The Warm Industry
A POSTSCRIPT, OFFERED FIRST TO CLARIFY THE NATURE OF THE POST'S TITLE:
"The Warm Industry" is NOT a reference to the Video Tribute industry. It's a reference to the family of a friend of mine, whose family members are constantly bustling off to meet patients or tutor kids or walk dogs or row or lunch with friends from a few towns away - the house and life in their presense feels like being in a busy-but-not-manic factory involved in the production of, say, down comforters.
TO BUSINESS:
Issues of Self and Other are key tonight. Two main stories will illustrate the central issue with which I’ve been occupied for the 12 hours I’ve been awake—it’s 12 midnight, and simple math will tell you that I slept in until 12 noon. After last night’s writing I watched “The Matrix: Revolutions”, which is truly an insipid movie which you should never watch. People told me as much, but I watched it anyway. But now I tell you: don’t dedicate the time to this movie, ever. But the central issue, yes, the central issue has to do with the interplay between Individual and Group needs when it comes to grieving. What’s best? Looking out for #1, i.e. the self, always and ever? Or compromising your own self in the name of others?
McCAIN VS. THE WORLD
This issue was at the center of a David Foster Wallace essay I read yesterday, “Up, Simba” from DFW’s new book of essays Consider the Lobster. “Up, Simba” is a long-ass profile of John McCain in the first week of February 2000, just before Super Tuesday. DFW was writing for Rolling Stone. The article takes a lot time to illustrate its central concerns about how dicey it can be to distinguish between actual selflessness, especially on the part of a career politician, and that crafted selflessness which is the result of much money, polling, investment, and the like. For DFW, McCain stood as a foremost hope for American politics due mainly to his heroic military and Vietnam War POW bio, which is fleshed out considerably in DFW’s version. DFW the Rolling Stone journalist and DFW the after-the-fact essayist can’t get around the fact that John S. McCain III, interred in the Hanoi Hilton for a year with three broken limbs and a bayonetted groin, weighing 100 lbs., was offered release when his father was made Admiral of US Naval forces in the South Asian theater, and that John S. McCain III despite his grievous wounds refused release due to the US Military Code of Conduct, which states that prisoners should be released in the order they were taken. Which DFW correctly interprets to be an act of literally-incredible self-sacrifice, an action wholly devoid of self-interest.
I realize that I’m once again setting up a very Apples & Oranges comparison here. Still, bear with.
"CELEBRATING A LIFETIME OF" [KAFF KAFF! AHEM!] "MEMORIES"
This evening I had a bit of a breakdown when my family received an email from Buranish Funeral Homes informing us that the Video Tribute for Jon was finished and could be seen by clicking on this link. Baba and Pa were still here at this point. Melissa signalled that I should come watch. Now, yesterday I’d made it known that I wanted to have a hand in the musical aspect of this Video Tribute. And while granted I didn’t exactly get on my horse today to follow through on this having-a-hand, I still felt a) the trepidation of seeing a Video Tribute in which I had no hand, b) worry that this would be just too, too much to take for all parties present, esp. Mom, and c) skepticism that this VT would be way wrong in its depiction of Jon. On all counts I was horribly, horribly spot on. There we all were, clustered around the computer. Treacly music begins to accompany the white Victorian script on black background. Mom’s shoulder’s begin to move; her breathing is audible. Collage #1 Fades In: it consists of five shots of Jon in an X pattern. The central pattern is of Jon at the foot of some mt. in Alaska in a sleeveless fleece vest and a white T underneath that. One of his eyebrows is raised and he’s smirking, but it’s less George Bush than Indiana Jones. All sorts of megatonnage of grief starts to flash outward from my family. At about this point I leave. I don’t want to see anymore. Here’s why. The Video Tribute is the audio-visual equivalent of an over-the-counter panacea. It’s a handy, easily-consumed pill into which 22 years of my brother’s life has been distilled. Distilled by a stranger at that, but let’s set that aside for now. The big deal I began to address up there in the guest room, once my room, and originally Jon’s room, is that the VT is in no way what Jon would have wanted. Jon disdains emotion. Hates emotion. His spirit or what have you will be hanging out in a corner on Wednesday afternoon in the oak room of Buranish Funeral Home, saying things like “God, what a buncha goofs. That music? That’s awful.” The whole shoddy production—and I’m not even judging it on its production values—is completely out of whack with the person my brother is / was.*
Now, I’m self-aware enough to realize that at least some of my flight from viewing the VT in full has to do with a hesitancy to confront the emotions raised by the VT. A few seconds of “footage” did indeed inflate my Adam’s apple to the true proportions of grief. But in a way deeper way I was fleeing the VT itself. The emotions it happened to raise, I’ll deal with soon. But the VT itself seemed completely bent on raising those emotions, pulling them out of the viewer like a rainbow hankie from a clown. It’s a form vs. content issue. The content, i.e. the emotions, are fine. The form is not fine. The form of the VT is akin to a Hallmark card. The VT is akin to a sugarpill that inspires neat Pan & Scan visions of Jon as a bloody infant, Jon as a wide-eyed infant in a blue terrycloth sleeper, Jon as a 9-year-old with improbably-developed ab muscles kneeling in hole at the beach as the tide rushes in, Jon as a Naval cadet, Jon as a broadbacked outdoorsman crouching on the top of a hill in AK and still way about the clouds, which are spread out below him. Which, when I type it all up here, doesn’t seem so bad. You do get a sense of narrative here, which is nice. But each one of these clauses / photos deserves a fuller articulation; they require myself or Dad or Mom to be sitting beside the viewer, available to expound further on the circumstances of each shot: “This is when X” or “Oh yes, that was our trip to Y and Jon kept doing Y when we took this shot…” Etc. Not that it’s practical for us, the members of his family, to personally narrate the background to each photo featuring Jon. The VT might be said to be a sort of stand-in for us: it tries to provide the context in which those snapshots exist. But if that’s what it really meant to do, it’d look more like a PowerPoint slideshow than it does, and I actually use “PowerPoint slideshow” in a complimentary fashion. Because not only is it a) the attempt to package and present his life that I find honestly repugnant, it’s also b) the direct appeal to histrionic release. The exhortation to Cry, Big Time. Not only is the content intrinsically moving, but on top of that the form in which that content’s portrayed seems deliberately oriented toward maximum tears.
But then of course there’s the fact that such an approach might be exactly what certain people want and / or need in order to help them through the process of grieving. Calling Joseph Heller.
MEANING WHAT'S CALLED A "CATCH-22"
Funny thing is that this situation isn’t one that can be resolved through simple compromise. I don’t want the VT at all. The parents do. Can we show the VT fewer times? No. The issue, after all, for me anyway, is that it shouldn’t be shown at all: it shouldn’t’ve even been made. But I digress. Point is that there isn’t really a way to give-and-take our way through this situation. The McCain anti-Self-Interest story would seem to be a shining light illuminating the fact that one should bite the bullet and deal. The anti-Self-Interest thing to do is just contend with the VT: which I was always going to do, by the way, i.e. deal. I wasn’t going to sabotage the A/V equipment such that the VT blinked out and people were left only with the posterboard collages of Jon’s pictures. **, *** Although I did think about it, as certain best friends can attest. But no, see. My dealing would be anti-Self-Interest for sure, but I also need to deal with my dealing, which is to say that my own grieving will be impeded by the thought that all of these people are effectively swallowing an audio-visual One-A-Day about my brother’s life, an 8 to 10 minute sum-up of his birth, childhood, adolesence, and young manhood. The narrator in me senses how impractical and even impossible would be the task of conveying to another person the kind of person Jon is / was. Better to present an un-chronological assortment of Jon’s pictures and allow the viewer’s eye to rove over scenes and poses from Jon’s way too fucking short life and construct their own narrative as they go.**** We’re not going to be able to represent the totality of Jon’s 22 years in any sort of manner that’s going to approach sufficiency. And the VT seems to want to try to do that: represent the totality.
Plus, even as the VT tries and fails to represent Jon accurately, it feels very familiar. Saccharine strings you’ve heard before in Oprah and The View montages. The font of the script has that slight fuzz around the edges of the letters; words look like they’ve been through a chemical bath. There’s a general Jostens-high-school-graduation-video vibe to the whole bottom-feeding production. But again, it wouldn’t be an option, the VT, if people weren’t reliably springing for it. I don’t know why I continually reject things that are mainstream (John Irving, Harry Potter, FM radio). It isn’t wholly a concious process. If I had to conjecture I’d say it has something to do with the premium I place on originality. K— spoke to this on the phone tonight: there’s a tendency in myself and those like myself (and let’s do the nasty: educated, bookish, leftist American Confucians of the middle and middle-upper classes) to equate real (or more real) emotions with original formulations and statements. There’s a belief among us that the expression of actual emotions requires new articulation or formulation. *****
THE UPSHOT:
All of which seems neither here nor there when I think of Jon being present in the room on Wednesday, rolling his eyes and calling us all Goofs. I don’t want the spirit-Jon to call us Goofs. I want the spirit-Jon to say, Yeah, that’s awesome, in the way that he might compliment a really excellent piece of barbecue chicken or a cigar or something he actually valued and enjoyed and identified with.
FOOTNOTES:
* Issues of tense aren’t issues with which I can contend right now. In true postmodern fashion, we’ll have to spring for the Both / And rather than the Either / Or.
** Which is also drawn from Forrest Gump: when Gump’s speaking at the D.C. anti-war rally and a staff officer rips out the mike wires.
*** Remember that the service has to be closed-casket. Our options for visually representing Jon are therefore limited.
**** And yes, this IS classically postmodern, and no, I’m not sorry about it. :o)
***** To that end, I want to play Built To Spill’s “Else” from Keep It Like a Secret. The originality here would consist in eschewing string-laden weepies like “Unforgettable” and going for the unexpected pairing. But this just another example of the Cult of Obscurity, a sort of Rob from High Fidelity elitism? Christ, I don’t care. I have to stop second-guessing myself.
"The Warm Industry" is NOT a reference to the Video Tribute industry. It's a reference to the family of a friend of mine, whose family members are constantly bustling off to meet patients or tutor kids or walk dogs or row or lunch with friends from a few towns away - the house and life in their presense feels like being in a busy-but-not-manic factory involved in the production of, say, down comforters.
TO BUSINESS:
Issues of Self and Other are key tonight. Two main stories will illustrate the central issue with which I’ve been occupied for the 12 hours I’ve been awake—it’s 12 midnight, and simple math will tell you that I slept in until 12 noon. After last night’s writing I watched “The Matrix: Revolutions”, which is truly an insipid movie which you should never watch. People told me as much, but I watched it anyway. But now I tell you: don’t dedicate the time to this movie, ever. But the central issue, yes, the central issue has to do with the interplay between Individual and Group needs when it comes to grieving. What’s best? Looking out for #1, i.e. the self, always and ever? Or compromising your own self in the name of others?
McCAIN VS. THE WORLD
This issue was at the center of a David Foster Wallace essay I read yesterday, “Up, Simba” from DFW’s new book of essays Consider the Lobster. “Up, Simba” is a long-ass profile of John McCain in the first week of February 2000, just before Super Tuesday. DFW was writing for Rolling Stone. The article takes a lot time to illustrate its central concerns about how dicey it can be to distinguish between actual selflessness, especially on the part of a career politician, and that crafted selflessness which is the result of much money, polling, investment, and the like. For DFW, McCain stood as a foremost hope for American politics due mainly to his heroic military and Vietnam War POW bio, which is fleshed out considerably in DFW’s version. DFW the Rolling Stone journalist and DFW the after-the-fact essayist can’t get around the fact that John S. McCain III, interred in the Hanoi Hilton for a year with three broken limbs and a bayonetted groin, weighing 100 lbs., was offered release when his father was made Admiral of US Naval forces in the South Asian theater, and that John S. McCain III despite his grievous wounds refused release due to the US Military Code of Conduct, which states that prisoners should be released in the order they were taken. Which DFW correctly interprets to be an act of literally-incredible self-sacrifice, an action wholly devoid of self-interest.
I realize that I’m once again setting up a very Apples & Oranges comparison here. Still, bear with.
"CELEBRATING A LIFETIME OF" [KAFF KAFF! AHEM!] "MEMORIES"
This evening I had a bit of a breakdown when my family received an email from Buranish Funeral Homes informing us that the Video Tribute for Jon was finished and could be seen by clicking on this link. Baba and Pa were still here at this point. Melissa signalled that I should come watch. Now, yesterday I’d made it known that I wanted to have a hand in the musical aspect of this Video Tribute. And while granted I didn’t exactly get on my horse today to follow through on this having-a-hand, I still felt a) the trepidation of seeing a Video Tribute in which I had no hand, b) worry that this would be just too, too much to take for all parties present, esp. Mom, and c) skepticism that this VT would be way wrong in its depiction of Jon. On all counts I was horribly, horribly spot on. There we all were, clustered around the computer. Treacly music begins to accompany the white Victorian script on black background. Mom’s shoulder’s begin to move; her breathing is audible. Collage #1 Fades In: it consists of five shots of Jon in an X pattern. The central pattern is of Jon at the foot of some mt. in Alaska in a sleeveless fleece vest and a white T underneath that. One of his eyebrows is raised and he’s smirking, but it’s less George Bush than Indiana Jones. All sorts of megatonnage of grief starts to flash outward from my family. At about this point I leave. I don’t want to see anymore. Here’s why. The Video Tribute is the audio-visual equivalent of an over-the-counter panacea. It’s a handy, easily-consumed pill into which 22 years of my brother’s life has been distilled. Distilled by a stranger at that, but let’s set that aside for now. The big deal I began to address up there in the guest room, once my room, and originally Jon’s room, is that the VT is in no way what Jon would have wanted. Jon disdains emotion. Hates emotion. His spirit or what have you will be hanging out in a corner on Wednesday afternoon in the oak room of Buranish Funeral Home, saying things like “God, what a buncha goofs. That music? That’s awful.” The whole shoddy production—and I’m not even judging it on its production values—is completely out of whack with the person my brother is / was.*
Now, I’m self-aware enough to realize that at least some of my flight from viewing the VT in full has to do with a hesitancy to confront the emotions raised by the VT. A few seconds of “footage” did indeed inflate my Adam’s apple to the true proportions of grief. But in a way deeper way I was fleeing the VT itself. The emotions it happened to raise, I’ll deal with soon. But the VT itself seemed completely bent on raising those emotions, pulling them out of the viewer like a rainbow hankie from a clown. It’s a form vs. content issue. The content, i.e. the emotions, are fine. The form is not fine. The form of the VT is akin to a Hallmark card. The VT is akin to a sugarpill that inspires neat Pan & Scan visions of Jon as a bloody infant, Jon as a wide-eyed infant in a blue terrycloth sleeper, Jon as a 9-year-old with improbably-developed ab muscles kneeling in hole at the beach as the tide rushes in, Jon as a Naval cadet, Jon as a broadbacked outdoorsman crouching on the top of a hill in AK and still way about the clouds, which are spread out below him. Which, when I type it all up here, doesn’t seem so bad. You do get a sense of narrative here, which is nice. But each one of these clauses / photos deserves a fuller articulation; they require myself or Dad or Mom to be sitting beside the viewer, available to expound further on the circumstances of each shot: “This is when X” or “Oh yes, that was our trip to Y and Jon kept doing Y when we took this shot…” Etc. Not that it’s practical for us, the members of his family, to personally narrate the background to each photo featuring Jon. The VT might be said to be a sort of stand-in for us: it tries to provide the context in which those snapshots exist. But if that’s what it really meant to do, it’d look more like a PowerPoint slideshow than it does, and I actually use “PowerPoint slideshow” in a complimentary fashion. Because not only is it a) the attempt to package and present his life that I find honestly repugnant, it’s also b) the direct appeal to histrionic release. The exhortation to Cry, Big Time. Not only is the content intrinsically moving, but on top of that the form in which that content’s portrayed seems deliberately oriented toward maximum tears.
But then of course there’s the fact that such an approach might be exactly what certain people want and / or need in order to help them through the process of grieving. Calling Joseph Heller.
MEANING WHAT'S CALLED A "CATCH-22"
Funny thing is that this situation isn’t one that can be resolved through simple compromise. I don’t want the VT at all. The parents do. Can we show the VT fewer times? No. The issue, after all, for me anyway, is that it shouldn’t be shown at all: it shouldn’t’ve even been made. But I digress. Point is that there isn’t really a way to give-and-take our way through this situation. The McCain anti-Self-Interest story would seem to be a shining light illuminating the fact that one should bite the bullet and deal. The anti-Self-Interest thing to do is just contend with the VT: which I was always going to do, by the way, i.e. deal. I wasn’t going to sabotage the A/V equipment such that the VT blinked out and people were left only with the posterboard collages of Jon’s pictures. **, *** Although I did think about it, as certain best friends can attest. But no, see. My dealing would be anti-Self-Interest for sure, but I also need to deal with my dealing, which is to say that my own grieving will be impeded by the thought that all of these people are effectively swallowing an audio-visual One-A-Day about my brother’s life, an 8 to 10 minute sum-up of his birth, childhood, adolesence, and young manhood. The narrator in me senses how impractical and even impossible would be the task of conveying to another person the kind of person Jon is / was. Better to present an un-chronological assortment of Jon’s pictures and allow the viewer’s eye to rove over scenes and poses from Jon’s way too fucking short life and construct their own narrative as they go.**** We’re not going to be able to represent the totality of Jon’s 22 years in any sort of manner that’s going to approach sufficiency. And the VT seems to want to try to do that: represent the totality.
Plus, even as the VT tries and fails to represent Jon accurately, it feels very familiar. Saccharine strings you’ve heard before in Oprah and The View montages. The font of the script has that slight fuzz around the edges of the letters; words look like they’ve been through a chemical bath. There’s a general Jostens-high-school-graduation-video vibe to the whole bottom-feeding production. But again, it wouldn’t be an option, the VT, if people weren’t reliably springing for it. I don’t know why I continually reject things that are mainstream (John Irving, Harry Potter, FM radio). It isn’t wholly a concious process. If I had to conjecture I’d say it has something to do with the premium I place on originality. K— spoke to this on the phone tonight: there’s a tendency in myself and those like myself (and let’s do the nasty: educated, bookish, leftist American Confucians of the middle and middle-upper classes) to equate real (or more real) emotions with original formulations and statements. There’s a belief among us that the expression of actual emotions requires new articulation or formulation. *****
THE UPSHOT:
All of which seems neither here nor there when I think of Jon being present in the room on Wednesday, rolling his eyes and calling us all Goofs. I don’t want the spirit-Jon to call us Goofs. I want the spirit-Jon to say, Yeah, that’s awesome, in the way that he might compliment a really excellent piece of barbecue chicken or a cigar or something he actually valued and enjoyed and identified with.
FOOTNOTES:
* Issues of tense aren’t issues with which I can contend right now. In true postmodern fashion, we’ll have to spring for the Both / And rather than the Either / Or.
** Which is also drawn from Forrest Gump: when Gump’s speaking at the D.C. anti-war rally and a staff officer rips out the mike wires.
*** Remember that the service has to be closed-casket. Our options for visually representing Jon are therefore limited.
**** And yes, this IS classically postmodern, and no, I’m not sorry about it. :o)
***** To that end, I want to play Built To Spill’s “Else” from Keep It Like a Secret. The originality here would consist in eschewing string-laden weepies like “Unforgettable” and going for the unexpected pairing. But this just another example of the Cult of Obscurity, a sort of Rob from High Fidelity elitism? Christ, I don’t care. I have to stop second-guessing myself.
posted by Wil at
6:24 PM
2 Comments:
I never even heard of this VT thing. I hope no-one asks me to compile my loved one's life into a 8-10 minute presentation, when I'm grief-stricken, no less.
By
junebee, at 7:09 PM
It was a new aspect for me, as well. Apparently they're fairly popular. Which is fine, because if some people feel that it will help themselves or help others, then by all means a VT should be produced. And our service needs to be closed-casket. So I understand the urge just fine. It's the execution that I can't brook. But among the things that need to be endured, this'll be small potatoes. Thanks for reading along, btw, Junebee. It's good to know you're here.
By
Wil, at 8:51 AM
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