Customer Reviews

The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink

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Dery's initial metaphor--Coney Island as controlled chaos, an irruption of social taboos--sets the theme for this collection of essays exploring the fin de millenium American turn toward the countercultural, the outcast, the obscene,the pacifying. Exploring the place of Disney, talk radio and television, technology, Heaven's Gate, the Unabomber, aberrant art, freak culture, carnival celebrations and other social expressions beyond the pale, Dery suggests that in the century since Coney, America continues to indulge the dark and the chaotic, but it does so now in tones suggesting resignation more than despair. Suggesting a dialectic reaction, Dery posits the angst of postmodern American as a response to the loss of meaning and control that pervades its society. Gated communities attempt to carve out islands of control amidst urban terror; Disney offers a world whose simplicity and comfort counter the misshapen reality about us; all the while underground art movements aggressively mock corporate values. And for good measure,Dery is a scintillating writer, tossing off well-turned phrases and allusions that both entertain and clarify. A stimulating compilation of writings.

I heard Dery interivewed on KPFK in Los Angeles, and wondered if he was as gleefully subversive, jarringly insightful and downright hilarious in print. I wasn't disappointed! Imagine a brains-sloshing rollercoaster ride where your IQ is ten points higher--rather than lower--when you disembark. That's what you're in for.

austro@excite.com

I found that this book captured near perfectly the sense of hyper-reality and unease that grips our civilization at the close of the millenium. With a series of at-first seemingly disconnected images, Dery weaves together a coherent and prismatic image of what America means in an age when meaning is equated with mere image. This is an author who is a journalist in the highest sense of the word, bringing the reader to a fresh understanding of the common everyday world which surrounds us all.

I whole-heartedly recommend this work.

Journalist Mark Dery offers a collection of essays that speak to the pre-millennial tension that each of us - from the gun- and food-hoarders to the cybergeek - likely feels to some degree. The book's title and ostensible theme are based on a comparison of postmodern America to the United States a century ago, when amusement parks like Coney Island ushered in a strange and scarifying new era. However, the book's strength is simply Dery's clever, free-associative explorations of subjects that both fascinate and repel us, as the century draws to a close. Freaks of nature. Excremental art. "X-Files"-loving conspiracy theorists. Some readers - myself included - may take issue with Dery's dim view of organized religion and with his underlying conclusion that capitalism and the free market are a source for many, if not most, of the world's ills. But anyone with a love for ideas who is unafraid to look the weirdest (and sometimes worst) elements of our culture in the face should read this book.

Mark Dery's writing style makes my mind wander and fails to pull me in. He mentions something about everything, from Ace Ventura's anal speech to the burning of Waco. "The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink" gives short insight into life's odd episodes, freak shows, and moments of insanity but misses out on making a statement worthy of reaction. As I read, I kept thinking, "yes, I know, so what?" Give me something, anything. I guess was expecting more.

Dery's compendium of stellar essays achieve the dizzying heights of literary incision that is all too rare at this end of the millenium. His wit, depth and powerful style inform both the reader and the Zeitgeist of heretofore unimagined and palpably novel analyses of America as Hypercapitalist theme park turned phantasmogoria.The book recalled to mind that fabulous poem by William Carlos Williams, The Pure Products of America go Crazy, from Spring and All 1923.Like his previous sphere-gasser,Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the end of the century, Mark Dery's superb research and synthetic skills pull together a truly colossal set of sources and deftly deliver them to dazzling effect.Dery's flourish and sardonic wit are both rare and endlessly entertaining. Like the early Tom Wolfe, his essays explore the uncanny, the gothic, and the downright pathological with flair and scholastic rigor that is equally well received by the educated bibliophile and the academic.J.G. Ballard's sleeve notes are no exageration!

Ten years into the millennium, and this book remains relevant as ever. Fun, intellectual, weird excursions into arts and culture at the brink and sometimes right over it. Well worth the price of admission.

I didn't take notes while reading this book, so I hope the following short review doesn't misconstrue the author's book in any manner. Any faults of interpretation are from my bad memory.

I originally found this book on one of Cosma Shalizi's Notebooks. It's quite a prescient series of cultural criticism essays -- originally published in the late 90s -- on what could be best described as millenarian and counter-culture groups. The essays range from "killer clowns," to the art of Damien Hirst, to UFO cults. My favourite chapter was the chapter on the Unabomber, in which the author juxtaposes the Unabomber's anti-technology, pro-Nature screeds with Wired Magazine's use of Nature as the predominant metaphor in explaining technology and culture (again, quite prescient tying the two together, as Bill Joy's 'Why the Future Doesn't Need Us' was published a year after Dery's book).

The other chapter I enjoyed was on the UFO cult Heaven's Gate. The main theme of that essay was juxtaposing the cult member's aims of discarding their human bodies with cyber-culture's similar goals in 'uploading our brains' to computers. However, I took away a different theme from that chapter. After the cult members killed themselves, there was much reporting on how they met on the Internet, and how the Internet was a primary stimulant of cult inductees. But as Dery shows, the cult itself was around for quite some time before the Internet, and the Internet does not just serve as a "folly amplifier," but also as the opposite: it often serves as a shining light on hidden truths e.g. Wikileaks.

Throughout the book I'd catch myself thinking, 'Damn, he foresaw that back then?' For instance, in a passage where he states we've already passed the point of humanity becoming more like computers, as we are merging with technology every day. I looked up from reading on the bus. Everyone was 'plugged in' to some form of technology. Kindles, iPhones, laptops. He also foresaw Ledger's Joker and his role in 'chaos culture' like Anonymous. One thing he didn't foresee was the role of Zombies in pop-culture. But this book was less a work of prophecy, than a work of description of pre-Millennium anxiety. So to say that Dery didn't foresee certain aspects of post-Millennial culture would be unfair on the role of this book.

Dery also makes the argument that apocalyptic subcultures are now a permanent fixture of mainstream culture (a view echoed in Michael Barkun's A Culture of Conspiracy). See for instance the 2012 movement, al Qaeda, or the Zeitgeist movement. For this reason, I'd really like to see an update on this book, as I think Dery has many important things to say about millenarian sub-cultures beyond the late 90s.

I originally wrote the above review on my blog some time ago. The author does have a new book coming out 2012, which looks to be an update on similar themes (complete with an essay on zombies!).

Although this collection of essays may seem an unsolvable puzzle to one of the reviewers here, keep in mind that the ingredients lists of zeitgeists and rennaisances (and, in America's case, events of total cultural collapse under the weight of hilarious stupidity) can tend to run a bit long.

Fans of Chris Hedges could like this stuff a lot, even if Dery, an obviously humble person, more often tends to leave the reader to reach his or her own conclusions. Where Hedges approaches the crumbling social structures and compacts from a more religious angle, Dery looks out from the cultural ground zero of New York City and offers for your head the deepest, most verist artistic interpretations to be found in the urban jungle -- realistic x-rays of "clown skulls," whole cows pickled in formaldehyde, lots of gross stuff. These often disgusting images are, in the end, social critiques that carry undeniable import, and don't get me wrong, Dery does tie them all into handy categories even if he doesn't come out and holler "Man, is this joint a mess."

The absence of outright condemnation on Dery's part, however, does reflect a weird sort of optimism that can only come from seeing the big -- as in massive -- picture. If you're hungry for answers to how and when American culture became a smoking crater that's been turned into a hot tub for Kim Kardashian's posse, these are the trees, if not the forest (the latter part's up to you).

Every, and I mean every, American social critic needs to clue into Mark Dery.

The author makes the dissection of popular culture readable, engaging and thought provoking. My only gripe is, where's the tenth anniversary edition? We need an update! Please!