At first I treated YouTube like a primitive Tivo and used it for time shuffling. Since I haven’t had cable in a decade, and am way out of the TV-land loop, I was more inclined to tap YouTube for information than for outright entertainment. During the election, I got in the habit of a morning YouTube session in tandem with The New York Times online to check out the latest gaffes, or Jon Stewart making fun of the latest gaffes.
Then I moved into the territory that Chuck Klosterman explores in “Surfing with the Alien” , and began to employ YouTube as a rock and roll archive
(Esquire, 30 November 2006).
I don’t go in for jazz the way he does, but I watched Mick Ronson’s guitar solo in “Moonage Daydream”, and Neil Young and Pearl Jam blasting their way through “Rockin’ In The Free World” at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1993.
I jumped to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young at Big Sur in 1969, and to their ominous, angular version of “Down By the River”. There was Mimi Farina, girls in red robes grooving like lost Tibetan monks, and someone who I thought was Grace Slick in a background shot.
I ended up knee-deep in the strange apocalyptic hopefulness of Jefferson Airplane’s “We Can Be Together”, the one with the lyrics borrowed from the profanely named UAW/MF Lower East Side-based anarchists’ collective.
I was nearly home, at least geographically, but ‘home’ was the New York City of 40 years ago, and I was momentarily freaked out that I was stuck in the afterglow of The Summer of Love for so long, but I trusted it, went with the synaptic flow, and discovered YouTube’s true power. The power not just of the archival, but of verisimilitude and recall— both of real lived, and of somehow fallaciously familiar experiences.
My trip was part the stylized ‘80s flying phone booth of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989), and part the infinitely referential, memory-made-physical of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961). It captured the bright colors, bad hair, and primitive digital beauty of the ‘80s, but also the desperate phantom longing of memory as illusive, fragmentary, and reminiscent of the best science fiction.
The YouTube experience brings to mind the “wall jackers” of Bruce McAllister’s “The Girl Who Loved Animals”, a short story that I read in Strange Days (1995), where Ralph Fiennes fights his way through a millennial apocalypse where people trade in a black market of other people’s memories.
Better than Karaoke
Better than Karaoke
In Routes (1997), his theoretically-inclined book on travel and on the future of anthropology, James Clifford suggests that cyberspace is ripe for fieldwork. The scholar in me agrees wholeheartedly, and suggests, as well, that YouTube and databases such as archive.org, and even The Hype Machine come as close as we’ve ever been to fulfilling the “new grammar” of the web that Steven Johnson suggests in his prescient discussion of hypertext in Interface Culture (1997).
Author: James Clifford
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication date: 1997-04
Length: 416 pages
Format: Paperback
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/c/clifford-routes-cover.jpg It’s not just about empty, non-linear nostalgia. There’s something much deeper happening. What passes initially for “time travel” — in the same way that watching The Breakfast Club (1985) on USA Network on Thanksgiving, or hearing your prom song on the radio 20 years later might — ends up revealing a lot about the workings of memory and our nostalgic drives.
Ultimately, the endless array of mash-ups, videos, film clips, and strangers doing stupid things are important because of what they tell you about you. And because of where they enable you to travel in your own memories. In this regard, the “You” in YouTube is apt.
The YouTube experience, as we move from clip to clip, is revolutionary because it offers us a far more reader-centric approach to narrative than any other textual encounter. In fact, it is larger in scope than any of these science fiction metaphors allow because the stimulation that it provides isn’t ultimately someone else’s, and because we don’t read it empathetically, or engage in any ongoing relationship with plot or character. When we use it, we use it best, to bring us further into ourselves. It’s not ethnography. It’s all about “You”. Even if you never bother to post a clip.
Author: Steven Johnson
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 1997-10
Length: 264 pages
Format: Hardcover
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/j/johnson-interfacecult-cover.jpgNavigating YouTube troubles the discrete boundaries of narrative perspective, and is perhaps the greatest fulfillment of the second person that we’ve yet to come up with. Better than karaoke. Better than Robert Montgomery’s experimental film version of Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake (1947). Better than P.O.V. video games because the composite narrative is yours, truly, and it’s not ruptured by the fact that you’re self aware and confined to the space of an artificially-bounded world.
It is perhaps the closest thing out there to a plausible Choose Your Own Adventure book for adults that keeps the reader adequately sutured into the text:
To go to your freshman year dormitory at University of Delaware in the Fall of 1992 click on “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or Beavis and Butthead.
For the Eighth Grade dance: “Man in the Mirror” and “Treetorns”.
To imagine what life was like before you were born, both literally and conceptually, then select “Jefferson Airplane” and “Embryonic Journey” specifically.
To return to the present, leave YouTube entirely and check out Grace Slick’s MySpace page (yes, it exists, but I’m not going to look at it again long enough to link to it for you).
My Instantaneous Mnemonic Surrogate
“All in the Head” by Wes Black found on Blotter Art.co.uk
My Instantaneous Mnemonic Surrogate
In contrast, Google, like any searchable database, provides us with facts. The fact that sine is opposite over hypotenuse. The fact that Blondie’s Parallel Lines came out in 1978 and not in 1980.
We get narrative too, and it’s often collective, through Wikipedia, for example. But even if it includes photos, sounds, and animation, it is just a conglomeration of multimedia, rather than anything approaching the mnemonic continuity of pure narrative. Google and the rest of the web may be searchable, and they may be nonlinear, but they don’t work the way that we remember experiences because they don’t always provide us with such narrative.
YouTube gives us an instantaneous mnemonic surrogate. Stories, actors, music, graphics, plot, or not. The ability to abort narratives in mid-memory and recast them.
Blondie’s “Union City Blue” offers us the Manhattan skyline and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center as if out of nowhere. Then we’re watching Bruce Springsteen’s “Darlington Country” and listening attentively:
“Our pa’s each own one of the World Trade Centers, for a kiss and a smile I’ll give mine all to you.”
Click. The Who are stealing the show at the Concert for New York City in the wake of 9/11. Roger Daltrey is recasting the anthemic “Baba O’Riley” as comforting, and the cops, the firemen, and John Cusack are enraptured and pumping their fists in the air. Try as I might, it’s impossible to jump to Say Anything (1989).
I watch Pete Townsend work the windmill. He’s subdued, yet still rebelliously powerful, and somehow hopeful, even. Like Tennyson’s “Ulysses” an old punk heading out to sea one more time as the Twin Towers rise symbolically out of the stage lights.
It’s ADD and collective nostalgia in its most extreme, artistic form. It feels random, but if you don’t think about it too much, then a trajectory’s revealed. And like Sam in that lame but thoroughly addictive ‘80s show Quantum Leap, we jump.
One minute Grace Slick is changing the world at Woodstock belting out “White Rabbit” in what feels like the soundtrack to a revolution. Then she’s singing “We Built This City” in a horrid video filled with animation that’s much worse than that of Dire Straits’ contemporaneous, then state-of-the-art “Money For Nothing”.
Grace Slick, like the World Trade Center, is the Hook
Grace Slick, like the World Trade Center, is the Hook
I’m in fifth grade and there’s a certain kind of poetry to the lyrics “someone’s always playing corporation games” and to the chorus “we built this city on rock and roll”, despite the fact that this song reflects the airplane’s final descent. But my mom’s driving us to the pool in her white 1980 Ford Fiesta and my story, and my own memories are foregrounded, and they achieve a velocity that becomes far more important than the archival evidence of the Airplane’s demise.
Grace Slick, like the World Trade Center, is the hook, the mnemonic marker, but my own memories are ultimately more interesting. My trip started out externally-directed, and about someone else’s narrative, or our collective narrative, and it ended up pushing me deeper into my own storehouse consciousness.
I snap out of it, and think about “We Built This City” as a triumphant song in the Journey “Don’t Stop Believin’” vein, and in the moment, in the fifth grade moment, it feels as real and as powerful (because in fifth grade I wasn’t aware of the airplane’s history and formidable back catalog). I flash to a-ha’s “Take on Me”. The video is about a man who’s a race car driver who gets trapped in a cartoon world and can’t get back to reality. Love ultimately saves him. It feels somehow appropriate.
I watch the Challenger explode and I remember being in the cafeteria of James Buchanan Elementary school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania when it happened, and then I search for “Three Mile Island”, the other defining disaster of my childhood, but all I see is a guy driving around the back roads of Harrisburg and listening to Pink Floyd.
I remember when my friends in elementary school where talking about their families’ well-constructed emergency evacuation plans. I went home and asked my mom what our plan was. She said there was our German Shepard, Lydia, my Mom, my dad, my brother and I, my dad’s girlfriend, and her yellow two-seater Karmann Ghia. No other cars ran in our divorced/extended family. So we waited it out and we’re all still here.
A Cardboard Cutout of Debbie Harry
Blondie poster (partial) found on Star Store.com
A Cardboard Cutout of Debbie Harry
Fortunately it’s not all disasters. There’s always Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). Forest Whitaker and Sean Penn. A turn of the metaphorical dial and the massive football star Charles Jefferson and the terminally-stoned surfer Jeff Spicoli are both grown up Oscar winners for The Last King of Scotland (2006) and Milk (2008). I want to get back to the present, or to another present, but I’m momentarily hung up on Milk, the man, not the movie, and I skip to an alternate take on that historical/filmic reality, the earlier documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk (1984).
Only I’m still half-back there with Mike Damone in Fast Times, chatting up a cardboard cutout of my first love, Debbie Harry, as my alternate virtual realities blur together. I think about seeing her and what looked like a Siberian Husky in Hell’s Kitchen last winter.
I watch “Union City Blue” again, and think of her dancing in an orange jumpsuit and sporting the kind of shades that are now sadly commonplace on Bedford Ave. I think about the old docks, the new condos, and a landscape that’s lost and never to be found again regardless of what the economy does next.
Then I think about the World Trade Center again. I remember the comments posted to YouTube by an anonymous user who couldn’t bear to hear Blondie after 9/11. The post said something poetic about the brightness of our time, our band, and our city being shattered.
I remember the urban legend about Debbie escaping from the serial killer, Ted Bundy once in Alphabet City. Back when New York was going to hell, or so I’m told. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, though, everyone seems to look back longingly. I think about the anonymous YouTube user’s quote again, and I feel like I arrived in the city much too late.
I can’t get the quote right, and when I go back to look for it a few days later, the video’s been removed because of copyright. Another one’s sprung up in its place, but the original post, and the collective reflection that’s mixed in with snide comments from bored adolescents who never had their own Debbie, is gone.
YouTube’s Reality & Real Reality
YouTube’s Reality & Real Reality
The ultimate danger is that this vast collective memory will vanish due to failed economic models, despite the fact that we live in an age of cheap gigabytes and infinite redundancy. In this regard, the recent court case in the UK, where videos are being removed, is downright scary. There’s no real market for low resolution clips of ‘80s music videos, film clips, or pop cultural ephemera. They have no value as actual commodities.
I can’t get the quote right. No matter how many times I go back and watch the reposted video. And this quote, the meta, was the only thing of actual value on YouTube, and it’s gone. What’re important are the memories, what they do for us and to us, and the commentary that results from us exploring the past, in real time, together.
YouTube’s reality is mingling uncomfortably with real reality. The side effect is that when confronted with infinite remembering, reality starts to blur. I was online on the anniversary of the night Joe Strummer died. I watched him do a cover of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song”.
Jim Jarmush is in the video by the mural outside of Jesse Malin’s bar Niagara on Avenue A. I watch a pretty punk girl brush past the mural and trace the perimeter of Tompkins Square Park in “Broken Radio”, Malin’s duet with Bruce Springsteen.
I watch “In The Modern World” as well, which starts off with a sex scene in a shower that’s recorded on the sly, and posted to a fitting YouTube parody called “ME TUBE”. The video is refreshingly ‘80s, in that it has a storyline that has little to do with the lyrics, and it’s filled, appropriately, with security cameras, screens, and ample playback.
A few days later I see Jarmush at a falafel shop in the West Village. He’s wearing a Clash “Give Em’ Enough Rope” t-shirt. I’ve just had “Train in Vain” on my iPod. We make eye contact. I want to talk to him, but I’m stuck in meta.
Author: Albert Goldbarth
Publisher: Graywolf
Publication date: 2005-03
Length: 120 pages
Format: Paperback
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/g/golbarth-budget-cover.jpg I think of the girl I was with the night Joe Strummer died. I could Google her, but that seems so passé, and I know where to find her anyway. And in light of YouTube, the whole idea of Googling lost love seems downright Amish. This is no time to be pulling a Nick Hornby and to be having a “what does it all mean” moment. There’s a Brave New World (1932) of history, of other people’s memories, and of my own to explore.
Note: Apologies to the poet, Albert Goldbarth, for starring aimlessly at my bookshelf, and seeing his excellent book of poetry, Budget Travel through Space and Time, and lifting his/alluding to its title at 4AM while writing this. Albert, if you’re reading this, I’m the guy who gave you the ride to Swarthmore College in my Saab a few years back.