The Jukeboxes of Clarksville, Pt. 1

I was saving this to get published somewhere else, but it doesn't seem to quite fit anywhere I'm looking to put it. Besides, it's not like I'm going to get paid for it.

This is a fairly extensive rework of a previously posted blog. This first part should look familiar to people who follow my foolishness, but the next couple installments are substantially new.

Oh, and sorry about double posting the poem, but I decided to leave it in even though it's already here.


The Hut on the Trail West

The Pizza Hut on Lewis and Clark Parkway stands largely silent. In the J-Town Pizza Hut, the jukebox spews top songs until someone ponies up some change to play something different. Here, however, silence is the rule rather than the exception, and the austerity is matched by the empty tables – no grated cheese, no crushed red pepper, no salt, no pepper.

The jukebox is one of those modern CD jobs, 4 plays for a buck, 25 for a five, filled only half full. Lots of cowboy hats, lots of classic rock, that's what this Clarksville jukebox has. Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Seger, Martina McBride, John Mellencamp, John Mayer, and lots and lots of cheap compilations – rap, r & b, rock, country, all straight off the radio . . . the only thing that would earn a worn dollar bill from my pocket is Johnny Cash's 16 Hits.

A couple of the employees are hanging with friends at a corner table. They are loud, but not obnoxious. They are older than average pizza jockeys (this being late afternoon, the kids are in school), of ambiguous age somewhere between a hard-rode 35 and a weathered-but-youthful 48. I jump a little when, from out of nowhere, the jukebox springs to life. It's some generic manicured cowboy hat. As suddenly as the jukebox blares awake, it again falls silent. In the three times I've eaten there, I've heard three songs: two cowboy hats, and one hippie lite jam which I imagine was Dave Matthews . . . it seems no matter how many times I hear Dave Matthews, I never can register how he really sounds.

Driving back to the store at the end of my break, I think about those soldiers who go in before the bombers fly and "paint" infrared tags on the selected targets. I think about calling in an air strike. I am not in a good mood. There's something about Clarksville that makes me feel like Céline (and I don’t mean Dion). It's not like Anderson, which is getting progressively poorer, damaged, displaced, and desperate. Clarksville's not this thing in decay; it's just this thing. There's something about Clarksville that puts my gut on the boil.

Corporate Corned Beef Could Be a Lot Worse Than an Arby’s Reuben Sandwich

It's not as if there's a kosher deli in Clarksville, IN. Far as I know, the closest top-notch deli is Shapiro's in Indianapolis. The Arby's reuben has soggy, processed "marble rye", stringy sauerkraut, flavorless swiss cheese, and corned beef that can be pretty nasty at times. Nonetheless, more often than not, it hits the spot . . . besides, corporate food rules the Lewis & Clark Parkway, so there's not much in the way of competition.

The Arby's also stands out because, unlike most of the other joints on the strip, it actually plays a normal over-the-air local radio station in the dining room. Of course, "local" needs to be segregated out with big-ass quotation marks, since commercial radio is no longer local. The only hint of local flavor is in the advertising, making it local in the crassest of ways. So, you’re sitting there chilling with your reuben, and there's irrepressible chatter, commercials, commercials, commercials, and (theoretically, at least) music. I'm not sure exactly what is what, because it's all woven together in a white-noise-invisible tapestry of blandness, like the swiss cheese and sauerkraut on the reuben. This is what seems to be called Easy Listening (a step blander than Adult Contemporary), though it should be called "I Don't Want Anything Even Remotely Involving to Pass Through My Earholes".

Besides the reubens, the main reason I come to the Arby's is the big front window. It's a grand window, from tabletop to ceiling, with minimal interruption from support pillars or dividers. I chill in the booth with my books, notebooks, sandwich, fries, unsweetened ice tea, and look out the window . . .

And, friends, it is a bleak view indeed. Down at the southwest corner of the dining room, looking up to the northeast, the massive white block overpass of 65 marks the horizon. The rest of the tableau spreads forth like a perspective exercise in an intro to drawing class: streetlights, signs – Hooters, Denny's, Home Depot, h h gregg – concrete, and a wire-crossed sky vast and indifferent. I have often tried to capture the emptiness in words, and even with a camera, but the void escapes my expression.

I have written a chapter of a detective novel staring out the window of Arby's. It will more than likely never be finished, but in it, I (the detective) am a voyeur spying on a banal lover's tryst in the Don Pablo's across the street. The lovers disappear into static air. In reality, everything gets swallowed up & disappears in this landscape.

One day, as I stared out the window, a Dodge Neon pulled up in the lot & kicked me out of my reverie. The Neon was sort of a dust-brazed dull gold color, and it had a spoiler, and a HUGE white Playboy bunny decal taking up most of the back window. A skinny white boy (about 20) rolls out, sporting a wife beater, baggy jeans, and a medium-thin gold rope. He seemed like a nice kid and all; he had his 20 year old wife with him, and a little girl, and he treated them both with obvious love and uncommon respect, but the symbol was still jarring . . . that fucking Playboy bunny, blaring incongruously from the back window of a sad little Neon, an aspiration to a goal simultaneously worthless & unobtainable, a playaz desire to be what his disguised handlers say he should be (though what he really be is cannon fodder in the culture wars), filed & forgotten by the true playaz populating the capitol of this country, a lost boy doomed by a defective cultural marker . . .

Ah, Clarksville. I resist accelerating this strip of mall of a town into a symbol, but it keeps reaching out to me, positing itself as type . . . and it promises nothing but oblivion.

I slouched down to Louisville Derby weekend of '97. I've lived in the Highlands; I now live in Butchertown. The majority of the last ten years I've worked in Clarksville. I’m not slow: it hit me between the eyes as soon as I showed up. From '98:

SPRING, NEAR THE KENNEDY

Rain ankle deep
soaks through holes in shoes.
They're dealing morphine at truck stops in Clarksville -
it's not news, friend,
nothing surprises, and little lives here.
This, then, is the promised land:

cancer as connective tissue,
a facile denial of what is, followed by the
disappearance of is:
a map spread across the passenger seat . . .

here, by this cigarette burn,
an anonymous junction of Interstate 65.
Hell is there, or hell is not.
Stories are told, rich at a dime a dozen:

and a filmist’s manufacture,
an oncologist's atmosphere . . .

and this, the promised land,
blurred with opiates
dispensed like potato chips in the Bigfoot.

I’m not wrong about this.

The Death of Meaning Pt. 2: Whopper Virgins

From Burger King, the people who brought you the advert with the hidden camera footage of people freaking the fuck out when they couldn't get Whoppers, as if that was a good thing:

Calm folk who look (at first glance, I've only seen the ad once or twice) indigenous to the mountains of Peru are pulled into a septic beige room in front of a cheap video camera. Cheap furniture and bad camera angles re-enforce the verite motif of the commercial. The idea is that these folk, who have never had fast food burgers before (hence "Whopper Virgins"), make ideal judges for a fast food taste test. Of course, they choose the Whopper over the Big Mac.

Flawless logic, that. It's just like the last time I watched Throwdown with Bobby Flay, he was challenging this cake master in Brooklyn to a red velvet cake bake-off, and the judges they brought in were diabetic Eskimos in New York for a funeral. Or the time I watched Iron Chef Symon take on Chef Rubino in Iron Chef America's "Battle Rabbit", they brought in a bunch of vegans with the understanding that their fresh taste buds unsullied by animal flesh would be the best palate on which to judge rabbit dishes. It seems that Alton Brown was particularly graphic with his discussions of the various operations performed on the deceased coneys that night - sadist!

Beyond that absurdity, there's the blatant overtones of cultural imperialism: "Here, eat this, it's so much better than all that grain and grass you people eat every day! I mean, on the days you actually do eat, since all you poor people are starving all the time!" It's unbelievable how shameless the ad is - the "moderator" administering the "test" is less a disinterested social scientist than he is drug pusher. And, there is that whole "Whopper Virgin" consignment, which implies that, like a virgin experiencing sex for the first time, the juror/victim is entering a titillating world of pleasure and wonder with his/her first bite of Whopper.

When I first saw it, the image that popped into my mind was the pox-ridden blankets the US government gave the indigenous Americans. Indeed, that beige room, with its simulated distance from the perpetrators of the fraud, is a site of infection, and one imagines that the only way to keep the disease (be it simply fast food, or the whole of American culture) from infecting the juror/victim's culture is to cut out the damaged tissue, or remove the victim from his home.

Perhaps most the appalling thing about these commercials is the cold heart of cynicism which engenders them. We have already declared meaning dead; these hucksters introduce credulity as a replacement for meaning - "we have constructed situation x with internal logic y, and who better than us to know, since we are the ones on your TV?" The Burger King takes the destruction of meaning (the only rebellious act left to the masses) as license to divorce truth from meaning once and for all . . . "see, the room is beige, the camera work is crap, these people are wearing their native costumes, so obviously this is true, even if it is not real" . . .

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If you are writing ads for a fast food joint, you obviously can't say "hey, we know you're a lazy bastard with an appetite and an absolute disinterest in your health, so you may as well stuff your pie hole here", even though that's more or less the clientele you are trying to cultivate. Most Americans are going to eat fast food once in a while, but try to avoid it as much as possible; so in order to come out on top you must reach that clientele that has fast food as their major dietary staple, and make those folk your die-hard customers. There isn't a lot of differentiation in the quality of food between fast food places (barring a few unique items, like the RALLY'S DOUBLE BARBECUE BACON CHEESEBURGER!), so the only way possible to separate your client from that mess is to promote the fetishization of his/her product.

Arby's takes the direct route in their latest commercial: a late-twenties looking guy is laying on his bed in a darkened suburban bedroom, enveloped in an air of giddy anticipation. From behind the bathroom door comes a female voice: "I'm only doing this because it's your birthday" . . . the reference here being sexual, as in the old saw about married guys getting sexual favors from their wives on their birthdays. Anyway, out of the bathroom pops the wife, a cute-in-a-fresh-faced-middle-American-way brunette, wearing a full Arby's uniform and carrying a tray with an Arby's meal to the bed. "Ta-da!" she says, and shoots her hip out almost imperceptibly. A lascivious smile spreads across his lips, he says "Whoa! Me likey!", and a Arby's logo hat springs, boner-like and complete with a "boing!" sound affect, over his head.

Here the confusion between food and sex is much more playful, especially since it doesn't have the subtext of cultural imperialism. The food/sex intertwining is amplified by the American male fetishization of female fast food workers: the woman in the ad is very girl-like and could easily pass for a teenage Arby's worker. A significant portion of the American male population worked at a fast food joint in their teens, and probably had a crush on very similar co-worker at the time. Here the sexual overtones are focused on lost youth and confused with the food on every level possible, making a case for the fetishization of Arby's. And finally, since the sexual overtones of the commercial are so blatant, they subject themselves to the scrutiny of the audience, thereby involving the audience in a decision process, as opposed to burying a Trojan Horse (subtext) in a unidirectional edict (as in the Burger King example above).

Not that Arby's is as pure as the driven snow, but the ad is more like a harmless slightly off-color joke, and less like a cynical attack on the sensibilities of the audience. I actually get a kick out of the ad. Still doesn't make me want to eat at Arby's, but at least it doesn't make me want to boycott them.