Bloggrokker (Scott) 9/12

Here we are, the week of the fifth anniversary of 9/11, and I can't seem to rid my mind of a cornball pop mess called the Pussy Cat Dolls.
Don't worry. It's all very postmodern.
There's an odd linkage here. To understand it, or at least recognize it, grill me with the post-millennial JFKer: Do you remember what you were doing when it all happened?
Me? Half-awake, the remnants of a cherry Pop-Tart gritting my teeth, half-watching the Today Show. Matt Lauer, aka The Hairplug from the Black Lagoon, interviewing some guy who wrote a book about his dead cat. Lauer interrupts the dead cat guy, rudely and comically as if he'd like to say "I could care less about a dead cat," grabs his ear-mike, and informs everyone with his flattest deadpannery that a plane has just hit the World Trade Center.
Looking back at it now, it seems the height of absurdity, hence its postmodernity, something as fluffy and meaningless as some poor schmuck's dead cat book suddenly railroaded by history-in-the-making screaming for the media's attention. Postmodern fluff and meaninglessness knocked aside by a postmodern moment in history.
Pussy Cat Dolls, you ask?
Timewarp to this past weekend. My twelve-year-old niece is listening to American Top 40.
There's a new #1 hip-grinder, "Buttons" by the aforementioned Pussy Cat Dolls.
I really don't know what the linking "cat" significnce is, some guy's dead cat book and a feline fetisherie of a pop gaggle, other than one fell on 9/11 and the other on that terrible day's fifth anniversary. It's weak. It doesn't matter. What does matter is "Buttons" itself.
It's a mid-tempo dance-tune sonically bedecked in sampled Middle-Eastern instrumentation. If I were one among the conspiracy theoristas I'd probably say something left field here regarding the record industry's complicit involvement in 9/11. I'm not a conspiracy nut, though--although I do believe conspiracy theories are serpentine po-mo mythologies, but that's a thread for a different blog entry. So I'll just say this:
As a dance hit, "Buttons" dances a very Lyotard-esque jig. It reappropriates the cultural instrumentation and sonic qualities of a region of the globe the current US administration has taken great and rather clumsy strides in demonizing. In doing so, "Buttons" removes a highly peripheral element of the 9/11 attacks--an aspect of the culture from the terrorists' homeland--and re-shapes it into a commodity. I see this as Lyotard's idea of capitalism derealizing familiar objects. In this case, the familiar object derealized is the burning-then-collapsing Twin Towers. Ergo, through its status as a derealizing commodity, "Buttons" joins the ranks of all the 9/11-spawned purchasable paraphernalia: movie tickets to Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, American flag stickers, History Channel 9/11 retrospective video transcripts, and untold stacks of uber-patriot and Moe Howard lookalike Sean Hannity's books.
And what better, what more pleasurable--pleasure deriving from pain, and 9/11's chock full o' pain, isn't it?--way to derealize than through a dance-tune. Everybody waaah-tusi!!
Then again, I probably wouldn't feel this way about this bubbleheaded pop ditty if it hadn't topped the charts the week of 9/11's fifth anniversary. Conspiracy to capitalize on a tragedy?
Ordinarily I'd finish up the entry here, but I've got a few more po-mo-ish things to say regarding 9/11 I've gotta get outta my system, and they might be kinda crazy.
If, as some postmodern thinkers like to say, we are truly living in an age where anyone can be an artist, what does this say for the hijackers and the media regarding 9/11?
There's the traditionalism vs. avant-gardism argument of Habermas. Can Mohammed Atta and his suicidal entourage be seen as avant-gardists? In their destruction of such massive architecture, they definitely accomplished something original, as opposed to those traditionalists who simply admired the urban aesthetics of the World Trade Center and perhaps imitated, i. e. payed homage to, some of its architectural grandeur.
I'd find difficulty stating this claim were it not for the existence of such underground bands as Einsturzende Neubauten--whose Teutonic moniker translates as Collapsing New Architecture. EN reappropriates jackhammers, power-drills, sheet-metal, old bicycle frames, and, in one instance, a highway underpass as instruments, their motto being "Without Destruction There Is No Creativity." Yes, the aesthetics of destruction are in full flower.
And then there's Lyotard's opinion stating "artists and writers should be assigned the task of healing the community." Concerning 9/11, has the media risen to this task? From ABC to CNN to, yes, even Al-Jazeera, images of the collapsing Twin Towers is in constant heavy rotation, forever concreting the waning of effect, deadening the impact, mediating the event, medicating the masses--healing the community. Is the media an aggregate Lyotard-esque artist?
And now for the weird stuff.
Call it the sexual politics of 9/11.
Picture the World Trade Center before the fall. Think of Jencks's anamnesis. What does it bring to mind? To my mind it brings the image of two giant legs--sultry, sleek female legs, the supersleek glass-and-steel facade helping out a lot here. Then picture the airliners hitting--they both hit near the top, more or less. Keep thinking on a level of anamnesis--what do the crashing airliners bring to mind? For me its the image of seeds hitting and infernally impregnating up near the tops of the architecturalized legs, the legs collapsing as if in ecstasy, everything shattering and exploding, birthing a black cloud of debris and ruination, birthing a heightened epoch in the Postmodern Age.
Postmodernism is, after all, about breaking things down.