What Happens When Disaffected Youth Grow Up?

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I read Less Than Zero my senior year of high school.  Growing up in suburban Buffalo, NY, I knew about drugs, casual sex and absentee parents.  The parties and dive bars my friends and I went to had none of the glamour of Beverly Hills, but we claimed the book as the anthem of our generation—the surrender to materialism, the wizened disconnect from the world, the futility of caring.

When the movie came out, we took our jabs at it.  Andrew McCarthy injecting niceness into Clay?  (And what happened to his bisexuality?)  Jamie Gertz as Blair?  She came off as dumb instead of disaffected.  And Less Than Zero was not a love story!!  There wasn’t supposed to be redemption at the end.  Still I re-watched the movie every time it was on cable.  At least the stylized cinematography and the soundtrack translated.

Now, 25 years later, the sequel Imperial Bedrooms comes out.  I was immediately intrigued by the real- time lapse between the books.  I’d grown up since Less Than Zero.  Ellis had grown up.  How had his characters grown up?

More on that question in a sec.  The quick synopsis:   Clay, now a successful Hollywood screenwriter, returns to LA for the production of a film and is drawn to a beautiful but middling young actress and, soon enough, a ton of trouble.

So, what happens to a group of disaffected, morally ambivalent youth 25 years later?

According to Ellis, not much.  Julian has somehow survived heroin addiction and netherworld pimps though he’s still pissing people off and owing them money.  Blair is married to Trent, the guy in Less Than Zero who introduces his friends to snuff films, and she’s still mired in the soulless culture of the LA elite, now set squarely within the film industry.  Clay is still drifting through life anesthetized.  The drugs have changed—alcohol and Xanax have replaced cocaine and heroin—but the results are  the same.  The sexual relationships remain ambiguous.

In Less Than Zero, you could say Clay was feeling his way out of a postapocalyptic world of interpersonal exploitation.  In Imperial Bedrooms, the transactions have become ingrained in Clay.  He’s too psychologically detached to recognize it, but he’s as much a predator as any of the people around him.

This subtle shift had pluses and minuses for me.  In fact, I vacillated on how I felt about it every other page.  One on hand, Clay’s pathological narcissism is raw and gripping.  He thinks and does increasingly awful things.  Reading the book is like being an acrophobic strapped to a high speed roller coaster.   I felt stuck on his ride until the end.

But I stopped caring about Clay early on, and halfway through I was so desperate for empathy, I started pulling for everyone who stood against him.  I was rooting for the actress who was using him to get a part in his movie.  I was rooting for Julian, who sets Clay up in a really despicable way, but at least the guy had cleaned up his life a little.  I was even rooting for Rip who hires thugs to torture and murder people.  Anyone who would give Clay his comeuppance.

So maybe that was Easton’s point—to push the boundaries of Clay’s relatability, to ask the question:  what really matters?   The existentialism works well on an atmospheric level.  In several parts of the story, I was wondering—is this actually happening or is it all in Clay’s head?  Though I think Ellis did a better job with ambiguity/suspense in Lunar Park.

I think the problem is that as readers we’ve grown up.  We’ve answered most of our angsty questions, found some meaning in our lives, and a book about a guy who’s lost and remains lost, no matter how elegantly told, just isn’t as interesting as it used to be.

To take it further, there are more angsty questions now that we’re approaching 40 or over 40, but another problem is Imperial Bedrooms doesn’t have anything to say about these issues.  Clay’s not having a midlife crisis, he’s having a personality disorder.  You wouldn’t know he’d aged since LTZ except for a few references to a failed relationship a few years back.  Characters talk about his screenwriting credits, but it’s hard to believe he ever had the ability to write a script.

It pains me to criticize Bret Easton Ellis since I’ve picked up every book he’s written as soon as it came out.  I’d judge Imperial Bedrooms as his least successful novel, but for fans, it still has moments of brilliant lyricism and the disorienting anomie we’ve come to love.  Less Than Zero was tough to follow up.  Most of us thought that all of the characters would be dead by now.

Did Atlantis Exist?

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Here’s a shocking departure from my usual bloggerings.  In returning to my Stories from Atlantis series, I’ve had my source material on my mind and figured I’d share some thoughts about it here.

I’ve set aside the angel project.  My brain got wrapped around a street lamp, a plot and structure street lamp.  The manuscript is in the intensive care unit in critical condition.  That’s the last bad metaphor I’ll use and the last thing I’ll say about it.

Everyone thinks they know something about Atlantis—it sunk in the sea, its citizens took a space ship to another planet, or it’s protected beneath the ocean in a bubble.  Nowadays, Atlantis is regarded as myth and legend, but that wasn’t always the case.  In the 19th century and early 20th century, many respected archeologists and geologists believed they could find evidence of the ancient civilization.  In the 1930s, “psychic” Edgar Cayce told people he communicated with Atlanteans during hypnotic trances.  Cayce wrote a number of books about his paranormal conversations, and they were a lot less interesting than you might imagine.

Atlantis is part of our collective unconscious, a Jungian concept.  The collective unconscious is a cerebral storehouse for universal ideas, inherited over generations.  It’s the place for archetypes and myths, the flood story for example, or Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth.   In modern terms, you could say it’s the source of urban legends.

Psychology and “hard” science have only become distinct relatively recently.  It was always a curiosity of mine how scientists sought to prove the veracity of Atlantis before the age of cold, rational science.

The classic source material comes from Plato who wrote about a technologically advanced society pre-dating the Greeks by 9,000 years.  His description placed the ancient continent west of the Pillars of Heracles (the Strait of Gibraltar), so Plato “purists” went looking for evidence in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of North Africa.  Some, like British archeologist Lewis Spence, argued that the Canary Islands are vestiges of a much larger land mass that sunk.  Only its highest mountain peaks remain above the water.

There’s a school of thought that says Plato was referring to the island of Santorini in the Mediterranean Sea where pre-Greek Minoan civilization thrived for years until it was destroyed suddenly by a volcano.  Others have placed Atlantis in Indonesia or even North America.  Cayce was “told” that the Atlanteans used to live in the Caribbean—the Bimini Islands.

While Spence never produced much in the way of compelling evidence, he launched a cultural diffusion theory that was wonderfully evocative.  Comparing a host of ancient African, Central American and North American cultures, he noted a variety of similarities in language, religion and architecture (e.g. the pyramids).  How could this have happened when cultures were separated by the unpassable Atlantic Ocean?  Spence insists it was because there was a continent in the middle of the ocean facilitating travel.  Spence believed that bull sacrifice was an important Atlantean tradition that was passed on to many cultures, even evident today through the popularity of bull fighting.

I’m predisposed to doubt just about everything, but it’s tempting to believe that Atlantis was real.  If I was to believe, the most compelling explanation comes from geology.  By Plato’s account, Atlantis disappeared around 10,000 B.C.E.  That was the tail end of an ice age.  So, it’s possible to imagine that while much of Europe was covered in glacier, some people migrated south to warmer climes and traveled a land bridge from coastal Spain to an island.  There, with better terrain and an abundance of food, they developed a thriving society.  But with global warming, ocean levels rose.  The island was washed away.  Maybe there were survivors who brought their language and traditions to other parts of the world.  Maybe we’re all descendants of the Atlanteans.

For more about Lewis Spence, check out this.

Fire Island, 4th of July

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This past weekend, my partner and I went to Cherry Grove with a group of friends including our two German house guests, a couple.  We packed up the essentials—towels, a blanket, beach umbrellas, a cooler with water bottles, and a change of clothes, and took the drive down the center of Long Island then south to the Sayville Ferry.

We arrived ahead of schedule, but the dock was packed.  July 4th.  The busiest beach day of the year.  This was not an inconvenience though.  It was the beginning of a very colorful day.  We lined up for the boat with a parade of men in drag, their female admirers like gals out on the town for a bachelorette party, and nearly as many teacup Yorkies, Maltese and Chihuahuas as people.

Across the Great South Bay on the ferry and through the boardwalk paths, we found a spot on the beach beside a group of young, short-haired Asian women set up in a screen tent eating picnic lunch with chopsticks.  The group laid out in front of us was harder to reconcile.  There was a handsome guy with silver hair and a British accent and his decades-younger daughter? girlfriend?  wife?  The young woman tended occasionally to a naked toddler tottering around, and there was a restless young man making frequent trips to the ocean in a diver’s body suit.  Then, there was an exceedingly well-behaved ink black French Bulldog.  Group inter-relationships were inscrutable except the man and the dog.  They spooned beneath a sun tent for most of the afternoon.

By the ocean, men squeal at the impact of frigid three foot waves.  Bare-chested women play Kadima and toss footballs with locker room banter.

Wondering how the scene looked through foreign eyes, I asked one German friend how he liked this beach.  He said:  “This is more hetero than I expected.”  I inferred his meaning.  He would’ve liked to see more naked men.

The beach is a patchwork of racial and gender affinities and those sewn together by style of dress—the bold bikini bearers, the naturalists, the boys who look forward all year to the season they can wear sarongs.

We are a quilt panel of middle class Gen X’ers, not quite men of a certain age but we talk the part.  We’re outraged by inflation.  We rant about celebrities.  We have back pains and a hundred hypochondrias.  We lapse into silence, gazing at our younger, fitter counterparts.  Youth is wasted on the young.

But we are coupled (some of us), with careers, and wise, or if not wise at least resilient.

We go on to dinner and then a few drinks at the club.  We’re back on an earlier ferry than we used to take, and there are no outrageous stories to talk about the next morning.  Instead, there is laundry, an early afternoon matinee and shopping at Century 21.

We have edged up closer to the Future.  If we choose to leave the party early, it’s because we’d rather forgo the hangovers.

Dragging myself back to blogdom

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I’ve been a terrible procrastinator lately.  When I started this site 9 months ago, I made a commitment to post at least once per week, every Wednesday.

I had a good excuse last week.  We had friends in town from Germany, and it would’ve been pretty rude to shoo them out of the guest bedroom so I could get on the computer.   But they took a trip down to DC for most of this week.  My only excuse for neglecting my site (and my writing) is needing some time to warm up before I get back in the game.  My manuscript has also more or less collapsed and will need to be gutted and rebuilt from floor to ceiling.  I’m feeling a tad sorry for myself.

So while my prose is gummed up, I thought:  why not some poetry?  Here’s a piece I just wrote while thinking about my re-write, both thematically and I guess personally.

I am driftwood in the ocean,

Hostage to its welter and swell,

I lift with foolish hope on the crest of waves,

To drag back in a tractionless wake,

Caught in the Universe’s laws of motion,

An object at rest prefers to stay at rest.

 

I never had a problem swimming with the current,

A school of fish is a happy place,

The undertow can drown,

And sharks attack in open water,

I thought that I was bold,

But I never ventured further than I could swim to shore.

 

I did not choose to wallow here,

It was what I saw, what I heard that chose,

A startled witness,

I did not want to see, too late,

The truth scalds like alchemy,

Changing who you are from the inside out.

 

I’ve become now petrified wood,

The ocean cannot keep me,

I plummet like a depth charge, crushed by psi’s,

It may be safer on the ocean floor,

An object at rest in a primordial bath,

Waiting for an organic spark to re-emerge.

Support Independent Book Stores!!

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Just received this e-mail from White Crane and felt compelled to post it here.  Gay Independent bookstores are going the way of the dinosaur, and it’s a real shame considering the (general) lack of depth of the big chains in regard to LGBT literature.

I remember my first time at A Different Light in NYC.  I was blown away by entire bookshelves filled with mysteries, science fiction, poetry anthologies, and tons of non-fiction on so many subjects.  Anyway, here’s the message, and while the only branch that’s left is in San Francisco, I’m going to support the appeal by ordering some books on-line.

A Different Light Bookstore and ADLBooks.Com

A Different Light Bookstore opened it’s doors in November 1979. As with all of the independent gay bookstores during that time, our stores became meeting places to promote GLBT writers, as well as gathering places for GLBT activists. And our independent gay bookstores served us well in working towards the equality we have achieved today and are working for in the future.

As you are aware, from surfing the net to reading the few newspapers and magazines that are still in print, our gay community bookstores, publishers and many other gay community small businesses are closing their doors. It is a fact that businesses are only as good as their customer and vendor bases. And as history as shown us, change is inevitable.

It is my belief that the GLBT community is the best read and highest achieving groups of people anywhere in the world. I also believe that in the future when the digital revolution has settled down that community based businesses will again serve as a place of social interaction that the human condition needs so badly.

In saying this, A Different Light Bookstore and ADLBooks.com “need your help and support” to continue to be a presence in San Francisco and online for our communities that we ship to all over the world.

If every customer in our store and online who receive our new product updates would commit to investing $10, $20 or more each month in purchasing our products, that would be an enormous step in continuing to preserve this very important part of our community.

The effect of this action is more then just keeping our business operational, but it also trickles down to our vendors. Equally important, your support will help keep and create local jobs that are so important to our community.

There are two actions that I would like you to consider. The most immediate action is of course stopping by our store or signing onto our website and buying a great book, gift, movie, magazine or DVD’s.

A more serious request, and one that I think would set a stage for preserving GLBT literature for the future is that you might consider buying 1-10 copies of each Queer Classic and “donating” it to a school, university, GLBT Center Library, local libraries or any of your favorite organizations. In addition to our GLBT archives around the world, this would put our literature in the hands of readers who might otherwise not have access or are being censored.

We are asking for your support. We sincerely appreciate and are thankful for our customers who visit and buy from us on a regular basis.

Thank you for your consideration and taking the time to read this note.

Bill Barker

A Different Light Bookstore and ADLBooks.Com