The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink

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!

Time and again I turn to the writing of Mark Dery for inspiration and illumination. The cleverest cultural critic to have spurted out of Uncle Sam's loins, Dery's roving, voracious, ferocious eye outs the dasein of these fine United States with a delicious jeremiad that entertains even as it horrifies. The other day I was trying to sort out how to address the growing phenomena of SCARFACE paraphernalia that is exploding in sales across the Texas-Mexican border. I returned to the pages of Pyrotechnic Insanitarium--the lucid paragraphs on the ubiquity of Edvard Munch's HOWL image-trope in the global visual economy. I remember being at Cornell back in the day and reading/teaching "Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs: Pamphlet #25" in my second class as a TA in Comparative Literature. THE PYROTECHNIC INSANITARIUM reveals a writer even more on top of his game. Take Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, JG Ballard, and mix in a little Helmut Newton and Lupe Vélez, and you the get the mind and prose of the one and only Mark Dery.

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 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.