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ANTIDOTE FOR CIVILIZATION

6/15/2009

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He was a French Jewish Marxist in the aftermath of World War II, with a vision of utopian communities spread like seashells across the beaches of the world.

But reality has never been kind to the visions of Jewish Marxists, most notably Karl Marx himself.

So Gilbert Trigano’s vision of Paradise, which came to be known as Club Med, has endured a long and tortured history, not unlike God’s vision of Paradise.

It began on the island of Majorca, across the blue water from the smoking ruins of Europe, as a sanctuary for Holocaust survivors. It was a return to the idea of the Noble Savage: an antidote for civilization, as the tagline would eventually promise. A natural Paradise freed from money, clocks, commercialism and all the other impediments to a life of unfettered joy and sensuality, as expounded by visionaries from Rousseau to Hugh Hefner.

Club Med would be Paradise with a French twist. Food would be exquisite. Wine bottles bottomless. And rather than supervised by resort employees, the place would be a crazy summer camp for grownups, run by gentils organisateurs or GO’s. The wild, handsome bunch of counselors and sun-baked adonises famous most especially to a generation of single women in the 70’s and 80’s. This was to be not just a return to primal paradise. This was la vie fou, the crazy life, French-style: sun, sand, and sea mixed with clowns and circuses and costumed folderol and nutty group singalongs.

The payment, of course was luxury. And for a generation or two of young sensual travelers, summer camp with only nature’s amenities was fine. But people grow up, and demand comfort. And those who enjoy sex on the beach eventually have to cope with the results of sex on the beach.

So Club Med began to target families, the first of many marketing evolutions designed to counter-act a long, downward slide. The problem was inherent in the French soul of Club Med. They were very good at la vie fou. They were not so good at la vie commercial. Indifferent to basic customer service, and flabby in their expansion ambitions, they overbuilt with clubs stretching from Vietnam to Bulgaria to Tahiti, and the money losses flowing like wine. More efficient and disciplined “Anglo Saxon” marketers co-opted the concept, and began offering cheap, all-inclusive beach vacations. Club Med’s visionary DNA evaporated when fighting it out on the travel pages in price-off ads. They had become just another resort.

Further compounding the problem was that in the case of the Triganos, the apple fell far from the tree indeed. When Gilbert’s pudgy, laconic son Serge ascended to the reins of the empire, the downhill slide only intensified.

Serge and Club Med became a notorious nemesis to the advertising world, firing their agencies with the insouciance you flick used Gauloises to the gutter. Almost yearly, they would turn a half a dozen more agencies upside down, as ever new teams of desperate advertising people wooed the brand in crazed, uncompensated pitches. I was personally witness to more than one, eventually being on the winning side and having the opportunity to pen their new tagline, of which I am not especially proud: “Club Med. Life as it should be.” At these pitches, Serge Trigano would sit bored and distracted, puffing on a cigar and delivering for the thousandth time the French grimace of boredom and resignation, as if to say: “I have heard it all, and you are telling me nothing new.”

Eventually, the son of the visionary was tossed out on his derriere, and the head of Disney Paris was installed to bring a business rigor to the fading family empire.

Today, the Wall Street Journal reported Club Med losses of $31 million in the first half of this year alone. And a major investor, Bernard Tapie, is carrying on a public feud with Club Med’s chief executive, the son of former French Prime Minister Giscard d’Estaing.

Gilbert Trigano once said: “Deep within us all is a nostalgia for the lost community of our ancestors.”

The nostalgia remains.

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A DANCETERIA IN THE RUINS

6/11/2009

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It is a danceteria in the ruins of industrial civilization. A nightclub carved in an abandoned tunnel near the West Side highway and called, because we live in an era when iron has given way to irony, The Tunnel.

Once, in a haze of cigarette smoke, nightclub names evoked the exotic worlds of black and white movies: El Morocco. Copacabana. Latin Quarter. Eden Roc.

Now it is 1990, and a super-cool authenticity is found in the detritus of late capitalism: a colossal warehouse of sweat and electronica whose only nod to ancient nightclub glory is the VIP room.

In the VIP room, the A-list slithers in, in all three sexes. A VIP party is taking place, but not an important VIP party, because VIP parties go on in the VIP Room every day. The party is in honor of a half-sister of Liza named Lorna who sings too. Except Lorna is nowhere to be seen. Maybe she doesn’t exist. Or maybe she does, but tonight she is just an imaginary theme, an excuse to hold a VIP party.

At any rate, the A-list slitherers don’t care. They wear their virulent strain of fashion as proudly as they wear the virulent strain of boredom that infects such events, and has since, oh, Max’s Kansas City. They all know each other. They show up in the same circles, parties such as this in places such as this. Parties are the office they go to every afternoon when they wake up.

The lesson of the A-list slitherers is that they are simply functionaries. Flunkies in a marketplace of meanings. Extras in a living commercial for this night club.

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The implied product of parties is happiness, but here in the VIP room of The Tunnel, the total quanta of happiness would not register on an electron microscope. What is taking place is commerce.

The Great Unwashed, whose money will soon be laundered, lays down cash at the door in exchange for a meaning: an experience of cool. The illusion of cool is created by the simple fact that an A-list exists and inhabits a VIP room they are not permitted to enter. Their own exclusion is the product guarantee of authenticity.

Meanwhile, up at the party, the exchange begins.

Lorna, the singing sister, couldn’t care less about the guests at her party, if she’s even there. She trades her slight frisson of fame for an infinitesimal boost to her career.

The slitherers couldn’t care less about Lorna, the singing sister. They trade their aura for a free place to conduct the business of being cool.

The owners of the nightclub couldn’t care less about the singing sister or the A-List. They trade some real estate and free drinks for a VIP room whose sole reason for existence is to create a class of people who won’t be allowed in.

I leave.

The bridge and tunnel crowd have begun assembling outside the Tunnel, lining up on a desolate street to entrust their destiny to a doorman. Some will not merit being admitted into a club that will then not admit them to the VIP room.

Humiliation, desperation, crushing prices and decibels are the payment. The truth embedded in the proposition? Same as it was on the leopard-striped banquettes of El Morocco: Enchantment.

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GIVE ME A HEAD WITH HAIR, OR, THE AGE OF CULTURAL KARAOKE

6/9/2009

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In 1968, the established culture packaged and neutered a revolutionary movement known as Hippies. HAIR opened in lower Manhattan, and long-haired freaks were transported off the squalid streets and mattress-clogged floors of the East Village and onto the stage of the Public Theater, singing and dancing.   He who would blunt the ferocity of a social movement would turn it into a Broadway musical.

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So, HAIR was a subversive cultural movement tamed into art. But, at the same time, it was a tame art form transformed into explosive art.  Broadway musical theater had never seen the crazy spontaneity of a Happening break the fourth wall of a theater. It had never sung and danced its way through a story without a “book” or logical story line. It had never filled a stage with explosions of four-letter words, unclothed bodies, hallucinations and anti-government slogans. Sociology was tamed, but art was energized.

Now we are forty years on, in the time of another unpopular war, and HAIR has been revived.  And it offers to one-hundred-dollars-a-ticket audiences all the revolutionary fervor of an American Idol show. Meaning, it is an act of cultural karaoke. Breaking fourth walls, sex talk and hints of nudity shock no more. The virulent anti-government rhetoric of the Viet Nam era and any semblance of flag abuse have been carefully scrubbed from the script to guarantee that. And The Hippie, once a walking, talking, drugged-out mockery of bourgeois values, is now a cliché suitable for costume parties, along with pirates and Elvis.

“Look, Maude, look at these wild hippies in the Hirschfeld Theater jumping into the audience and shaking their long hair. Look at the three seconds of nudity. Look at those cute anti-war signs. Look at the hallucinations. Isn’t it cute and zesty?”

HAIR wasn’t cute and zesty when it shattered theatrical convention in 1968.  Hippies weren’t cute and zesty when Rado and Ragni turned them into singing dancing clichés in their iconic show.

Of course, what hippies mostly did while conducting their revolution was smoke cigarettes, take drugs, have sex and listen to records. So maybe permanent enshrinement in Broadway theaters was the least unhealthy fate awaiting them.

Give me a head with hair? Please, take it.

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TWO-TONED SPLENDOR

6/2/2009

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He is the head of General Motors.

He is leading America into “...a new economic order, where the bonds of scarcity have been broken, and America is rolling in two-toned splendor to an all-time crest of prosperity.”



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This was 1955. Harlow Curtice was head of General Motors and Time magazine’s Man of the Year. The magazine was ebullient. Soon, it gushed, Americans will need to spend “comparatively little time earning a living.”

Well, it is today, and many people actually are “spending comparatively little time earning a living,” But not from the “crest of prosperity” that was promised.

The “two-toned” splendor” of General Motors turned out to be a planned obsolescence in which cars were designed to conveniently break down in three years. It turned out to be a fight to the death against energy standards, a full-scale assault on safety standards, and the destruction of mass transit and trains. It turned out to be about a trillion lousy cars hot off the assembly lines of Michigan.

General Motors went financially bankrupt this week, following a half a century of just about every other kind of bankruptcy. Time magazine isn’t doing too well, either.


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