creating something,” or simply, the fantastic feeling of having overcome the emptiness.

Jelena Radić doesn’t go in for classic works of art; she uses Gobelin techniques to copy motifs from hardcore pornography. Embroidered using traditional women’s needlework and mounted in kitschy frames, hardcore pornography is an unusual thing. Like some kind of anti-Wiehler, Radić also designs and sells Gobelin patterns. Žana, were she so inclined, could easily do a Gobelin picture with a fellatio motif. Jelena Radić is a professional artist and member of the Dez org collective. The collective promotes open source software and works for the popularization and democratization of art, the goal being that “all people, irrespective of financial status, religious, ethnic, or other designations, have the opportunity to display their creativity.” As stated in one of the collective’s manifesto type documents, “In ever increasing numbers people from different walks of life, who have nothing to do with the IT-world, are taking advantage of the freedom that reigns in the computer world. More and more people are making their books, music, and images available in open license and free formats. Liberation from the repressive mechanisms of the corporate world is an inevitable phenomenon, which has its origins in the IT-world and has as its goal the creation of a free society in which the individual will take center stage.”[4]

Edek

At the time when my own emigrant experience was still raw, and meeting my countrymen was like looking in a mirror, I had a chance encounter with a woman from Zagreb. The woman had married a Zagreb somebody (I should have known who he was, but I didn’t), divorced, and, having followed the children abroad, had ended up stuck in Los Angeles, not really wanting to be there, but with little resolve to pack up and try her luck elsewhere. In the evenings she worked at a restaurant that was owned by one of our countrymen (who apparently I also should have known, but didn’t) as an administrator or something to that effect. She shortened the daylight hours by painting. In a neat and tidy corner of her neat and tidy apartment sat an easel-mounted canvas and a box of paints.

“It reminds me of someone. .” I said uncertainly, pointing at the canvas.

“It’s our Edek. .” said the woman, opening a coffee table book featuring the work of another of our countrymen. She pointed to the painting she had just started copying. The woman was copying the work of the most significant Croatian abstractionist, Edek, two of whose signed prints hung on the wall.

My first thought was that this woman’s life must be catastrophically empty. And then a sadness crept up on me, not because of the woman, but because of the catastrophically dull automatism of my own reaction. What gave me the right to judge the richness or emptiness of someone else’s life?! Was my own life that much richer just because I didn’t copy other people’s pictures?

“I adore our Edek. .” said the woman somewhat melodramatically, putting the accent on the wrong syllable, a Zagreb girl born and bred. And it was only then that I understood the real reason for my irritation. It was Edek. Had she been copying someone else, I’d have had greater sympathy for her depressing hobby. But Edek, whether he liked or not, had become a poster boy for Zagreb’s chattering classes. Just as every Croatian redneck proudly packs his little ethnic bundle with a Croatian flag, a Dinamo or Hajduk t-shirt, a picture of the Virgin Mary, and a prosciutto ham or paprika-flavoured salami, this woman had packed hers with the requisites of Zagreb bourgeois life. These requisites (and I’m guessing now) included the repertoire of the Croatian National Theatre, a concert at the Vatroslav Lisinski Theatre, buying a hat at Kobali’s, haircuts at Kincl’s, shopping in Graz or Vienna, skiing on Mt. Pohorje. And Edek.

I remembered the woman many years later. At Zagreb’s Mirogoj cemetery I passed the gigantic headstone Edek had built in his own honor. Bordered with white ceramic tiles with colorful abstract motifs, the monument looked like a wall that been lifted out of a trendy wellness center and placed on the grave. It was an exemplar of artistic karaoke. The artist had copied himself.

Darger

The American and international cultural public only discovered Henry Darger posthumously. In his lifetime no one suspected that the “oddball” (he is thought to have been autistic), the collector of “trash,” the recluse who talked to himself, was actually an artist and autodidact, the meticulous creator of an autonomous world. Darger became a sensation in the art world when the American Folk Art Museum in New York opened the Henry Darger Study Center in 2001. In 2008 the Chicago room he rented from Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, where he spent his solitary years, was re-created as a permanent exhibition at The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago. Over the past ten years Darger has inspired a radio drama, a play, a multimedia production, a number of songs, and a poem. In 2004 Jessica Yu released the Darger documentary In the Realms of the Unreal. I saw Darger’s New York exhibition in 2002. My attendance isn’t worth noting. In an episode entitled “Lisa the Drama Queen,” Lisa Simpson also visited the exhibition.

The results of Darger’s decades of oddball “activity” have been neatly tucked in the niche marked “Outsider Art.” Darger didn’t know how to draw, he was, as Michael Thevoz put it, “a thief of images,”[5] stealing from children’s coloring and picture books, newspapers, advertisements, comics, caricatures, photographs, stamps, whatever he could lay his hands on. From this “trash” he selected his “little pictures,” tracing them in pencil and coloring them in watercolors. Certain images (stamps, for example) he would have photographically enlarged.

Darger’s personal world is shaped by a number of factors, including the trauma of growing up in an orphanage (which he later fled), a childlike interest in the American Civil War (which they say he inherited from his father), Catholicism, mental illness, solitude, poverty, repressed sexuality, monomania, and a childlike fear of adults.

He would often glue his drawing paper into a long roll, painting it on both sides. Most of Darger’s pictures feature little girls, nymphettes, the prototypes for which he copied from newspaper advertisements and children’s fashion magazines. The soldiers in his pictures (largely inspired by American Civil War comics) represent the world of evil grown-ups. His nymphettes are located in rich phantasmagorical landscapes, in spaces that are part paradise and part war-zone.

Darger’s sprawling composition In the Realms of the Unreal tells the story of the seven Vivian girls and their struggle against the evil Glandelinians who keep children as slaves. The Vivian girls free the children and defeat the evil Glandelinians. The child-slaves are naked and, were it not for their penises, would also appear as young girls. Nakedness points to innocence and sacrifice, with crucified children frequent motifs. The Blengins are giant mythical beings — naked young girls again, with penises. Their heads bear heavy rams’ horns, their backs enormous wings and dragons’ tails.

Darger’s compositions provoke a conflicted feeling, somewhere between attraction and rejection, wonderment and unease. His visual world overflows with details, bodies, faces, and colors. His images of young girls are identical, one little clone next to another. It seems that Darger crammed his pictures with everything he saw, and everything he saw he “stole” from the surrounding “cardboard” everyday. His world is one in which giant frogs and horsemen, flying childlike beings, giant ducks, flowers of different colors and types, distorted Mickey Mouse heads, and sunflowers that dwarf clouds all simultaneously co-exist. A child’s utopia and a kingdom of evil.

Identifying the original sources for the details copied in Darger’s pictures is a treat for those familiar with the American everyday. The fantastic anthropomorphic beings with butterfly wings, for example, are stolen from advertisements for “Karo” syrup. “Darger steals his images, lifts them from conventional narratives, common everyday journals, and sentimental stories. He takes them out of context, disorients them, and re-enchants them. Indeed, he uses these images to reconstruct another narrative ensemble, but in the process, the images do not reject their origin but persist like foreign bodies, bodies with disquieting strangeness. . Thus, Darger does not control anything: he is not the master of painting, nor is he even the master’s assistant. . he is a sorcerer’s apprentice.”[6]

Darger was proclaimed a great artist when his world, finally in tune with the Zeitgeist, could be understood as art. There is an inadvertent correspondence between Darger’s world and contemporary cultural practice. His way of thinking can be compared to that of a child who spends day and night on the Internet. Cut and paste is Darger’s primary artistic technique, and today, with Photoshop and programs such as Illustrator and Brushes, he would get the job done much quicker. Teenagers use different computer programs in this same way, the practice of vidding, making video clips and posting them on YouTube, is a good example. Teenagers trawl the alluring chaos of popular culture, selecting, combining, parodying, ridiculing, retouching, and beautifying, turning hierarchical relationships on their heads, making the incompatible compatible.

The second respect in which Darger’s art corresponds with contemporary cultural practice is that his imagination, fired by popular culture, is perfectly in tune with the contemporary hunger for parallel fantasy worlds. In the world of Harry Potter children also create their own communities, fly, inhabit magical worlds, struggle against the forces of evil (most frequently embodied by adults), perform miracles, befriend mythical beings, and take control. In all of this the borders between worlds are soft. Darger’s visual poetics likewise overlap with the aesthetics of popular mass media products, from comics to computer games. In this respect his poetics can be understood as a harbinger of manga and anime aesthetics.

Although canonized, Darger remains within the niche of outsider art. At least statistically, however, contemporary art practice is in the hands of amateurs, outsiders, autodidacts, the intuitive and anonymous, individual and collective authors.[7] Although “canonized outsider art” sounds paradoxical, it is a part of the cultural practice of our time.[8] At least for a moment, one can also put things the other way around. Using the iPhone Brushes program, David Hockney recently began sending his friends little sketches instead of SMS messages. On a symbolic level, the artist’s self-amusement can be interpreted as a voluntary self-dethroning, an abdication of authorship and descent into the vast ocean of anonymous digital gestures. The artist no longer exists — there are only gestures that others can, but by no means must, declare as art. Symbolically becoming one with his predecessor, the anonymous author of prehistoric cave drawings, Hockney himself declared: “Him scratching away on his cave wall, me dragging my thumb over this iPhone’s screen. All part of the same passion.”[9]

[1]Translator’s Note: In 1893 Jakob Wiehler founded a company selling Gobelin embroidery patterns and yarns via catalog. Although no longer owned by the Wiehler family, the company that bears their name continues to flourish in Germany and many parts of Eastern Europe, not least Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Bulgaria.

[2]www.stvaram.com

[3]Translator’s Note: RTCG refers to the Montenegrin state broadcaster, Radio Televizija Crna Gora. Crna Gora literally means “Black Mountain”—or Montenegro.

[4]www.draganrajsic.org/10.html

[5]Michel Thevoz, “The Strange Hell of Beauty,” in Darger, The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum 2001.

[6]Ibid.

[7]Responding to a critic who had dared suggest that contemporary visual art was illiterate, Tracy Emin — an established and canonized contemporary artist — replied, “So what if I’m illiterate! I still have the right to a voice!” Although she herself belongs to the art world’s elite, Tracy Emin spat out a sentence that sounds like the revolutionary slogan of a new artistic epoch.

[8]The canonization of outsider art today occurs within traditional institutions such as museums (the Museum of Everything recently opened in London, providing a roof for outsider artists), but also in non-traditional spaces such as fandoms, blogs, virtual communities, and associations. Groups brought together out of a shared interest in popular culture are, however, often anything but “popular.” A member of the virtual union of World of Warcraft gamers claims that joining the union is “as tough as getting into Harvard.”

[9]Lawrence Weschler, “David Hockney’s iPhone Passion,” The New York Review of Books, October 22–November 4, 2009.

7. KARAOKE WRITING

Masters and Amateurs

Every time I come across a story on contemporary artists whose work uses anonymous human bodies I think of communist “bodygrams,” the stadium crowds whose collected bodies would form and “write” messages of love and devotion to their leaders. Interestingly, for western observers these “bodygrams,” communist body art, were, more than anything else, both crown proof of totalitarianism and first-class material for mockery. It’s also interesting that for the democratically orientated citizens of these communist countries, “bodygrams” were, more than anything else, the triggers of frustration, rage, and shame at living in such absurd regimes.

In August of 2009 Nic Green brought her “theatrical exploration of modern feminism” to the Edinburgh stage, inviting ordinary, anonymous women, all volunteers, to appear naked. “Such a life-affirming thing to do” is how one of the women described the experience. At this time, Anthony Gormley was staging his “living sculptures” project One and Other, in which 2,400 volunteers each spent an hour alone on a plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. Having gotten it into his head that a sculpture had to be naked, Simon, a fifty-year-old, had to be removed by organizers. Later he explained that the event had been a turning point in his life. (“This event will serve to symbolize the beginning of a new age for me — I always wanted to be a sculpture”). Simon is a wannabe, a karaoke-man, and Gormley’s project gave him the chance to “sing his song,” experience a moment of internal emancipation, and make a dream come true.

Parallel to the Yugoslav communist culture of “bodygrams,” Yugoslav actress and poet Katalin Ladik offered sophisticated examinations of the visual, phonetic, and gestural possibilities of poetry, appearing either naked or semi-naked. She never encountered censorship. Unfortunately, like many other conceptualist artists (among them body artists), she is today half-forgotten. Today, “translation” is required in order for the post-Yugoslav generations (young Croats, Serbs, and others whose parents were Yugoslavs) to understand that in the “communist darkness” a whole set of alternative practices also existed. Marina Abramović, then a Yugoslav, carved a star into her naked stomach with a razor. In the western art market, and in the context of body art at the time, the star was seen as a communist star, which it probably was. Abramović’s sadomasochistic performance had a context, a reason and political charge for which no “translation” was necessary. Everyone understood what was going on.

Cultural dynamics unfold and develop in the paradoxes between the expected and unexpected, the translatable and untranslatable, the “read” and “unread,” in the misunderstandings between sender and addressee, and in the errors of “translation” into a new language and new context. This was also true of Yugoslav cultural dynamics in the time of “Titoism.” With the affirmation of “workers, peasants and the honest intelligentsia,” a place within these dynamics was also found for amateur literature. The world of “outsiders”—amateur poets, bearers of oral traditions, gusle players, “living newspapers” (reciters of political events in traditional decasyllables), cranks, literati, epitaphists, the lot — was given wings. It was, however, largely thanks to established writers and filmmakers such as Želimir Žilnik, Dušan Makavejev, and Slobodan ijan that this “underground” amateur literary activity was given its due. Exemplary in this regard is Moma Dimić’s documentary novel The Backwoods Citizen ( umski građanin) about Radoš Terzić, an eccentric, a Marxist, an amateur poet, and the author of the poem “How I Am Systematically Destroyed by Idiots” (“Kako sam sistematski uništen od idiota”). Terzić later sued his “portrayer,” the court proceedings providing light relief for many. Together with Dimić, in 1983 Slobodan ijan made a film about Terzić, taking his amateur poem as the movie’s title.

Wanting in on the joke, the media would from time to time deliberately hype an amateur writer. As an exemplar of catastrophically poor literature, Miloš Jovančević’s slim volume The Male Virgin (Nevini muškarac) briefly enjoyed cult-status among the culturati. Today it seems an early forerunner of “bizarro fiction.” A number of amateur efforts such as the lathe operator Stanoje Ćebić’s Why I Became An Ox (Zašto sam postao Vo) achieved well-deserved recognition, their rough and ready vernaculars rattling the terminally moribund sinecures of “established” literature.

The writer Milovan Danojlić conscientiously read his way through an enormous pile of amateur literary production, the end result of which was the novel How Dobrislav Ran across Yugoslavia (Kako je Dobrislav protrčao kroz Jugoslaviju, 1977), a highlight of its time and paean to the glory of amateur literature. Danojlić considers the efforts of his hero, an amateur poet, with respect, empathy, and tenderness, relativizing the borders and hierarchies established between amateurs, outsiders, and losers on the one hand, and the established artist on the other. At the same time, Danojlić’s book was also a “textbook,” showing us that there is no difference in the mechanism that moves the hand to pick up a pen — the differences lie in the execution, in the work itself.

Theoreticians of the day took an interest in this colorful anonymous “literary” production, the ethnologist Ivan Čolović’s monumental study, Wild Literature (Divlja književnost, 1985), examined everything from newspaper obituaries and headstone epigraphs to retro-modern folk songs and urban football legends.

It is unfortunate that today, thirty years later, Danojlić is a half-forgotten author, and that his novel, together with the time and context in which it was written, is completely forgotten. Criticism has changed. Today no one dares set out the differences between master and amateur, between good and bad literature. Publishers don’t want to get involved; they are almost guaranteed to lose money on a good writer, and make money on a bad one. Critics hold their fire, scared of being accused of elitism. Critics have had the rug pulled out from under them in any case. No longer bound by ethics or competence, they don’t even know what they’re supposed to talk about anymore. University literature departments don’t set out the differences — literature has turned into cultural studies in any case. Literary theorists have little to say on the subject — literary theory is on its deathbed, and the offshoot that tried to establish “aesthetic” values long in the grave. Critics writing for daily newspapers don’t set out the differences — they’re poorly paid, and literature doesn’t get much column space in newspapers full-stop. Literary magazines are so few as to be of no use, and when and where they do exist, they are so expensive that bookshops don’t want to stock them. Tracy Emin’s bratty retort—What if I am illiterate? I still have the right to a voice! — is the revolutionary slogan of a new literary age. The only thing that reminds us that literature was once a complex system with in-built institutions — of appraisal, classification, and hierarchy, a system that incorporated literary history, literary theory, literary criticism, schools of literary thought, literary genres, genders, and epochs — are the blurbs that try and place works of contemporary literature alongside the greats of the canon. Vladimir Nabokov is the most blurbable of names. But if so many contemporary books and their authors are Nabokov-like, it just means that literature has become karaoke-like.

Fan fiction

I remember a childhood ditty from the region where I grew up. I think it’s a folk song, and quite by chance I recently discovered that a Croatian pop group had done a successful remake. The verses of the song go like this:

On a hill sat a little house

A house with two windows

Where sat a pretty maiden

Pretty as a spring rose

Fair maiden, what are you doing

On this a glorious night?

Oh star so bright, my sweetheart

He said he’d come tonight

Three nights have passed

Alone I’ve been waiting here

And many more will come to pass

And many more a tear

My sweetheart is kissing another

Far behind he has left me

But curse him I shan’t

Because who I loved was he

We sang the song with a wee addition, inserting the words “in her undies” and “with no undies” in the original verses. Here’s how it went:

On a hill sat a little house (in her undies)

A house with two windows (with no undies)

Where sat a pretty maiden (with no undies)

Pretty as a spring rose (in her undies)

My young friends and I were delighted with our innocent intervention. Our delight was in vulgarizing the original text (we’d done something rude), in destroying the idyllic setting in which a “fair maiden” spoke with a star and waited for her sweetheart. It was in the liberty of changing the meaning of the song, in “taking its undies off.” We were children and had no idea that our little gesture was fairly common in oral literary practice. Folk literature, myths, legends, fairytales, stories, fables, songs, puzzles, and nursery rhymes were all created in the telling and retelling, in the interaction between an original text, its narrator, and his or her listeners. In the retelling narrators either deliberately or accidentally modified the original narrative, something every parent telling his or her child the story of Little Red Riding Hood for the thousandth time well knows.

Fan fiction (fanfiction, fanfic, FF, or fic) is a term used for a new writing practice that has developed together with the Internet. Anonymous fans, their real identities hidden behind pseudonyms, intervene in an original source text, which is simply referred to as canon. These source texts are mainly gleaned from “trivial literature” (vampire and fantasy novels, gothic fiction, etc.), comics, graphic novels, and popular TV series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena Warrior Princess, and The X-Files. Ficers, writers of fan fiction, remain within the closed virtual communities of their fandoms, their “interventions” intended exclusively for other fans. The key assumption is that everyone in the fandom is familiar with the canon. When J. K. Rowling finished her seven-novel Harry Potter cycle, Harry took on a new life in fan fiction. Ficers continue to dream up new adventures for her hero and intervene in his old ones. This sort of thing is hardly new. Throughout the centuries anonymous authors have served up all kinds of reworked stories to hungry readerships, from unauthorized installments of Don Quixote, tales about King Arthur and his knights, and new stories from A Thousand and One Nights, to re-workings and parodies of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and the Sherlock Holmes stories. As a modern phenomenon, fan fiction is attributed to Star Trek fanzines, one of which—Spockanalia—is thought to contain the first examples of fan fiction.

Slash fiction is a genre of fan fiction in which fans write about the sexual preferences of fictional heroes from the world of popular culture. Fans get off on projecting, intimating, suggesting, and constructing lesbian and homosexual relationships between various characters. Most slash fiction writers (slashers) are said to be heterosexual women. Slashy is fandom jargon for homoerotic, and slashy moments are those in the canonical source text that a slasher implies are homoerotic. “Femslash,” also known as saffic (from sapphic) centers on female characters. Of course computer programs such as Photoshop have seen amateur artists let loose, doctoring downloaded photos to create sexual images of their idols. For the moment these idols tend to be the actors and actresses who play their favorite TV and film heros/heroines, but it appears almost any celebrity will do.

Slash fiction even has its own sub-genre known as real person slash (RPS for short), in which fans invent biographical details and fabricate stories about real people (musicians, actors, pop stars, TV personalities, famous sportsmen and women). RPS has a number of sub-genres, among them, popslash, musicfic, and actorfic. Although there are almost no limits on what can be invented, there is an unwritten rule that suicide, murder, and rape are all off limits.

RPS is an Internet variant of a folkloric form mankind has practiced since the beginning of time — gossiping or spreading rumors. The real people on whom RPS is based don’t protest too much. It’s never been clever to cut off the branch on which you’re sitting, and gossip, of whatever nature, is the most effective form of publicity. Also interesting to note is that slash fiction has attracted a lot of attention from academics who are interested in feminist, gay, and queer studies.

The most entertaining part of the fanfic phenomenon is the new coinages, which supports the theory that fans are more interested in communication and interaction with other fans than the actual subject matter. Fanon is a story or situation that deviates from the canon. Fluff is prose to warm the heart, while Kleenex warning is an early signal that things are soon going to get sad. Gen (general fiction) denotes the absence of sexual content, although this doesn’t exclude the protagonists getting together or pairing. A hot bunny is a story idea, and a round robin a story with which the author seeks help from other fans. WAFF stands for warm and fluffing feelings (a feel-good story), Het denotes a heterosexual relationship, and AU (alternative universe) stories modify a particular aspect of the canon. Denial fic is a good example of AU. Ficers intervene in the canon to either prevent a tragedy, or simply “put things right” afterwards.

A crossover work appeals to two or more fandoms, usually those that belong to the same literary “class.” PWP stands for porn without plot. In bodyswap and genderswap protagonists temporarily enter someone else’s body or change gender. Darkfic deals with death, torture, and molestation. A Mary Sue is a female character that’s eager to please in every respect, the male equivalent a Gary Stu. For ficers, James Bond is a Gary Stu.

Fans have developed their “activity” with the help of the powerful and multi-faceted mass media industry. Fan fiction sites house archives with millions of “interventions.” Whether short stories or novels, the texts are hard to follow for fandom outsiders. I had a go at a hundred or so pages of WhiteMidnightKitsune’s “adaption” of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and although it’s a book I adore, I couldn’t make head or tail of the adaption. The publishing industry has swung into action in attempts to satisfy the enormous interventionist appetites of the potential reading masses, and the latest fashion — the production of “quirk books”—is in full bloom. The publisher Quirk Classics features novels such as Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Little Vampire Women, Jane Slayre, and Android Karenina, the authors of which use “mash-up” techniques, inserting elements of popular culture (zombies, vampires, parallel worlds, science fiction, etc.) into classic canonical works. The spawn of such “mash-ups” also include Vampire Darcy’s Desire, Mansfield Park and Mummies, Emma and the Werewolves, Alice in Zombieland, and Romeo and Juliet and Zombies. Their authors call them “adaptions,” although the term is rather meaningless, as Internet forums confirm that readers haven’t read the original — in the best-case scenario they’ve seen the film. Such a bizarre literary “mash-up” ensures it’s own autonomy, and its readers treat it as an autonomous work: they haven’t read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, they haven’t seen the film adaption, and the world of androids — which they know inside out — is, to their delight, given a new lease of life by the inclusion of “bizarre” details such as the names Karenina and Vronsky, not to mention “exotic” geographical and historical settings.[1]

Fearing its own disappearance, “high literature” has today hooked its oxygen mask to the face of “trivial literature” and its derivatives (fan fiction being one of them), in the hope it might provide the breath of life. However much people have tried to explain the poetics of today’s “rock star” writers and declare them “innovative,” “experimental,” or “Nabokov-like,” the critical unanimity points to the very opposite: that the “literary novel” is returning to its roots, back to the place from where “popular literature” never budged. Aimed at a wide audience, the novel was originally considered a lower literary species. Any novelty in the contemporary novel lies in its regression, in the primitivization of narrative structure, characterization, and description — all in all, in its de-modernization (if we agree that the novel had its peak in the epoch of modernism). On the international market, geography is the only thing that gives the contemporary novel the illusion of dynamism, vitality, and richness. First a novel from Turkey turns up, then one from Pakistan, then France has a turn, after that Japan. .

The borders between “high” and “low” literary production are either non-existent or extremely porous. Author, Work, and Reader are the three elements that create a literary work. Author and Work have had their time, and now it’s the Reader’s turn. Thanks to the Internet today’s reader is passive no more. He reads and writes blogs, joins fandoms, contributes to Internet forums, recommends books, exchanges tips, issues challenges, has the chance to follow the author, intervene in his work, correct him, plagiarize him, ridicule him, “delete” him, or praise him to the high heavens. Novelists no longer write for their readers, they write for their fans.[2]

In this respect the institution of the author has been permanently displaced from its traditional position and is today located at two diametrically opposite poles. Writers are either totally marginalized, or (if one belongs to the privileged few) institutionalized like rock stars. The Internet and the new communicative ecstasy have given birth to the collective author, his work “collaborative fiction.” With audacious ambition, and trying to piggyback on the success of Wikipedia, in 2007 Penguin Books initiated the wiki-novel project A Million Penguins. The project quickly tanked because the collective authorship couldn’t agree on a thing. In spite of this failure, the specter of the collective novel, a communist idea, still haunts the Internet. The site The Autobiography of Pain invites the people of the world to help write “a community driven novel.” The project initiators assure the artistically disenfranchised masses that The Autobiography of Pain project “belongs to everyone!” Although anyone can change whatever he or she wants, it hasn’t yet occurred to someone to change the novel’s title.

Keitai Shosetsu and Other Stuff

In recent years the cell-phone-novel (keitai shosetsu in Japanese) has rocked the powerful Japanese multimedia industry.[3] The cell-phone-novel is a new genre that has grown out of the mass usage of mobile phones, the Japanese site Maho-i-land (Magic Island), the largest of its kind, contains more than a million titles. Access to the site is free, and visitor hits run into the billions; anyone who owns a mobile phone is both potential reader and potential writer. Cell-phone-novels are amateur and unfiltered, the language simplified, the plot primitive, the forms traditional. The heroine is usually a girl from the provinces who endures an ordeal of one kind or another (she is raped, gets pregnant, her boyfriend leaves her, and so forth). The novels are written by barely educated high school dropouts, most of them girls, who hide behind fabricated identities and sign their work with short pseudonyms such as Mone (who apparently took her name “from some French painter”), Mei, Mika, and Kika. Their novels sell in print-runs of two or three million. In 2007 four of the top five books on the Japanese bestseller list were ketai shosetsu.

The father of the cell-phone-novel is Yoshi, who in the year 2000 began posting installments of his novel Deep Love on the web. Deep Love is about high school girls prostituting themselves to older men in exchange for designer clothes. It was soon picked up by the publishing industry, turned into manga, and adapted for film and television. The novel has sold almost three million copies.

Experts maintain that in Japan, where young people are obsessed with Internet games, the sale of two-and-a-half million books represents a huge cultural shift in the right direction. They say it’s important that young people do any kind of reading or writing. Mone, the young authoress, has no literary pretensions, but defends the cell-phone-novel phenomenon, claiming: “They say that we’re immature and incapable of writing a literate sentence. But I would say, so what? The fact that we’re producing at all is important.”

Those who work in the multimedia industry declare that it’s important for young Japanese to feel integrated in their community, to feel they belong to a culture and “to have their voice.” Sociologists and education professionals agree. The multimedia industry is of course most interested in a positive assessment of the keitai shosetsu phenomenon, because it makes them billions. A collective author or authorship is a sales guarantee. Millions of readers participate in the novel’s creation, cheering the young authoress on, and then they buy the book, feeling themselves to be, in some way, co-authors.

Attributed to Murasaki Shikibu, “The Tale of Genji” dates from the eleventh century and is considered a classic of Japanese literature. Some in the literature business claim that cell-phone-novels are simply modern variants of this traditional chronicle of court life, which, as they would have it, is little more than a gossip-soaked tome. Others, such as Nobel Laureate Kenzaburō Ōe, place great literary significance on the work. Whatever the case, “The Tale of Genji” is required reading in Japanese schools.

Kiki, a new cell-phone-novel writing star, completed high school, but flunked Japanese. She wrote her novel because she had just gone through “a difficult thing” and writing was a chance “to get it off my chest.” The novel is about a young girl called Aki who falls in love with a guy called Tomo and gets pregnant. Aki loses the baby and Tomo leaves her, but the novel has a happy ending. Asked whether she had ever read “The Tale of Genji,” Kiki replied that the novel’s language was complicated and that it had too many characters, but that she remembered another old book she had read a few years ago, and that it was really great because it was “very easy to read, very contemporary, very close to my life.” The book was called Deep Love.

The cell-phone-novel trend is in steady decline in Japan (some think it will disappear the same way it appeared), but it is slowly making inroads in America. As in Japan, authors tend to be young, uneducated, and from the lower social strata. Julian Knighten, a twenty-two-year-old from Texas, works three jobs and writes cell-phone-novels in the evenings when he goes to bed. Julian likes the contact with his readers, who give him advice and encourage him to write, because only writing, “gives me the chance to escape reality.”

It is interesting to note that in the cell-phone-novel phenomenon, as in all other karaoke-activities, the same simple rhetoric is repeated over and over: the right to a voice (the right to “get things off one’s chest”), the defence of amateurism (illiteracy, ignorance) in the name of having the right to a voice (to “get things off one’s chest”), or in the name of escaping reality.

And let’s not forget Twitter here, which in the space of a few months had seventeen million registered users. Twitter is used for social networking and a quick “getting things off one’s chest.” Two writers have already announced plans to write Twitter novels.

In the meantime Penguin has published Twitterature,[4] a collection of sham citations ostensibly excerpted from the most famous works of world literature and narrated using the abbreviated acronynm-laced language of Twitter users. “Twitterature provides everything you need to master the literature of the civilized world, while relieving you of the burdensome task of reading it.” The collections’s authors, a pair of nineteen-year-olds, employ revolutionary rhetoric, because “like any good revolution, this one started in a college dormitory.”

There’s nothing wrong with a reappraisal or rethinking of the canon, quite to the contrary. In our college days my generation poked fun at the classics of our national literature, the dull and decrepit texts of required reading lists. Instead of reading the poems of our literary lions, we’d sing them in the vulgar style of retro-modern folk-pop songs, thus probing just how much of an “aesthetic” beating the canon could take. The most alluring literary discovery of my time was the Russian writer Daniil Kharms and his literary vignettes (not to mention his longer pieces such as the novella The Old Woman), in which the Russian absurdist delighted in dethroning the classics of Russian literature.

Literary “vandalism” is, therefore, nothing new. The current cultural climate and the new technology of twitter, however, make for a crucial difference. The literary canonization of the pair of nineteen-year-old literary “vandals” occurred at lightning speed (Kharms needed a good seventy years for his entire body of work to emerge from anonymity), their work bound in a Penguin Classics edition. What’s more, the pair’s humorless and dull wee book was received with praise ranging from warm to delirious (while poor old Kharms died in a Soviet prison, not necessarily because of his literary vignettes of course). As far as technology goes, a millions-strong social network gave the novices and “twitterature” their breakthrough. Although the literary “subversion” of the two young authors is little more than a shrewd and fleeting financial scam, the cultural market has set to work on transforming a lucrative joke into a revolutionary trend, and as such, “twitterature” is already embedded within the broader neologism of “amplified literature.” The poorly-defined term also luxuriates in ecstatic self-satisfying revolutionary rhetoric. Here’s how a successful “transmedia” European festival announced the content of its program:

The complexity of the real continues to amplify and literature continues to be the only discourse that does not try to shape the world with ideological clichés, disciplinary limits or absolute norms. The beginning of the second decade of the 21st century reveals a fascinating scenario. The hegemony of the

printed word

is starting to lose ground to make way for other older and brand new words. We are witnessing the rebirth of a

plural orality

and, at the same time, the seismic eruption of the

electronic word

is altering the way we create, conceive, publish and distribute literature. [The festival] is a sensor of these new cartographies generated by the revision of the western cannon, the transformation of genres and formats, the assault on the categories of fiction, the emergence of transmedia narratives, the diversification of reading devices, the appearance of new species of readers and writers, group authorship that is opened up by means of social networks and the explosion of literary creativity that is taking place inside and outside Internet. Faced with all the crises we are proposing a solar festival with a highly intense program. A claim for amplified literature in permanent interaction with the arts and the sciences, in an open, mixed and changing world. Let’s celebrate the unstoppable journey: the adventure of knowledge, the excitement and the surprise of creating in an open, mixed and changing world.

Chris Tolworthy doesn’t defend amateurism in the name of the right to one’s voice, or in the name of flight from reality. Chris’s campaign affirms something completely different. Chris Tolworthy is fighting for “better stories,” for the “accessibility of the classics,” for “authenticity,” against “greed,” for “deeper ideas,” for “diversity,” for “creativity,” for “ending global poverty,” and all this by way of computer games based on literary classics. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is already on the market and Dante’s The Divine Comedy is in the works. You can watch the trailer on YouTube. First impressions suggest that it’s actually a fantasy game about transformers. Les Misérables seems more sophisticated and features a certain Peri Laris, a kind of Tinkerbell and Wellek-Warren adapted for a one-year-old baby. Chris Tolworthy has plans to expand production and adapt Shakespeare’s complete works, Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, Einstein’s theory of relativity, The Count of Monte Cristo, The World of Miracles, and many others. Worried that his current and future products might be declared trivial, in a section of his webpage entitled “Deeper Themes” Tolworthy offers the following:

Every story covers a major theme. It might not be obvious — you can ignore it if you like. But if you want to dig deeper there are people in the story who love to talk about deep topics and answer questions. They show how the ideas behind the stories all fit together.

Les Misérables: the theme is

justice

.

The Divine Comedy: the theme is

faith

.

The Nature of the Universe: the theme is the nature of

reality

.

Julius Caesar: the theme is

government

.

And so on. Don’t worry if this sounds boring, you can ignore those parts. But if you hunger for a story with a little more substance, a little more ambition, this game will deliver.

The last time I stumbled across this kind of language, and this kind of “thinking about literature,” was about thirty years ago when I bought a slim volume entitled How to Become a Writer at a local bookstore. It was written by Petar Mitić, an amateur, a wannabe, a literary instructor whose little book was the Yugoslav precursor of all those “how to” manuals (how to write a novel, how to turn one’s life into a story, how to succeed in the literary world) I would later indifferently peruse in American bookstores. I bought a copy of Petar Mitić’s little book, and what’s more, I even wrote a parody in which I inserted Mitić’s pearls of literary wisdom. At the time I had just graduated as a major in Comparative Literature and had published a couple of books. In the ocean of hardcore literary theory, Mitić’s amateur effort was like finding sunken treasure. I could play around, invent a Petar Mitić theoretical school, ridicule or praise him, reinvent, integrate — in short, I could do whatever I wanted. I belonged to the literary “elite,” Mitić to the literary “proletariat.” He went about his business with no literary or theoretical “undies”; he was just a beggar who had dared raise his commoner’s voice.

What is the difference between Chris Tolworthy and Petar Mitić? In essence, there isn’t any. The difference is in the wires: it’s in the reach of the ideas, the speed of dissemination, the penetration, and the visibility. Thanks to the Internet, Chris Tolworthy is visible. In the absence of the Internet, Peter Mitić was invisible. The difference is in me. Yesterday’s Mitić made me laugh, today’s Tolworthy I don’t find funny. Mitić was just a “vagrant” hanging around outside “my house.” Today I’m hanging around outside my former house. In that house — in literature — other people live there now.

[1]This is the contemporary literary context in which Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest book, Tree of Codes, finds itself. The title is “cut” from Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz being Jonathan Safran Foer’s favorite writer. By cutting pieces (literally) from Schulz’s book, Foer has created a “new” book, a visual and aesthetic object, from what remained. It remains to be seen how readers and critics will appraise Foer’s “intervention” or “adaption” at a time in which — Foer’s literary reputation to one side — there is no cultural context in which his gesture might be placed and read (postmodernism, for example, provided such a context), and therefore, how the undoubted differences between the two kinds of adaptions — between the “androidization” of Anna Karenina and the “dislocated” authorial reading of Bruno Schulz — will be articulated. Born of love, both acts of “vandalism” are homage to classics. The unknown Ben H. Winters put Leo Tolstoy down as his co-author. Jonathan Safran Foer neglected to do the same with Bruno Schulz.

[2]Sometimes the opposite happens: fans write for their authors, although they might not know who their author is. Lolita has found her place in the rich world of Japanese subculture — actually, she’s a Gothic Lolita known as “GothLoli.” As a symbol of young female sexuality GothLoli has little to do with Nabokov’s novel and much more to do with Japanese teenagers’ love of Victorian-era children’s fashion. As such, GothLoli look like Alices in Wonderland who like playing vampire dress-up. The GothLoli fashion hysteria emerged from manga and anime television series, computer games, and other phenomena of Japanese subculture. The fashion has been embraced by teen magazines (Gothic & Lolita Bible), goth clubs, pop music, and the film industry (Kamikaze Girls). The fashion industry has developed a number of sub styles, including Sweet Lolita (ama-loli), Classic Lolita, Punk Lolita, Wa Lolita (Lolita style combined with the traditional Japanese kimono), Boystyle Lolita (Lolita style combined with Victorian boys clothing), Hime Lolita (a combination of Marie Antoinette and Brigitte Bardot), and Guro Lolita (or “broken doll style,” which features wound-looking make-up and bandages etc.). A boutique selling clothes for Dutch Gothic Lolitas recently opened in Amsterdam. The end result of the hysteric fusion of cultural codes is best portrayed in Shion Sono’s film Love Exposure (Ai no mukisdashi, 2008).

[3]Many details about keitai shosetsu are taken from Dana Goodyear’s unusually entertaining and instructive article “I ♥ Novels” published in The New Yorker of December 22, 2008.

[4] Alexander Aciman and Emmet Rensin, Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter (Penguin, 2009).

8. THE MEANING OF LIFE

I never asked Mom about the meaning of life. In any case, I know what she would have replied: “Well, my children of course!” This reply would contain within it the desire that I not ask her silly questions. The meaning of life is the new day and that’s all. In her final months, when basic movements were painful and she had become half-blind, we didn’t have any other option but to put her in a rest home. Having taken care of the formalities and settled her in, my brother and I got ready to leave. At that very moment the nurse came in with lunch. We waited around a little longer. As obedient as a soldier, Mom picked up the spoon, and, her hand shaking, scooped some soup from the bowl. A tear slipped down from her eye and into the soup. That tear falling into the bowl of soup struck at my insides. The image often flashes before my eyes, enlarged, and in slow motion. Mum’s tear ricochets around my soul like shrapnel.

Mum’s hypothetical answer wouldn’t have been far from that given by a philosopher, who, responding to the same question, replied, “The meaning of life is reproduction.” I posed the question to an acquaintance of mine, an older gentleman, who was hit by a car at age eighty-three. “It’s a stupid question! Life doesn’t have any meaning!” he muttered, before adding, “Collecting. . Maybe collecting is what gives our lives meaning.”

Many people think Zagreb’s Mirogoj cemetery is beautiful, particularly the arcades in which notable Croats are buried. On Sundays Zagreb residents often visit the graveyard to place flowers on the graves of their loved ones and go for a walk. The different rows clearly demarcate the social differences among the deceased, the nouveau riche jostling for the first rows. With its imposing headstone, the grave at the very entrance to the cemetery is that of Franjo Tuđman, the first Croatian president, its strategic position suggesting symbolic leadership. Social differences are reinforced by the amount of marble and the size of the headstone, but the cemetery’s architecture is traditional, nothing much is over-the-top. Serbian cemetery culture is more inventive, although money rules the day there too. I have a striking photograph of a headstone from a cemetery in a Serbian village. A computer monitor, “house,” and keyboard carved out of white marble, all to natural scale, sit atop the gravestone. Imprinted on the marble computer screen is a black and white photograph of a young married couple.

The façades of Amsterdam houses are adorned with all manner of symbols, reliefs, and mini-sculptures (people, flowers, and animals — cats are the sweethearts of Amsterdam!), commissioned by the original owners to designate their professions and highlight their social standing. Today, Amsterdamers put photographs of their children in their windows (particularly newborn babies), alongside souvenirs (replicas of Amsterdam houses, cheap collections of little wooden boats, plastic flowers, and figurines) and personal effects meant to reveal something about their occupations, preferences, interests, and hobbies. The anonymous passerby is left to his own devices in interpreting these vivid autobiographical fragments.

Visiting Amsterdam for the first time, I was initially taken aback by this exhibitionism. The story goes (at least the one in the tourist brochures) that the Dutch are reluctant to invite new friends over, but, as a kind of compensation, they don’t think twice about exhibiting photos of their children for all to see. It occured to me that Amsterdam was a European city inhabited by an unknown tribe, European Indians or something. The colorful “arrangements” in the windows, dolls, flags, teddy bears, the posters and slogans draped over the façades — all of it is incongruous with the dominant Protestant culture, or the Catholic one for that matter. It seems that the residents of Amsterdam practice urban voodoo: the things they put in the window or hang out on their façades are supposed to protect them from evil spirits. All this colorful urban infantilism beats in perfect rhythm with the bodies of prostitutes in the red light district windows and the city’s carnival spirit.

Zorgvliet is one of Amsterdam’s cemeteries, and it looks more “Indian” than European. It’s not so much the sandy soil, but the graves, which the Dutch love to decorate with shamanic desiderata. If the deceased had been a barber, the blade he used all his life might be placed on his grave. If he liked a good drop, there’d definitely be a glass and a bottle. On one grave I saw Chinese take-out, fresh drumsticks, and rice in a plastic container. Who knows, maybe someone has a regular gig bringing the deceased a fresh lunch every day.

On a bench beside the grave of a child sat a family of teddy bears, the thirty or so of them bathed in damp. Pressed into the sand on the graves are touching colorful “arrangements”: sea shells, pebbles, plastic toys, painted Easter eggs, plastic Christmas trees decorated with candles and little gifts. In place of headstones, many graves have glass reliquaries the size of home aquariums that exhibit little items that belonged to the deceased: a comb, a toothbrush, a letter, a favorite book, a CD, miscellanea of all kinds.

The arrangements belong to the burial subculture of a new time. These assemblages are brief biographies of the dead written by the amateur hand of their nearest and dearest. At Zorgvliet, religious and cultural syncretism reigns. Relics co-exist in fraternal fellowship: a cross and an Indian dream catcher hang on a nearby bush, slippers embroidered with native silver brought home from a trip abroad, a little Buddhist oil lamp, plastic airline cutlery, a Chinese wooden rattle. .

Death is an empty orchestra. Those who remain behind try and brighten and fill the emptiness. They do so as best they can, either honoring strict burial conventions, or, more often, by breaking them. Zorgvliet graves remind one of MySpace or Facebook, of the final image of ourselves we leave behind. The bouquets of flowers and candles left on All Souls’ Day are testament to the number of friends we have.

Or maybe it’s actually the other way around?! Contemporary technology has given the ordinary individual the opportunity to indulge all kinds of fantasies, to live several lives, but the one thing it hasn’t yet dreamed up is self-interment. In this respect, it’s entirely possible that Facebook and MySpace contain within them the anticipation of death, the idea of the cyber tombstone, a display on which friends and acquaintances can, in our lifetimes, see who we are, what we are, what we like, the music we listen to, the films we watch. Here my elderly friend’s suggestion that collecting is the meaning of life becomes quite plausible. Collecting and consumerism are not only ways of overcoming the emptiness, but also presuppose a fear of empty space, of horror vacui. Death is an empty space. For as long as we are alive we try and fill the emptiness. Collecting is a secret negotiation with death.

A few months before my Mom died I opened her wardrobe and spent hours going through it arranging her clothes. I don’t know why. Her old Sunday best, a georgette blouse and pleated skirt, caught my eye. Mom had a lot of silk things, but it was that outfit, that skirt, which my eye happened upon. I spent hours carefully unstitching the pleats, one by one, not wanting to damage the silk. I cut the fabric into usable pieces, and then, almost in fear that someone might see me, took the scraps to a seamstress and asked if she could make me something. The seamstress protested that there was little to be salvaged from the assorted scraps, but she kept the bag and told me to come back in a few days. Mom died a month later. The bag is still at the seamstress’s. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe in mutilating her clothes I wanted to end her life? Or maybe it was the opposite; maybe I was trying to postpone her death. Maybe I was trying to slip into her “skin,” to make the pain more bearable for her. Maybe her clothes were supposed to be a kind of amulet, a magic shirt to protect me from evil spirits? Maybe, anticipating what was to come, I was taking a small piece of her body in my mouth, as was done by primitive tribes, where women had to ritually eat a piece of the deceased’s flesh in order that his or her spirit remain within the tribe? Maybe I was heading off the emptiness that would appear with her departure? Maybe destruction (ripping her clothes apart) is simply the flip-side of collecting, of the fear of emptiness?

In all its manifestations karaoke culture unites narcissism, exhibitionism, and the neurotic need for the individual to inscribe him or herself on the indifferent surface of the world, irrespective of whether the discontented individual uses the bark of a tree, his or her body, the Internet, photography, an act of vandalism, murder, or art. In the roots of this culture, however, lies a more serious motive: fear of death. From the surface of karaoke culture shimmers the mask of death.

9. THE BEGINNING WAS WHEN I WAS BORN, AND THERE IS NO END.

The sentence above is from a book called The Heart Moves the Pen (Olovka piše srcem), a funny and intelligent collection of preschoolers’ responses to various questions. Thirty years ago the book was a bestseller in the former Yugoslavia. The answer to the question, “What is the beginning, and what is the end?” is that of a boy, who today, if he is still alive, would probably be approaching forty.

The child’s sentence encapsulates the beginning of the new digital epoch, its sense perfectly attuned to the modern understanding of time. A child believes that all things in this world begin with his or her birth (and that there is no end), which is exactly how the “networked” man of today lives in the present. The beginning is log on, the end log off. The touch of a key gives the user the illusion of unimaginable power, the illusion of control over time. On the Internet everything exists in the now. Maybe that’s why delirious computer users believe that Google is God.

It’s a notorious fact that technology radically changes one’s perception of everything, including time. Thirty years ago I could wile away the hours on the cinematic aesthetics of Andrei Tarkovsky and similar directors. Today I am ashamed to admit that my eyes have simply been weaned off them; the shots are too long, too slow, and the plot, if there is one, plodding and ambiguous. I used to love all that auteur stuff, but today I don’t have the patience. In the intervening time I’ve become hooked on cinematic “fast food.” Flowing in my veins, this fast food has changed the rhythm of my heart, my attention span, and the rhythms of my respiration. The truth is that I overdosed on television, and so I don’t watch it anymore. I’ve been clean for a while now, and I don’t miss it a bit. But I do watch lots of documentaries — it doesn’t matter what they’re about, the most important thing is that they’re “slow food,” that they offer me the illusion that what is happening on the screen really is happening. The way I read has changed too. At first I was surprised when friends told me that they were going to speed-reading courses. Now I’m thinking about enrolling in a course myself. My eyes are too slow, the computer screen just gets richer and faster, and my attention span is ever shorter. From the sheer quantity of information my memory is getting worse and worse. It’s not just that I have no idea what I consumed on the Internet yesterday, it’s that I don’t remember what I sucked up five minutes ago.

Between you and me, karaoke doesn’t seem as stupid as it did when I started writing this essay. I’ve even been thinking about putting a bit of effort in and giving WhiteMidnightKitsune’s version of Alice In Wonderland another go. I mean, why the sudden skepticism about some “fanficer”? Didn’t I, thirty years ago, write a short story called “Who Am I?” in which I messed around with Lewis Carroll’s original? Swaddled in literature like a mouse in cheese, wasn’t I the one who was into the literariness of literature, deconstructing texts to see how the mechanism worked, protected by trendy jargon like intertextuality and metatextuality? Didn’t I spread my literary feathers like a peacock, parading the elegance of my handiwork?!

Back then it was called postmodernism. Why do I now look at WhiteMidnightKitsune, whoever he or she is, man, woman, or child, with such “elitist” contempt? Isn’t he just spreading his feathers? Doesn’t he also have the right to a voice? “What if I am illiterate? I still have the right to a voice!”—the line keeps ringing in my ears. I think it’s because with every new sentence I write, every new book I publish, I’m tortured by the question of whether I have the right to a voice. What have I got against Tracy Emin anyway?! Didn’t I piously wait in a never-ending line at the Stedelijk Museum just to take a peek through a hole in the door of a make-shift outdoor toilet, an installation, the voluntary victim of artistic manipulation? Aren’t I suffering from the same syndrome as Natascha Kampusch, the poor Austrian who was kidnapped by a maniac when she was a little girl and held prisoner in his basement for eight years?! Sometime in the years after her escape, Natascha Kampusch bought her torturer’s house, and they say she now makes daily visits to do the cleaning. But don’t I open the doors of my Internet-house every day, constantly bewildered by the expanse of the “rubbish”?

Maybe the problem is one of ideological manipulation? Today AA (the Anonymous or Amateur Author) is as untouchable as the teenager comfortably lounging on the tram seat. At sixty-years of age you stand next to him with bags full of groceries, struggling to keep your balance. Your legs hurt, and your single obsessive thought is how to give the uppity little schmuck a well-deserved slap in the face. You know it’s never going to happen, but the fantasy is good for your soul. If a little open hand communication isn’t an option, maybe a gentle word might help. But that’s not an option either, because, armed with his iPod and iPhone, the kid is both physically and mentally untouchable. And in any case, the kid is innocent, because he doesn’t see you. You don’t exist in his world. But he exists in yours.

Under communism, at least in the early days, fetishizing “the people” (“the little guy,” “the comrade,” “the citizen,” “the workers, peasants, and the honest intelligentsia”) was all the rage. The class enemy (the bourgeoisie) had to be overthrown. The people had to requisition his armchair, storm his mansion and summer house, smash his piano, trash the artwork on his walls, stigmatize him, hound him out, replace his values with one’s own, and get all that old bourgeois crap the hell off “the steamship of contemporaneity.”[1]

You stand there in the tram, secretly hoping the kid will get up off the seat and make room for you, and what’s more, you’re convinced that this would be “normal,” that it’s the “natural” order of things. You need the kid, the kid doesn’t need you. He’s visible, you’re invisible. So you stand there next to him and grumble, trying to establish communication that’s not there, because it can’t be there. The kid just doesn’t speak your language. You feel as if you’ve been personally tossed from “the steamship of contemporaneity.”

Armed with his high-tech toys, our Anonymous Author, just like the kid in the tram, has today occupied a lot of territory. He has occupied the television — and all power to him, television was always meant to be his medium, and today it finally is. The intended viewer is also “one of his people,” and also passive no more. Today’s viewer is (inter)active, his phone calls are broadcast live mid-program, he sends SMS messages and e-mails, he comments and makes requests, he’s there on stage and in the studio — in actual fact, programs wouldn’t exist without him. AA has occupied the newspapers; protected by the mask of anonymity (a kind of condom), he spends hours firing off comments. Because only authors — people with first names and last names — are responsible and vulnerable to attack. AA’s power lies in his namelessness, irresponsibility, and invulnerability. All the same, AA forces you to communicate with him, and if you don’t, he simply excludes you from his field of vision. Remember: he doesn’t need you, you need him. He has his online newspapers, his blogs, his network of readers, he is himself both an author and a reader. AA has occupied YouTube and hundreds of similar sites, which were all invented for him in the first place. Don’t even dream they were for you. He is an anonymous creator, editor, contributor, and end-user of his own encyclopedia, Wikipedia. And hey, amazing, he’s now the most consulted global source of general information. Protected by the mask of anonymity, AA establishes his hierarchy of values. He decides whether his Mom is worth a Wikipedia entry, how much space Paris Hilton deserves, and how much Nikola Tesla. AA has his own literature, determines canons, and then does whatever he likes with them. And nobody can hold him to account, because he is nameless. He has his own culture in which others just like him, the nameless, actively participate. He has set up his virtual institutions, developed his forms of education, his information, and his leisure activities. AA doesn’t need existing institutions — he will invoke, destroy, and reference them; AA has created his own parallel world in which everything belongs to him. AA is in the majority. That’s his strength. He controls the most powerful toy in the world, the Internet, that’s where his strength lies. He is fluid, changeable, ephemeral. He is a morph, he is infantile, he is elusive, he is mobile, he “rides” and “surfs,” he moves around, he appears and disappears. He doesn’t have a declared program to contest or dispute. Actually, he doesn’t have a program at all, but this doesn’t stop him from making his fanatical and penetrating voice heard — that’s where his strength lies. You are in his power. You have a first name and last name, you’re an author, you stand behind your work; you are responsible for what you’ve written. He’s not interested in responsibility (To whom? To what? I mean, do the superstars of the contemporary art world show any responsibility?!), nor is he interested in authorship. He takes whatever he likes, and justice is on his side. His constructions are virtual, he builds and destroys them with ease, and like a good thief, he leaves no trace. He is a representative of the new, you are a representative of the old, that’s his strength and your weakness. He’s young, you’re old — that’s his advantage. Fighting him is as senseless as punching the wind. Getting into an argument with him is stupid, ignoring him more stupid still. This is his time and his culture, you’re on the margins. Learning his codes is tough, but if you don’t know his languages, you’re condemned to linger there on the margins. It is both a comforting and terrifying thought that he too is vulnerable: the source of his strength lies — in wires.

In wires?! Standing next to the kid in the tram, your hands loaded with bags of groceries, him having occupied the seat, headphones on and iPhone in hand, suddenly you reconcile yourself to the fact that yes, this is the normal order of things. Because AA lives in a world that “has narrowed, not broadened, in the last ten years,” he lives in the “ideology of globalised market economics raised to the level of the sole and over-powering regulator of all social activity — monopolistic, all-engulfing, all-explaining, all-structuring.”[2] AA is a child of the consumer and conformer age, an age dominated by fear of loss (of one’s job, one’s identity, one thing or another) and the ideology of catastrophe and global crisis. And it can’t be ruled out that the delirium of communication — his everyday life practice — is in fact a form of autism, of apathy, a refusal to confront a world that has the measure of him and threatens to swallow him up.

“The steamship of contemporaneity,” from which you for a moment felt thrown, is a metaphor for a revolutionary age, a time when steamships symbolized progress, speed, and modernity, when artistic gestures really were “a slap in the face of public taste.” The revolution in society at the beginning of the twentieth century was marked by concomitant revolutions in literature, painting, film, architecture, poetics, and systems of thought. The entire cultural system was turned on its head. AA doesn’t incite revolutions, and he’s too much of a conformist to give anyone a slap in the face. In any case, a slap in the face is an authorial gesture. AA is a child of his time, his gestures — irrespective of his occasional self-adulatory revolutionary rhetoric — are neither great, nor powerful, nor subversive, nor mind-blowing. Deep down, AA is just a small-time hacker. He’s not even driven by a powerful and passionate Salieri-like envy. He hardly knows who Mozart and Salieri are — questions of copies and originals are lost on him. He is a sophisticated barbarian, the sophisticated part his mobile phone, the barbaric his message, which he films live and sends to other users. AA shouldn’t be underestimated. Don’t get all worked up, just meekly bow your head: this is his moment, his era, and his culture. While he sits there comfortably sprawled out over the seat, you stand there with your shopping bags thinking about him. There’s no need to worry about him throwing you overboard, if that’s what you’re worried about. His authentic “revolutionary” gesture is not invention, but intervention, not originality, but appropriation, not explosion, but implosion.

[1]The “steamship of contemporaneity” is a syntagm from the 1912 Futurist manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (Burliuk, Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov), which called for the destruction of old traditional values in the name of a new future.

[2] Ibid, Kirby.

10. AND THERE IS NO END.

I just came across a newspaper story about the opening of a virtual “ABBAWORLD” in the Earl’s Court Exhibition Center in London. Visitors have their photos taken at the entrance so they can later buy an ABBA record sleeve with their portrait, or a poster on which they have swaggered their way into a group photo with the famous four. But that’s not all. Visitors will be able to get up on a stage with a spectacular three-dimensional holographic illusion, and sing with the virtual ABBA while watching themselves on video screens. Visitors will then be able to buy a DVD of their performance, so that back in their meaningless lives they can watch themselves and ABBA until their hearts are content. Forecasts suggest that this interactive mega-exhibition is going to attract millions of visitors. Abbasolutely fab, isn’t it?

Cultural managers, curators, festival and event organizers, cultural theorists and commentators all assure us that the concept of the professional artist, he who “knows knowledge,” belongs to the past; that the false cordon between the amateur and professional artist has finally given way; that the professionalization of art killed spontaneity and the fun of the artistic gesture; that amateurism is the only hope; and that today art finally belongs to the international creative masses.

Apparently “I Will Survive” (written by Freddie Perren and Dino Fekaris and made famous by Gloria Gaynor) has been top of the pops with karaoke fans for years now. It’s been parodied often enough and performed and remixed any number of times. It’s turned up in films, served as a hymn for women’s solidarity, as support for AIDS sufferers, and has served many purposes and been used on many occasions. It’s entirely possible that CDs with the song lie scattered underground, with the corpses of the deceased, irrespective of whether they believed in reincarnation or not. It’s easy to imagine that “I Will Survive” has already been catapulted into outer space as a contact message, the earthling hymn sent out to life on other planets. It’s also easy to imagine the video clip: billions of people opening their mouths like fish and singing. Actually, the people are the song. They’ve all got the right to a voice too.

I’ve always had an inkling that there was something in “making one’s voice heard”—whether this voice be collective or individual, amateur or professional. In 2005 the artist-activists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen initiated the “Complaints Choir” project, bringing people together irrespective of nationality, race, class, gender, religious, sexual, or other identifiers. Choir members start by making a list of their complaints (their “complaints’ book”), which are then set to the tunes of well-known melodies. The project began in Birmingham, and since then choirs have popped up in Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Hamburg, Melbourne, Jerusalem, Juneau, Chicago, Malmö, Budapest, Philadelphia, Vancouver, Florence, Singapore, and even on Gabriola Island. Zagreb recently got a choir. They sang their lists of complaints at the main train station. The local authorities wouldn’t let them sing in St. Mark’s Square, in front of the Croatian Parliament.

I’m joining the ranks of this rhapsodic Complainers Internationale. I’m making my voice heard against lax public services; traffic lights that don’t work; overcrowded trams; lines in the supermarket; long queues in doctor’s waiting rooms; expensive dental services; the antiquated school system; the unbelievably thin bags in supermarkets that you can barely prise open and which send your blood pressure through the roof; the racket caused by mobile phones and their owners; price increases on public transport; corruption; low salaries and small pensions; rubbish in the city streets; narrow seats in aeroplanes; complicated telephone messages that click in when you’re trying get hold of a public service; loud advertisements on television; television; 3D films for children that give children nightmares; against the mass (ab)use of deodorants; against preservatives. .

And then I stop for a minute and add karaoke to my list. I raise my voice against karaoke: kindergartens are karaoke, newspapers are karaoke, television is karaoke, fashion is karaoke, books are karaoke, values are karaoke, the education system is karaoke, religious faith is karaoke, the free market is karaoke.

I raise my voice against cosmetic plastic surgery that produces karaoke people; against political plastic surgery that produces mentally identical individuals; against religion, because it produces sectarian lackeys; against karaoke politicians; against karaoke states and state systems; against karaoke ideologies and ideas; against the global karaoke spectacle and the millions of us who are birds of a feather and karaoke devotees. Totalitarianism is dead, long live totalitarianizing freedom! And that’s why, earthlings, complainers of the world — unite! Let’s clear our throats, raise our red fists, and sing without risk. Because even our protest is nothing other than karaoke.

Do we have any other choice? We wanted freedom, we got the freedom of a game, and we even thought the game was the freedom to just clown around. We wanted individual freedom and achieved the freedom of imitation. So let’s tighten our vocal chords, there’s no quick and dirty exit from this game. We voluntarily got ourselves lost in a house of crooked mirrors, and there’s no way back to our authentic reflection. Our bodies move of their own accord, and our mouths do the same. A voice emerges from our throats, but nothing is under our control any more, although they constantly reassure us to the contrary. In the mirror we see our distorted image: what initially filled us with childlike glee has turned into our nightmare. We spin around like an old gramophone record, our hopes pinned on hearing a benevolent click signaling the end, but an invisible hand has already placed the needle back at the beginning. And we again open our mouths. It’s too late, there’s no going back. This is our glorious age, the age of karaoke; we embrace it, sink down into it like quicksand. There’s no cause for alarm, we won’t drown, but we won’t swim our way out either. We will remain, we will survive. Survival is, in any case, our only purpose on this earth. Sure, we will survive.

2009–2010