The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness by Rebecca Solnit Read Free Book Online Page A

but not just to wait for it. Sometimes you have to become the unexpected, as the young heroes and heroines of 2011 have. I am sure they themselves are as surprised as anyone. Since she very nearly had the first word, let Asmaa Mahfouz have the last word: “As long as you say there is no hope, then there will be no hope, but if you go down and take a stance, then there will be hope.”
    March 2011

RATTLESNAKE IN MAILBOX
    Cults, Creeps, California in the 1970s
    It’s true what you heard about macramé. Partly some mutant version of a craft tradition and partly something for the fidgety hands and wandering minds of the drugged, macramé was also the means to create harnesses from which a million planters were hung from a million ceilings to create gratuitous clutter. You can think of macramé as some vernacular extension of 1960s soft sculptures by Bruce Conner, Eva Hesse, Robert Morris, and Claes Oldenburg, but its aesthetics had grown monstrously. There was something quintessentially 1970s about these pendulous burdens—obscuring views and dripping foliage—something that tied them to the fern bars of the era and to the overall aesthetics of horror vacui. This era of shag rugs and feather-bedecked roach-clip hair ties rivaled the Victorians when it came to clutter, ornament, jewelry, print, pattern, texture, flourish, tassels, fringes, tendrils, frizz, dangly bits, lace, laces, buttons, and other distractions for the eye.
    Dangling, creeping plants were at the heart of 1978’s definitive film, Phil Kaufman’s horror movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers , filmed in San Francisco. Donald Sutherland as the restaurant-inspector-turned-alien-detective walks into Brooke Adams’s house and finds a clone of her growing in a lush, damp sort of greenhouse alcove full of plants; later Jeff Goldblum is cloned in a bathhouse, also full of houseplants. San Francisco’s hills, trees, fog, and intricate Victorian gingerbread houses suit the film’s sensibility. In one scene, a teacher out with some small children in a park near the Haight-Ashbury ominously encourages them to pick the pretty flowers and take them home. Eleven years earlier Los Angeles’s Mamas and the Papas had sung “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair),” promising the city would be full of gentle people, a “love-in.”Now the flowers were monstrous and the emotions were null. Technically the threat in Invasion of the Body Snatchers is colonizing plants from a destroyed planet, but the film makes an allegory of the fuzzy thinking, fuzzy surfaces, spreading tendrils, and labyrinthine passages that were both the culture and the landscape of San Francisco during the late 1970s. In other words, the city—and by extension, the world—is being eaten by the counterculture; and being taken over by the pods turns people into affectless ambulatory vegetables.
    Blank is the word that comes to mind for this condition, though blank also sounds like a refreshingly uncluttered surface in that context. Blankness calls up Richard Hell and the Voidoids’s anti-anthem of the year before, “Blank Generation.” Punk rock arrived like a machete in the jungle, hacking at all that stadium rock, chopping the tendrils, paring away everything unnecessary and slicing down to the rage, the indignation, the energy, and the essence. The jungle was the meandering, woolly, over-decorated excesses rock-and-roll had sunk into during the 1970s—the fourteen-minute tracks, the long instrumental solos, the excess of studio polish, the pointlessness of songs about bored decadence and sybaritic luxury, the stale formulas. The Eagles’s 1977 hit “Hotel California” was a flawless piece of craftsmanship, but it was about upscale fatalism and gilded cages, about the hotel you can check into but never leave. It sounded as though Joan Didion had started writing lyrics. As Don Henley sang, “They stab it with their steely knives, / But they just can’t kill the