Frances Halladay is dancing down Catherine Street in New York, her body moving in time to David Bowie’s Modern Love:
Bowie sings:
Modern love – walks beside me
Modern love – walks on by
Modern love – gets me to the church on time
Church on time – terrifies me
Church on time – makes me party
Church on time – puts my trust in god and man
God and man – no confessions
God and man – no religion
God and man – don’t believe in modern love
Even though a new love or perhaps meaning may be around the corner, she runs out of street too quickly. Back at the shared apartment, she flops down and reads 1993’s ‘The American Nonconformist in the Age of the Commercialization of Dissent’, from The Baffler archives that opened today. It begins:
“Thirty-five years ago, Norman Mailer first gave voice to the idea that the “hipster,” the young art-appreciating free-spirit alienated from an increasingly repressive society, was the existential hero of the day. In an America terrified by the bomb, grown stagnant from over-organization, cowed into homogeneity and conformity by red scares and the depersonalization of the computer age, the “hipster” was supposed to represent liberty and the affirmation of life.
“The only life-giving answer” to the deathly drag of American civilization, Mailer wrote, was to tear oneself from the security of physical and spiritual certainty, to embrace rebellion, particularly rebellion associated with the subculture of jazz and drugs. The distinction between those who resisted mass society and those who collaborated was a clear and obvious one, Mailer insisted: “one is Hip or one is Square . . . one is a rebel or one conforms . . . trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.””
See also
Review: The Men Who Made Us Spend.
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