Boomer Stories Booming

Well-crafted fiction about the politics and psychosis of the sixties is becoming a growing industry.

Age of Special

“Hello, I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity” by Hal Niedzviecki. (City Lights)

By Adrienne LaFrance

A word to the mohawked and tattooed, to those who reject cell phones and popular music. Yes, you, the self-proclaimed non-conformists: You’re not special. Or maybe more aptly, you’re just as unique as the droves of people trying to be individual in exactly the same way you are.

In his latest book, Hal Niedzviecki explores how non-conformity has become mainstream, how emphasis on being special has permeated our lives, from school and work, to artistic expression, even religion, to an extent that reshapes tradition, corrodes communities and sends our relationships with institutions reeling.

“Hello I’m Special,” is a dark exploration of the Western world’s inward-gazing obsession, and the social chorus of “Be yourself (only thinner, richer and better looking)!” that has changed the way we live.

Welcome to North America in 2006 where narcissism prevails, reality TV rules and anyone who wants it badly enough deserves to be famous… or at least to bask in the limelight for a spell. Niedzviecki even offers the chance to his readers, with the online “Most Special Ever Conformity Challenge,” the winner of which gets a stab at a book deal of his or her own.

In a world where everyone has a blog (with counters to monitor just how many people are reading) or a myspace.com account (to tally the network of people who consider us friends), or a soapbox of some kind upon which one can showcase individuality, “being different” isn’t so different after all.

Niedzviecki holds a scalpel to this social monster with analytic precision that evokes Malcolm Gladwell, dissecting a beast we’re all peripherally aware of but haven’t quite articulated. He systematically divides the implications of social flux into bite-size pieces for readers to marvel at before devouring.

Niedzviecki takes readers through a fun house of “special,” illuminating a time where normal is abhorrent, where people believe fame and fortune comes to those who simply want it and believe they deserve it. Call it Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame run amok.

“More and more people want to be special and to be noticed for being special,” Niedzviecki said. “But if everyone is special, nothing is special. If everyone’s a rebel, what is rebellion? Now we have this problem but we can’t say the answer is ‘reject individualism,’ or ‘reject free will.’”

While the idea is complexly philosophical, Niedzviecki’s writing is sharp. He sustains richness of content with prismatic examples of the paradox he sets out to expose. Take the art student so desperate to achieve aesthetic innovation that he makes a film of himself butchering cats.

“The thinking becomes so polluted by this need to be special that they don’t realize that they’re, in this case, breaking the law and torturing animals,” Niedzviecki said in an interview. “I think there’s a feeling that everything’s been done and there’s nothing left to do. It’s not a pleasant feeling.”

But the trend extends far beyond artistic endeavors. Niedzviecki examines the deterioration of a host of cultural facets as we know them, all because the emphasis is turned toward the individual.

He offers such a wide range of examples that it’s hard not to take this work with you. From the mostly delusional but sometimes semi-talented youths taking their shot at stardom by appearing on “American (or in the book’s example, Canadian) Idol,” to the evolution of religion into something we’re only willing to accept if it fits into our desired level of commitment. Think: Catholicism’s introduction of the “Buddy Christ” to replace the “wholly depressing” image of Jesus on the cross in Kevin Smith’s farcical 1999 film “Dogma,” or television programs like the recently launched “Shalom in the Home,” (no, seriously) that alter the way we experience religion. Niedzviecki calls this shift “Tradition Lite.”

While the premise is relevant, one may argue that “Hello I’m Special,” would have worked better as a long magazine article leaving readers yearning for more, rather than an entire book, which may have them counting down the pages in the last few chapters.

It’s not that Niedzviecki is repetitive per se, it’s just that he makes his point effectively, and well before he finishes spelling out his argument. This is a case of less is more, especially since the book’s progression is less about drawing definitive conclusions and more about—get this—individual revelation.

“This isn’t ‘Chicken Soup for the Special Soul,’ or ‘How to be Special the Right Way,’ by Hal.” Niedzviecki said.

No, “Hello I’m Special,” isn’t warm and fuzzy self-help, nor is it outright social criticism. It’s a cautionary and observatory can of worms that isn’t afraid to spill open and writhe in circles.

“I came to a much more difficult series of rhetorical twists,” Niedzviecki said of his journey exploring the world of so-called specialism. “We can’t reject this (social trend) and there are a lot of great things about it. What we really have to do is take what’s good and what’s real, which is the human yearning to self expression and the natural human desire to say, ‘I exist.’”

If only mere existence were special enough.

The Preoccupied Mind: Art Arises

By Adrienne LaFrance

EVERLY, Mass.— Those with messy desks and piles of clutter take note; things aren’t out of place, they’ve simply found their natural congruency. At least, that’ s what artist Kiki Smith, 52, told a group of about 325 people on Wednesday, March 29 at Boston University’s second-annual Tim Hamill Visiting Artist Lecture, “My Preoccupations.”

And Smith can become preoccupied with just about anything as a subject for her art. She has sculpted, etched, painted, drawn, cast, collaged, and even taken photos of herself covered in blood.

“I don’t think you can buy blood anymore,” Smith mused in a faraway sing-song that would make you think she’s trying to remember items on a grocery list. “We used to buy jugs of it down the street in New York,”

Smith’s long, gray curls and dark approach to art evoke images of John Updike’s Alexandra Spofford, the sculptor with a good heart but a gleam of mischief in her eye, from The Witches of Eastwick. The bluish-ink outline of a star tattooed between the thumb and forefinger on her right hand and a collection of tiny asterisk-like stars tattooed to her left only add to her mystique, a quality that blossoms most fruitfully in her work.

Smith’s perspective on life and art is an intoxicating blend of humanity and imagination that could leave any audience teetering between being stunned by her brilliance and wondering if she, who proclaims a “spiritual fondness for rats,” is secretly just yanking our chains.

But most of her art, some of which is more bizarre in her vision than it appears when it’s complete, is deeply somber.

In one project, she cast hundreds of sculptures of frogs to symbolize a biblical plague. She painted a witch lying lifelessly, having eaten her own poisonous apples. One project she refers to as “Noah’s Death Barge,” featured sculptures of dead animals, all black, conveying species extinction. Another exhibit featuring depictions of animals that are all white does not elicit the opposite emotions, as one might expect.

“I made them all white because things that are white are either poisonous or disappearing,” she said.

But without the privilege of hearing Smith discuss her art, it seems impossible that anyone could guess the thought process that led to its creation. One such piece features a figure standing above the body of a wolf.

“I got the idea from (the part of) little red riding hood when the hunter cuts the grandmother out of the wolf,” said Smith. “And I thought that if you take that out of the context of the story, it’s quite an odd thing to be happening.”

And context is never something that constricts Smith’s work. Her adherence to the very specific form itself allows multiple layers of interpretation, and she encourages each person to have their own intimate relationship with the art she creates.

Smith’s art has been celebrated as groundbreaking, her subject matter serving as metaphors for a slew of social issues like race, gender, age and religion. But Smith said she hesitated to embark on figurative art because she wanted to avoid those kinds of broad social statements. She wanted her art to be accessible on a more individual level.

For example, Smith’s famous depictions of internal organs (her inspiration for which came some 25 years ago in a copy of Gray’s Anatomy that was a gift from an old boyfriend) are intensely personal for anyone who considers them, she said.

“Every body part I looked at resonated and had meaning for me,” said Smith. “It was like this language. Fat cells meant something because I’ve always been overweight, nerve cells meant something because I’m nervous… I want people to look at this stuff and wonder what relationship they have with pus or with vomit and why that’s important.”

Smith is hardly what one might envision to be overweight and what she describes as nervousness comes across as more distracted than anything else. But this is a characteristic that she acknowledges without hesitation.

“I probably have ADD, but that didn’t exist when I was little,” Smith said. “Sometimes people will come over to my house and I’ll start cleaning and they think it’s rude but really I just listen better that way.”

And that’s when she explains that messiness is actually conducive to art, because it allows you to see things in a way that you wouldn’t otherwise see them. Just catching a glimpse of Smith’s perspective is a wholly refreshing experience.

She has an almost girlish quality in that she’s vibrantly unapologetic for her unconventional view of the world. And it’s a view that she can’t quite explain herself when people ask about what inspires her.

“I always say, like, my dead sister told me what to do, or I dreamt what to do or my birds told me what to do,” she said. “But I was listening to this Buddhist lecture the other day and it said, ‘Knowledge arises,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, it’s just like, shit happens.’ And that’s just it. Knowledge arises. Shit happens. Things just become apparent to you.”