In 1999 I wrote two short, topical essays a month for the Web site FEED. I thought, then, that I'd re-examine these pieces a year later to see what had been on my mind and to see if I still agreed with what I'd written. Here they are. Take a look at my 1999 Journal for this month, below, and join me in the Wicked Pavilion to discuss it.

December 3, 1999

Thanks to noted feminist Susan Faludi, many of us had begun to feel sorry for Sylvester Stallone. "I feel like the case of the Greek persona wearing the mask," Stallone mumbled to Faludi in her recent book, Stiffed. "And he takes it down, and you don't recognize who this person is—I don't exist. It's like people see right through me." The multimillionaire actor/director is trapped in a body so perfect that, as he explains, "it's like the orchid; it's so gorgeous, but it's a parasite. It lives off of everything but what it is." Pretty deep stuff, but recently Stallone's classical references have gone from charmingly inappropriate to frighteningly telling. A lawsuit brought earlier this week against Stallone by former employees—who claim that his wife imposed "odious" household rules upon them—suggests that the Italian Stallion has come to think of himself as a Greek god.

Four years ago, around the time Judge Dredd was jet-packing its way into the hearts of dozens, Stallone's wife Jennifer Flavin warned five temporary cooks and cleaners at her Miami estate they could be fired if they failed to "back out and vanish immediately" whenever her husband entered the room. Nor were they ever permitted to look directly into the eyes of the lord of the manor. Weird? Not to those of us who've already noticed the startling resemblance between Stallone, circa his reactionary Rambo trilogy, and the muscular, hirsute statue of the Greek god Eros displayed in the Vatican. According to myth, Eros—who, like John Rambo, goes around armed with a bow, unerring arrows, and a flaming torch —didn't allow mere mortals to look at him, either. In fact, when Psyche (the personification of the human soul) sneaked a peek at Eros in his bedroom, she was driven from the mansion by Eros' jealous mother/companion Aphrodite. Paging Joseph Campbell!

Actually, we should probably page Dr. Freud, who found the myth of Psyche and Eros as compelling as the legend of Oedipus. Perhaps Freud would have seen Stallone as soulless Eros, living a shallow, narcissistic existence, making himself and others miserable. (Stallone's choices of film roles would seem to make him more of a Thanatos figure, you say? You sense more death than love? You must not've caught his first film, the 1970 porno Party at Kitty and Studs/The Italian Stallion.) Flavin, for her part, would certainly make a good Aphrodite. Just as Eros' beautiful mother tried to destroy the mortal interloper Psyche by setting her odious tasks, fashion model Flavin requires the servants to undergo daily searches, won't let them eat or drink in the mansion, and forces her maids to check guests' suitcases "to see if they took towels or silverware." Until Stallone/Eros stops allowing Flavin/Aphrodite to block his access to ordinary mortals/his own soul, Freud might well conclude, he will never become fully human.

But has Stallone ever been fully human? Psyche spies on Eros, according to the myth, because she's afraid he might be a beast—a frightening winged serpent. Indeed, in Freud and Man's Soul, the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim explains that as long as Eros is estranged from that part of himself which is most human, he will always appear grossly sexual or monstrous. Isn't this exactly what Stallone complains about—that for every nuanced Cop Land performance he turns in, he's forced to slug his way through five Rocky pictures? Come down off Olympus/Planet Hollywood and make another Paradise Alley, Sly! You can start by letting the staff look at you.

December 17, 1999

The original Luddites missed their target. They "acted like bulls, hypnotized not by the flashing red cape but by the whir of machinery," lamented political philosopher Sebastian de Grazia in his 1962 masterpiece Of Time, Work and Leisure. "All the while the real enemy, the matador, was there behind, silent, imperturbable: the clock on the wall." So it's not "technology" which makes us less human, de Grazia argued persuasively, but clock dependence; that's why "the free professionals today are envied, because their time is not clocked off like industry's." Likewise, in Keeping Watch: A History of American Time, (1990) historian Michael O'Malley predicted that computers, fax machines, and telephones would one day make office work at home a realistic possibility, thereby moving society "away from clocks and watches and back toward nature's example." Unfortunately for the hopes of these thinkers, a report in the Boston Globe's business section this week suggests that "free professionals" may never again be off the clock.

Two Massachusetts companies are racing to produce the equivalent of time clocks "that can keep track of you wherever you might be," the author of the Globe article reports enthusiastically. Responding to a work force increasingly composed of contractors, part-timers, mobile workers, telecommuters, and home-based workers—many of whom have opted to work off-site because they long to proceed at their own pace—companies like Kronos, Inc. and Simplex Time Recorder Co. have developed systems which "extend" out to the individual employee. Kronos, for example, advertises a suite of products and services providing "solutions that touch every facet of the employee's workday, and offer senior management visibility to performance across the enterprise." Translation? You can run, but you can't hide.

By the 1910s in this country, the pre-eminent time-and-attendance office equipment company was the International Time Recording Company (later known as IBM), whose catalogues warned employers against "evanescence"—time's fleetingness. Around this same time, Frederick W. Taylor, the father of scientific management, helped pioneer techniques by which employers could capture basic labor data, and transform it into information that could "improve work force productivity and the utilization of labor resources." This last phrase comes not from Taylor, however, but from Kronos' Web site, which promises to help managers know exactly which jobs its so-called free professionals are spending time on, as well as how efficiently those jobs are being performed. Thanks to applications which require, for example, that employees who work off-premises dial in the start and stop times for each and every task they perform, Kronos and Simplex (a company founded by Edward G. Watkins, one of the first time-clock patent-holders) have extended Taylorism to its final frontier: the home office.

In a way, this development is actually a good thing. When Situationist Guy Debord wrote in The Society of the Spectacle that the rich occupy "historical" time, in which new things can happen, while the poor are constrained by "cyclical" time (the sweep of a clock's hands), in which the same things happen over and over again, he never meant to imply that off-the-clock telecommuters enjoy the "lazy liberty" of the rich. But well-meaning theorists like O'Malley and de Grazia, by suggesting that those of us who aren't directly subject to clock time are somehow exempt from discipline, surveillance, and control, have contributed to this illusion, haven't they? So let's thank Kronos and Simplex for reminding us that even if the staunchest freelancers among us had temporarily escaped the clutches of Taylorism, no one who works for a living is ever really free.

Illustration by Freyja Balmer