In a recent piece in the New Yorker on the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, Tad Friend observed the diplomatic hazards of running a social satire with a national audience, what was off-limits in terms of the audience and sponsors.  The president of Comedy Central, the network on which Stewart’s show airs, remarked to Friend, “If the show is going after an advertiser, we call the advertiser with a heads up, but we tell him, ‘If Jon is making fun of you, it’s a plus.  It means you’re being talked about.!”  Sad but true.  The network two-step is pervasive in all branches of the armed media.  To the converse, anything “not represented” in print, or on screen is unworthy.  This is also why a number of my previous places of employment shall go nameless in anecdotes.  Libel nothing, I get the creeps just mentioning their names.  Value in popular media is not about moral rectitude, but visibility.

It still makes me a little sad to think of that last scene in Sunset Boulevard when, having murdered William Holden, Gloria Swanson, the written-off, bygone starlet descends the staircase to reclaim her fame.  Deluded to the reality of the police and news cameras that await her descent, she believes herself returning, in character, to perform an epic film scene.  This example, like the one from the Jon Stewart Show, illustrates how actuality is not only shaped by, but is thoroughly dictated by representative forms in the media.  And what is true is invariably a subordinate to what is evident.

So where does this leave meaning.  Actually, precisely where we left it.  The notion of national relevance is a myth.  The smaller the audience the more discreet the impact of a message can be on that audience--No?  It returns us to Marx’s prospect, that an ideal future would be one without poets, only poetry.  Or to orient it in more polemical terms, Schoenberg benevolently proclaimed, “If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.”   The appeal of independent records is not that they are merely the alternatives to major labels records.  It’s because, generally, they haven’t been conditioned so much.  Fewer people eavesdropped the latest White Stripes record in the studio and said, if we tweak this, and polish this just a bit them we can broaden the demographic this much.  It’s not to say that some completely contrived bullshit doesn’t emerge from smaller ventures.   Nevertheless esoteric forms have become emblems of our creative urge to connect with a truly receptive audience.

Often misleading are the fluke objects that escape the underground:  paintings that repeatedly devastate the viewer in a museum, the major label record that despite the meddling of unnumbered hands, turned out quite well.  I don’t know why TLC make such great records.  They just do, who or whatever is responsible.  But unfortunately in these instances the institution overshadows the object, taints the integrity of the ideas.  It bespeaks a myth that widespread availability is necessarily complicit with mediocrity.  Such is simply not the case.

Whether it is work on the most intimate, or epic scale the fashion in which we perceive it has come into a rather slippery state of being, a perceptual limbo.  To borrow a phrase from the cultural theorist, Jean Baudrillard, we are engaged in the reception and proliferation of pornographies.   Such instances occur when, unwittingly, we compile the manifold representations of an art object--the critical reviews, the artist’s interviews, the style in which the artist is photographed, the tv ads in which, as is the case with pop music, the artist can be heard, et cetera--and use them to form a composite of the corresponding art object.   Essentially we are replacing the opportunity of closest examination of the object with the textual world that has been built up around it, to sell it to us.  It happens on all levels of production.  And as consumers we have little sanctuary.

One of the few,  remote sanctuaries of small culture is the mix-tape.  One person quixotically compiles it, passes it down, and it disappears into a populace that has neither design nor demographic.   No advertising.  No ominous cost of production.  Whatever screwy shit goes on between the ears of the person making it comes to the reckoning of her/his stereo, record collection, and ability to steal any valuable sound from thin air.   It is the great satire.  Like graffiti it is abhorred.  Like shock art it is alternately hushed or mocked for its clumsiness.  Clumsiness is a merely a clever way of antagonizing candor, which does little to sell art.  So what was I talking about?  Oh yeah, I made you a tape.  It’s here, and ostensibly, wherever you are.