Grasping in the Dark

Bulletin, 2010

In my hand, I hold a tiny, sleek device that promptly delivers my junk mail, Facebook updates, texts, and tweets with a delightful, cheery chirp. On my lap, a computer delivers to me on-demand music, anthologies of obscure and popular TV shows and endless sites to entertain me for hours. I love this. However, I have noticed a peculiar trend.

Clustered within the labyrinthine stacks of the legendary Powell’s bookstore, I stumbled upon the merchandise. Among the mounds of stuff, a laptop case caught my eye. Emblazoned on the front of the otherwise plain case was an inky, black drawing of an old-fashioned typewriter. Next to these cases were similar ones for an iPod, with old-fashioned gramophones drawn on the covers. Above the cases, a placard stated that they were called “Luddite Cases.” Below that, it gave a description of the Luddite Movement, which was an attempt by 19^th-century Brits to combat the (as they saw them) degrading forces of the Industrial Revolution.

The Luddites fought to destroy the means by which the Industrial Revolution affected their lives, largely focusing on the terrible conditions within the textile mills of the day. Their mission included destroying the mill machines they felt were ruining their society. Today, we romanticize the past in commercial products, and various cultural anachronisms are held in high esteem. Unlike the Luddites, however, we want to have our cake and eat it, too. Rather than destroy our iPods or our laptops (which, I don’t actually believe would solve much), we merely place them in handy, trendy, uber-expensive cases that reference nostalgia for a “simpler time.”

For just twenty-four dollars, I can, without kidding, listen to my iPod while simultaneously protecting it from the elements in that says I prefer to sit in the parlor and drop the needle on the gramophone to rock out. But the harking back to a history that perhaps never existed doesn’t stop with bags and cases. We don’t want to experience life as it was; we want to experience life suspended between then and now. Our cultural phenomena suggest both an embittered grasping towards a festishized history, and an utter dependence on and connection to modern accoutrement. Someone put the second part of the equation to me as, “becoming a society of people who think milk is made at the store.”

The trend of simultaneous entrenchment and refutation of technological reality seems to be built on one thing: realness. In a world where entire histories of conversation can be deleted with one stroke of a key, pictures only exist in clickable albums, and a physical letter in the mail is both alarming and alien, we grasp for a tangible reality—a realness we can feel. While binary, html, and the movement of electrons across millions of miles of wire mean something, they simply aren’t real. We are quick to make a fetish out of things that are handmade, vintage or in some way more tangibly individual than anything else, but we also want these things and our technology too.

One example of this is the idea of a “ranch vacation,” wherein the traveler can head to remote Montana or Wyoming to “work” on a ranch and see “Western frontier” life. Like the pioneers we are so quick to romanticize, we can ride a horse around a farm for a week and call it

ranching. Of course, few of those vacationers actually want to partake in the backbreaking, time-consuming and often exponentially unpleasant duties that go into running a working ranch. Likely, no one feels the urge to assist in the unseemly task of pulling a stuck calf out of a birthing cow or, gasp, actually kill an animal in an up-close realization of the circle of life. No, thanks, we would rather just watch the Lion King.

I assume these vacations are fun, and, if Montana is universally like any part I’ve seen of it, stunningly beautiful. However, when can we admit to ourselves that we just want to feel something real? One of the most popular Montana vacation ranches, Montana Bunkhouses, promises eager travelers “a real experience with real people.” This taste of “reality” can be tailored just the way we like it to fit our desire for immersion. On their homepage, Montana Bunkhouses suggests, “Those seeking adventure may sign up for authentic cattle drives, trail rides, or a pack trip. Others may prefer to ride in the pickup and visit with the rancher on daily rounds to feed and care for livestock.” Experience the thrill of a day in the saddle amidst a herd of horned bovines…or hop into the Dodge Ram and throw some silage into a trough.

Another example of this is the growingly popular TLC show “BBQ Pitmasters.” This show focuses on a group of traveling barbequers as they compete in contests nationwide. In a world of plastic food, drive-thru windows and preservative-packed microwave meals, it makes sense that we are drawn to a style of cooking that references an older era we imagine to be the epitome of masculinity. We imagine the BBQ Pitmasters as modern tribal nomads, cooking large quantities of raw meat over an open flame. Proving our reliance on the machinery of modernity coupled with our longing for a realer past, the show uses the technique and technology of today, while still paying homage to primal cooking. In each episode, the barbeque masters use state-of-the-art grills, high-tech culinary technique and sophisticated sauces while still connecting to the metaphor of the man cooking his kill over an open fire. The show’s popularity represents another fusion of our desire to return to realness while retaining the equipment of today.

On a smaller scale, I find myself involved in this exact sort of charade as I make the trek to Greenbluff every year. Often in the weeks leading up to Halloween, I look down upon those who buy their pumpkins at Safeway. Pshaw, how can they not go pick their own? I ask myself, my theoretical arm tiring from mentally patting myself on the back for getting a “real pumpkin.”

Aside from finding an excuse to eat two pieces of pie in one meal, I find myself wanting to return to Greenbluff because it seems more real. Somehow picking a pumpkin in Northern Spokane, where a docile pygmy goat sulks in a square cordoned off by chicken wire allows me to buy into the ruse that I am experiencing the season. Being at Greenbluff gives us, the idea of realness—touching, smelling, seeing and hearing the sounds of the season—no matter how canned they may be.

On the occasions that I darken the door of the gym, I am mesmerized by the Expresso Fitness Bikes. On these popular bikes, one can set the screen to project a mountainous trail, a grueling street climb or a dirt path. Granted, the snowy Spokane winter prevents much in the way of bike riding any time between November and March, but these machines may very well be the embodiment of the trend. We love the fact that we can ride a bike in a warm room at the gym, but we also want to pretend we are on a mountain trail, making the competition more real. With their computerized pacers, pixilated landscapes and rising popularity, these bikes give us exactly what we want—modern technology with a hefty homage to a glorified tangibility.

In the debate surrounding our place in the trajectory of history, we find ourselves in a proverbial no-man’s-land. We are not firmly planted in modernity, as we suffer from an undeniable discontentedness spurred by historical anachronism. However, we cannot claim full post-modernity as we are still indelibly tied to the technology that is paramount to material modernity. Perhaps the person who buys a pumpkin at Safeway hasn’t given up, they simply don’t buy into the sort of one-foot-in philosophy of things like Greenbluff, Luddite cases, Expresso Fitness bikes and Montana Bunkhouse vacations. Some of us are not so lucky and we find ourselves stuck in the middle, caught between the nebulous reality we experience and the yearning for a concrete reality we want.