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.”