ENGL 6480/7480, Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties Dr. David Lavery Summer 2015 The Space Age.

ENGL 6480/7480, Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties Dr. David Lavery Summer 2015 The Space Age

ENGL 6480/7480, Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties The Space Age

ENGL 6480/7480, Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties The Space Age Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space Age (1992) Table of Contents Introduction: To Hear Us Talk Probe: The Real Two Cultures 1. Due Back on Planet Earth Probe: Gnosticism and the Cult Film 2. Departure of the Body Snatchers Probe: Nemesis and NASA 3. Infinite Presumption Probe: The Anti-Gnosticism of E. M. Cioran Probe: "Body's Earth": H. E. Francis' "Ballad of the Engineer Carl Feldmann" 4. The Simulator Probe: Space Boosters 5. The Abandoned Earth Probe: The Revolution of the Earth Conclusion: Dreaming Nothing

ENGL 6480/7480, Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties The Space Age “The House on Maple Street” (“It was a perfect lift off.”)

HYATT: THE PERFECT WORLD Andrei Codrescu I went to the Hyatt House in Indianapolis recently, and I have come back to report that it can support human life indefintely. Its climate very much resembles that of the earth. There are green plants hanging from protruding formations, and once I stumbled into a circle of extremely real looking potted shrubs around a black piano. The air is neither too thin nor too thick and is slightly scented by the thousands of bodies scrubbed with hotel soap that stumble out of its showers every morning. The creators of the Hyatt have contrived to take a perfect late summer day on earth and are able to play it over and over, no matter what season or time is experienced on the outside. ENGL 6480/7480

I had a good look at the city of Indianapolis out the window of my room and the air outside appeared to my naked eye to be cold, crisp and turbulent. I experienced none of those conditions behind the plate glass window that separated me from the city. I would have liked to go out there, to walk around, but I immediately suppressed that nostalgic impulse by reminding myself that, thanks to modern art which isolates the eyes from all the other senses, I could safely view the world without actually mucking about in it. But the most remarkable aspect of the Hyatt was the supportive nutritive system. On several floors discrete little feeding stations functioned smoothly. All of them produced several varieties of nachos, Bloody Marys, and fried zucchini. The ones on the lower floors also stacked large slabs of recently killed meat so that, I became convinced, an advanced system of communication existed between the Hyatt and the outside world. ENGL 6480/7480

As I rose silently in the glass bubbles of the elevators, I surveyed the seemingly endless tiers of this perfectly ordered world. In a large room businessmen stood before gadgets with drinks in their hands. In another large room writers read poems to appreciative audiences with pockets bulging with their own poems. This was the room where I too was expected. I pulled the paper from my pocket. At the top it said "Hyatt, the Perfect World." I began to read. ENGL 6480/7480

In a Cathy comic strip—Cathy Guisewite's ruthlessly perceptive daily chronicle of modern spaciness—Cathy and her boyfriend Irving introduce us, in a Sunday comic show-and-tell, to all the new material possessions in their repertoire, all of which are "state of the art“ and none of which is ever used:  an "anodized aluminum multi-lens three-beam mini excavation spotlight that live its life in the junk drawer with dead batteries"; a "high-tech, epoxy- finished, heavy-gauge steel grid hanging unit for home repair tools that required two carpenters to install and is now used as a scarf rack“  “safari clothes that will never be near a jungle";  "aerobic footgear that will never set foot in an aerobics class";  a "deep-sea dive watch that will never get damp";  "architectural magazines we don't read filled with pictures of furniture we don't like"; ENGL 6480/7480

 "financial strategy software keyed to a checkbook that's lost somewhere under a computer no one knows how to work";  an "art poster from an exhibit we never went to of an artist we never heard of.“ Guisewite brilliantly labels this post Me Decade conspicuous consumption, "abstract materialism": materialism about as "realistic" or representational as a Jackson Pollock canvas. "We've moved past the things we want and need and are buying those things that have nothing to do with our lives," Cathy herself tells us in the cartoon's final frame. In the 1980s, the age of the yuppie, we perfected the art of what Time magazine has called "transcendental acquisition." ENGL 6480/7480

The Pythia of Delphi has now been replaced by a computer which hovers over panels and punch cards. The hexameters of the oracle have given way to sixteen-bit codes of instruction. Man the helmsman has turned the power over to the cybernetic machine. The ultimate machine emerges to direct our destinies. Children phantasize flying their spacecrafts away from a crepuscular Earth.—Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society... the emphasis on surface; the blankness of the protagonist; his striving toward self-sufficiency, to the point of displacement from the recognizable world.... Does the icy quality of an artificial outer space, the self-conscious displacement and blankness of car commercials, MTV, and "Miami Vice," correspond to a glacial inner space?—Todd Gitlin, "We Build Excitement" ENGL 6480/7480

—I saw Space Age microphotography—designed, we are told, to view the Earth from space—reveal the epidermis of a woman's skin in order to convince us of the positive effects of an antiaging cream. —I saw the three-ply lamination of Glad garbage bags fuse together, set against the backdrop of interstellar space. —I saw Maybelline Dial-a-Lash tubes shoot off from launching pads. —I saw a fashion model, standing on the lunar surface, wear Revlon lipstick said to exhibit "out-of-this-world colors.” —I saw a Technics turntable orbit the Earth. —I saw the Cincinnati Bell logo transformed into a space station. ENGL 6480/7480

—I saw an ad for Always Plus Night Super Maxi Pads depict the feminine hygiene product as a UFO.

ENGL 6480/7480 —I saw a ready-to- assemble "wall system"— labeled, of course, as a "Space Age" product— offer "new heights in organization" and "infinite" possibilities for creativity, solving storage needs by allowing the owner to "fill unlimited space.”

—I saw a United Negro College Fund appeal, showing African-American scholars in graduation robes and mortar boards set against yet another cosmic backdrop. (For, after all, this solicitation for contributions informs us that the mind is as "vast as space.") —I saw Taster’s Choice—like Tang before it—offered to us as the choice of astronauts (the shuttle astronauts in this case). —I saw a spot for Home Box Office show a family in its living room flying through space, watching HBO.—I saw an insurance company's famous "piece of the rock" appear in a cosmic landscape resting on an Earth seemingly without atmosphere (the moon appears only miles away), orbited by a ranch-style, two-stall garage home, a sports car approaching on a highway through space, and a floating sailboat followed by frolicking dolphins—all in keeping with ENGL 6480/7480

the advertisement's promise that "With the Prudential, the sky's the limit.” —I saw cartoon children carried into space by Bubblicious balloon bubbles. ("It tastes so unreal it'll blow you away.”) —I saw, during a decade in which (inspired by Reagan-era deregulation) it became increasingly difficult to distinguish Saturday morning television programming from its advertising, "kidvid" become more and more spacy. (A television critic notes that producers—under the influence of both George Lucas's and Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars"—came to agree that "outer space, high tech and faraway enemies in a distant future are a safer, tidier, less complicated way" to capture an audience (Engelhardt 1986, 88-89). ENGL 6480/7480

—I saw a vacuous blonde, female astronaut in a lunar lander proclaim to her companions, "Go ahead without me. I've got a run!" ("She would have been the first woman on the moon if only she'd worn Sheer Business Panty Hose.") —I saw Timex watches link together to form Star Wars-type spacefighters, accompanied by a montage of images of a man and a woman in space suits on an alien world, while a voice- over tells us that "Timex performs with all the accuracy and beauty of the cosmos.” —I saw a special new antiplaque electric tooth-brush ("Interplak"), bearing a striking resemblence to the starship Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey, majestically dock into its recharger on a bathroom sink—choreographed to a Strauss waltz. ENGL 6480/7480

—I saw a man, traveling through a magically real yet alien landscape (Earth visible on the horizon), have a "vision of the future," not, we are told, of "space travel" or "time machines," but of the financial welfare of his family (through the assistance of Equitable Insurance). Upon his arrival home, he then witnesses his garage door open—like the entrance to the mother ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind—to disclose a blaze of white light out of which emerges a figure we take to be an alien but which turns out in fact to be his daughter, excitedly pronouncing, "Daddy!" ENGL 6480/7480

—I saw woofers and tweeters of a Delco- GM Sound System become a formation of flying saucers beckoning us to "Ride into the Sound Set.”

—I saw a youth, dressed in Levi's jeans, launched toward distant skies while a voice explains that in the famous jeans "the mind knows no limits.” —I saw an ad for a Chevrolet pickup truck instruct us not to "leave Earth without it" and insist that a new model has "brakes so good they're almost extraterrestrial.” —I saw two female astronauts extol the benefits of a new roll-on deodorant called "Real": "We have seen the future and it is Real.” ENGL 6480/7480

—I saw "Almost Home" chocolate-chip cookies float in space in order to optimally display their "almost out of this world" taste.

—I saw a man in a cumbersome space suit EVA into the cockpit of a new Toyota compact and then—so impressed is he with the car—leap in ecstasy out of the frame, beyond the limits of gravity, never to come down. ("Oh what a feeling!") —I saw the new Hyundai Sonata, introduced to us as a "space vehicle," soar off into the cosmos at the commercial's close. ENGL 6480/7480

—I saw an image of a patch of lawn, complete with a house, shade trees, and two family dogs, floating in outer space, evidently removed from the Earth by cutting along a still visible dotted line surrounding the property, advertising the Invisible Fence "dog containment system."

—I saw a solicitation for new members of the National Space Society illustrate its motives and goals through two paintings: The Ultimate Sandbox (by Michael Whelan) showing a little girl in a "Miss Piggy" space suit building a sand castle on the moon; and Leonardo's Finale (by David Brian), in which the great Renaissance man, sitting in his study surrounded by drawings and plans for future discovery, holds a prototype model of the space shuttle in his hands. —I saw three former Apollo astronauts ("Schirra, Apollo 7," "Bean, Apollo 12," "Gordon, Apollo 12"), looking for all the world like has-been athletes, testify—in extreme, unflattering close-ups—that Actifed relieved their snuffy noses in spaces. —I saw an Always Ultra-Thin Panty Liner become an unidentified flying object. ENGL 6480/7480

—I saw a small, evidently sick young girl lying in bed, a thermometer in her mouth, securely wrapped in sheets with a sky and cloud pattern (which, because they fill the frame of the advertisement, make her appear to be floating), reassuringly touch a space helmet—all beneath a headline that reads: "When your little space traveler has a fever..."

ENGL 6480/7480 —I saw both Motorcraft spark plugs and oil filters blast off, as if from launching pad, from the hoods of Ford automobiles toward distant skies.

—I saw the Chevrolet Astro minivan circle in orbit about the Earth and yet (we are promised) still remain small enough to "fit right in your garage!” —I saw—in yet another image plagiarized from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (promoting McDonald's "Spaceship Happy Meals")—children look up at the sky with true cosmic yearning (fantasizing, no doubt, about "flying their spaceships away from a crepuscular Earth"). —I saw a poster in a McDonald's restaurant (advertising a "Space Age Calendar") instruct parents to "help your child into outer space.” ENGL 6480/7480

—I saw the traditional Jewish child's toy top, the dreidel, no longer satisfactory, undergo a Space Age sea change into an "Outer Space Dreidel" (made in Taiwan)—a battery-powered model that not only lights up but "makes outer space sounds!” —I saw, prior to the feature presentation, a short subject, sponsored by theater owners and intended to discourage littering, depict an interstellar cloud of snack bar-debris— popcorn, Raisinettes, straws, nachos, Milk Duds—out of which an exemplary soft-drink cup/rocket speeds toward the brightly lit landing dock of a trash receptacle/space station. —I saw a cartoon Albert Einstein plug the "genius" of Betamax while ensconced in an armchair in a living room floating in the cosmos. ENGL 6480/7480

—I saw a Canon Typestar typewriter blast into orbit ("A new Typestar lifts off"), its "lift-off" correction key in turn lifting off from it, like a communications satellite out of the cargo bay of the space shuttle.

ENGL 6480/7480 —I saw the "baby of today" in the "diaper of the future" (actually old-fashioned 100 percent cotton!) orbit about the Earth in the arms of a New Age father whose legs— evidently his means of cosmic propulsion—dissolve into beams of light.

ENGL 6480/7480 —I saw Concept Custom Length electric guitar strings ("The Final Frontier" in guitar strings) advertised by an image of a spaceman strolling the lunar landscape, an American flag planted in the moon to his left, the Earth visible in the background; and I saw Kahler guitar strings, in comparable "far-out" imagery, become in effect the orbital path of a space vehicle made of tuning pegs.

ENGL 6480/7480 —I saw the Nady Systems Lightning Guitar and Thunder Bass—instruments with "the right stuff"—billed as the first electronic guitars of the Space Age and advertised in copy divided into sections entitled "Countdown," "Liftoff," "All Systems Go," "Ground Control," and "Link Up" and in the usual "product in orbit" imagery; and I saw the Carvin V220 guitar blast off from Earth in an ad whose headline proclaims the instrument to be "One Step Beyond."

—I saw an ad for a Kenwood stereo satellite receiver announce the company's proud claim that "after conquering Earth, we headed into space." (An image from the Japanese science fiction film The Mysterians [1959] appears at the top.) "We've been a force in home and car audio on this planet for over 25 years. But now we're aiming even higher." "Get on board now," we are warned in a class Space Age threat. "Or get left behind.” ENGL 6480/7480

—I saw a space colonist, showered by the spores of a huge, menacing flower on an alien planet, plagued by allergies ("No matter where you go, there's going to be pollen"), at least until he uses Contac. —I saw us encouraged to give to the college of our choice through an image of a young boy in a Day the Earth Stood Still space suit and his dog standing beside a space capsule / doghouse accompanied by the following text: ENGL 6480/7480

Today he's off exploring the back yard. Tomorrow, he may be off exploring new galaxies. But before kids of today can conquer the frontiers of outerspace, they'll have to conquer the complexities of mathematics, physics and chemistry. That's where you come in. For only with your help can they be assured of the first-rate college education they'll need....

ENGL 6480/7480 So please invest in the future. Give generously to the college of your choice. You'll be helping launch America to a successful future.“ Help him get America's future off the ground," the public service advertisement's headline pleads.

—I saw a woman, once "in the dark about blinds," open her Levelors—blinds "enlightened by Space Age technology"—to watch, as if from the Archimedean point, an Earthrise. —I saw a woman in Sheer Energy slippers blast off from the Earth's surface—finally able, with their support, to overcome the harsh demands gravity has placed on her feet and distance herself from its draining effect on her energy. ENGL 6480/7480

—I saw a new breakfast cereal from Ralston-Purina called Freakies—marketed as "multigrain... crunchy honey-tasting spaceships with marshmallow"—offer "out of this world fun with earthly nutrition.”

—I saw the legendary Barbie herself enter into space. "Barbie's on the Moon," proclaimed the cover of an issue of Barbie magazine, and there she was, in her "Astronaut Barbie" manifestation. (Later, in the "Barbie Drama" section, I learned that being the first woman on the moon was all a dream, though a spacy date with Ken at the "Lunar Lounge" made it all come true!) ENGL 6480/7480

—I saw in a Space Age toy store a new line of dolls called the Shimmerons, a species of alien Barbie clones. "Lacy-Spacy—Out of this World... Space Cadets" with spindly bodies and sparkling wardrobes, they have come to Earth—according to their back-of-the package mythology—because our planet offers not only the cosmos' best shopping but also the most awesome parties! ("What on Earth are they doing here? Well the Shimmerons wanted to discover why the Planet Earth is number one for teenage fun, and show you how fun is done on the Planet Shimmeron." "Here on Earth, the Shimmerons are discovering skateboards, hot dogs, rock music, and shopping malls!") ENGL 6480/7480

—I saw us encouraged to "Expect the World of ABC News," for, as their advertisement—showing the Earth from space, coupled with a cosmic telephoto lens and an extraterrestrial Peter Jennings—made clear, the network evidently covers the planet from the Archimedean point. ENGL 6480/7480

ENGL 6480/7480, Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties The Space Age

ENGL 6480/7480, Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties Dr. David Lavery Summer 2015 The Space Age.

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ENGL 6480/7480, Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties Dr. David Lavery Summer 2015 The Space Age.

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