33 1 3 022 R.E.M's Murmur J Niimi (pdf)

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.Back in my hometown of Chicago, the city’s boomera is only visible when you weave your way through theskyline and into the heart of the Loop, where compara-tively short early skyscrapers like the Monadnock andthe Reliance building are buried in the shadows of their• 80 •MURMURsoaring 70s legacies like the Sears Tower and the JohnHancock building.Unlike Chicago—the other twentieth-century American city that emerged from a nineteenth-century conflagration—Atlanta’s boom era is laid plaineven fifteen miles away.From the top of Stone Mountain,the city’s coppered-glass towers capture the sun, radiatinga sense of the New South, where, through money andmedia and market expansion, the South remade itself inReagan’s image, his new sense of national pride, muchas Chicago had made itself in the image of the East atthe turn-of-the-century with the blood of cattle, versusthe blood of the slave.Atlanta’s skyline is orange, thecolor you get when you mix amber waves of grain withblood.Coke was a benign world emissary, and CNNshaped its trajectory.It was through this new 24-hourworld of media representation, the gleaming prestige offlagship products, and the seamlessly eternal Reagan pres-ent that Atlanta found a way of unbridling itself from itsdark past over the course of the 80s.Political historianHaynes Johnson describes the new media culture underHigh Reaganism in his book Sleepwalking Through History: In the eighties Ronald Reagan and television fittedinto American society like a plug into a socket.To-gether they produced a parade of pleasing images thatglowed in more and more living rooms and affectedthe country like little that had gone before.Hegoverned through the eye of the camera and by usingdevices of the entertainer.Reagan was perfectlysuited for the role of master entertainer and for fulfill-ing a public need for reassurance.Unfailingly he sentforth the message that people wanted to hear: Better• 81 •J.NIIMIdays were ahead; national pride had been rekindled,faith in the future restored.News was no longer bad;it was something to celebrate.It was “morning againin America.” He was the Sun King, presiding electron-ically over the new national celebration from theWhite House.Under his reign, all lines blurred: newsand entertainment, politics and advertising.In thetelevision age Reagan was right for America, andAmerica was ready for him.In the 80s, Atlanta was a crucible of old and newculture meeting old and new money, where past (andcurrent) transgressions are forgiven in the spirit of prog-ress and assimilation.In the 80s, it longed to be America’squintessential Calvinist metropolis, where piousness ismeasured not in deed but in a Milton Friedmanesquefaith in free markets.Where trickle-down economics arethe finest expression of the Protestant ethic and the spiritof capitalism.Atlanta was an idea, or series of ideas, madematerial, much like Murmur.***Halfway between Stone Mountain and the depths of Levi-athan, on the leafy outskirts of Atlanta, lies the unassum-ing suburb of Decatur (Michael Stipe’s birthplace) andthe main campus of Emory University (Peter Buck’s almamater).It’s a train stop removed from the center of thecity that once called itself Terminus, the last stop onthe Atlantic railroad, the place where train tracks andNorthern capital ended.It was the furthest I could go as• 82 •MURMURwell, the most distant retreat I could find from the stulti-fying Chicago suburbs.My living quarters were near a Confederate holdoutfrom the Civil war, along Peavine Creek, a shallow brooknamed for kudzu’s botanical cousin.Worn down throughsoil and clay, the stream bubbled over rocks and pebbles.You could hear it at night through an open window.Thehouse I lived in was a rundown ex-fraternity house plantedalong the side of the gully; one story spread vertically, like many Georgia houses that transverse the uneven ground.The lower parts of its outside walls were stained thestucco orange of spattered clay.A rail line followed theleafy ridge that ran behind the house, with the creekdown in front just beyond the road and woods beyondthat [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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