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.

July 2, 1999

Berlinologists have often suggested that Germany's postwar generation is not only too guilt-haunted to create strong artistic statements, but that because Berlin's creative types were scattered and killed during the Nazi era, it still feels like the city's culture is starting over from scratch. Maybe this explains why infamous German director/provocateur Christoph Schlingensief's plan to toss 100,000 marks (about $53,000) off the Reichstag tonight, as a "special tribute to capitalism," fails to impress. Schlingensief, whose Weekend-like splatter films German Chainsaw Massacre (1990) and Terror 2000 (1992) satirized the contradictions and problems of his country's unification process, has announced that tonight's performance will prove that "Money is the only thing that really gets people moving." Whatever. Been there, done that!

When Yippie! co-founders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin scattered dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange back in '67, "stockbrokers scrambled over the floor like worried mice, scurrying after the money," Hoffman recounted in his autobiography. "Greed had burst through the business-as-usual façade... The sacred electronic ticker tape, the heartbeat  of the Western world, stopped cold." In a chapter entitled "Money Is Shit," Rubin's 1970 manifesto Do It! concurs that "like wild animals, the stockbrokers climb[ed] all over each other to grab the money." Rubin riffed that "People don't do what they dig because they want smelly money... If the Beatles listened to their own music, they would burn all their money." Will Schlingensief be able to top this kind of rhetoric? Actually, he probably doesn't intend to: the other half of his slogan for tonight's event is "Save capitalism, throw the money away!" Easy enough, since the money is being donated by Schlingensief's sponsor, the Deutsche Bank. Just what kind of guerrilla theater is this, anyway?

It doesn't seem likely that tonight's happening will emulate what Hoffman described as his "TV-age version of driving the money changers from the temple." It may be instructive, then, to re-visit yet another money-throwing performance piece. Just two years after the Yippie invasion of the Stock Exchange, the film version of Terry Southern's The Magic Christian suggested that at least one of the Beatles actually had listened to his own music... or had at least read Do It!. Starring Peter Sellers as the world's wealthiest man and Ringo Starr as his protégé, Magic Christian ends with the spectacle of pinstriped businessmen diving for (literally) "smelly money" in an enormous vat of shit. Southern's novel—written in 1960 while the Yippies were still boning up on their Abraham Maslow—may use rituals of defilement to mock the greed of the capitalist system, but it stops well short of counterposing any high-minded hippie values. The Stock Exchange was political theater; the vat of shit just a cruel demonstration of how people will do anything for money.

Is Schlingensief, who was born the very year The Magic Christian was published, a latter-day Yippie or just another mean-spirited performance artist? His "Chance 2000" Partei der theatralischen Revolutionäre, which—employing slogans like "Elect yourself," and "Confess that you exist"—almost got him elected to the Bundestag in 1998, might suggest the former. But his post-election appearance before audiences in Berlin—draped in a Jewish prayer shawl and brandishing the taxidermied corpses of a rabbit and a badger—suggests the latter. Perhaps tonight's cultural presentation will answer the question once and for all.

July 20, 1999

Hearst Magazines has announced that next year they'll begin publishing an uplifting women's monthly, one devoted not just to fashion and beauty but also to spirituality, community, and books. Its premiere issue will have a tremendous print run of 850,000, thanks to the star power of Oprah Winfrey, who has agreed to allow Hearst to "translate Winfrey's message of encouragement and inspiration to the magazine page." Uplift is in, it seems, since Hearst's Talk magazine—co-published with Miramax's Talk Media—has, in these past several months leading up to August's launch, transformed itself from the provocative, upscale gossip rag that it was initially touted to be into an enlightening, democratic "dialogue of the American culture." Ugh. Do people really want more middlebrow? Why can't Tina and Oprah stick to the lowbrow divertissement they do best?

Playing to America's self-image as an ongoing experiment in democracy, one conducted by free and open conversation among citizens, could be regarded as a cynical marketing strategy coming from Brown, who—along with her pal Martin Amis, who's just signed a major book/article/screenplay contract with Talk Media—is British. Much more at issue, however, is the convergence in these inescapable glossies of two different, but equally pernicious, styles of middlebrow. Surging up from talk-show television, Oprah wants us to read books that are literary but not too difficult!, and that contain messages of "internal well-being." Hurled to earth like lightning bolts from the Olympus of New York's media elite, Tina's middlebrow teaches us the proper attitude (part reverence, part amusement) to have toward high culture, without demanding that we actually engage with culture directly. Middlebrow, which substitutes spirituality for religion, sentiment for emotion, and upliftment for inspiration, will soon form a pincer—mercilessly squeezing any real intellectual effort, or emotion, out of their audiences.

Speaking of phoniness, the manner in which both Oprah and Tina have been seeking to exploit the much-hyped interactivity of web-based publications for their decidedly offline efforts is equally aggravating. Oprah's magazine, we're informed, will "provide some format for readers to interact with her." And Tina, according to one interview, wants her magazine "to have the feeling of the voices of the Web"—voices which are honest, personal, and unmediated. Now, we're all waiting for a new print magazine to do this, but it won't happen here. Oprah's much-touted empathy is relentlessly inner-directed: remember when she burst into tears while interviewing the coach of Columbine High's forensics team, because "I was on the forensics team, too"? And although buzz, the thing Tina is so good at generating, may in fact be a form of verbal exchange, dialogue it most definitely ain't.

But apparently this kind of criticism is taboo now. Even formerly skeptical media critics have taken to making cynical predictions that their colleagues will hate Talk (initial circulation: a mere 500,000), not because the very idea of a magazine whose sole purpose it is to generate pre-optioned film and TV ideas is repellent, but just out of viciousness and envy. Perhaps we've all been infected by the disease carried by Oprah, who declared several years ago that "I am not going to be able to spend from now until the year 2000 talking about dysfunction," and then inked a deal with Starbucks to have them sell her favorite pseudo-literature in their pseudo-writerly coffee-shops. Call it "millennial middlebrow." Unlike Y2K, it really is coming.