Osama® the Brand

Six years ago to this very minute (just after 9 in the morning) I was under the streets of New York, riding to work on the subway, lucky enough to get a seat so I could read without getting jostled. The book was Barry Miles' The Beat Hotel, an account of the subterranean literary figures Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Gregory Corso as they mixed it up in a rundown little Paris fleabag in the 50s and 60s. The passage I was reading dealt with a mysterious 11th Century figure named Hassan I'Sabbah, Grand Master of the Ismaili Hashishim sect, or Assassins, who indoctrinated and trained his legions in his hidden mountain stronghold of Alamut, Persia, and sent them forth to infiltrate Seljuk Turkish society and kill their political enemies. His invisibility and omnipresence fascinated Burroughs and Gysin; they adopted him as a symbol of occult subversion in their Cold War era, mass media conscious art. He became known to the Turks as "The Old Man of the Mountain," a terrifying bogeyman for grown men who feared waking to find his dagger in their pillows, dire warnings attached. That morning on the subway, I reflected on how historic figures eventually inherit the clothing of old archetypes. The latest Middle Eastern bugaboo came to mind, a rich Saudi hidden somewhere in the mountains training his own loyal, deluded legions to go forth and blow up embassies. I couldn't recall his name.

I think I was still struggling to remember when I got off at 23rd Street, emerged into the sunlight and stopped and stared, in the midst of a silent sidewalk crowd, at the sight of the burning Twin Towers; they were perfectly framed by the chasm of Fifth Avenue. I haven't forgotten his name since that day.

And now, six years on, OBL has receded and grown omnipresent. He seems to occupy a chamber of our minds, rather than a point in time and space. In his most recent video, he even appears to be growing younger, sporting a dense black beard. Here, the archetypes coalesce and blur. Bram Stoker's Dracula grew younger as he gorged on the blood of his victims, his hair turning black from a snowy white over the course of the novel; he was, interestingly enough, another incarnation of the Oriental Other, threatening Victorian Western stability. Of course, in the age of electronic and digital media, there's a more useful term for these enduring, stealthy archetypes who inhabit our dreams and nightmares. We call them brands. And apparently OBL and/or his handlers, whoever they may be, have a decent grasp of branding principles: keep the brand consistent and straightforward, a quick read in the saturated media environment. Use a select color palette. And refresh the brand every few years, whether it takes a leaner typeface, or a henna dye rinse. The Old Man must stay young. He doesn't even have to stay alive: Elvis and Marilyn, Kerouac and Ché Guevara, even Hitler are powerful brands today. All it takes is a responsive target audience.

This is one brand I'd like to relegate to the scrap heap. No Logo indeed.

The Endless Scroll: Kerouac in the Digital Age

It is ironic to contemplate: Jack Kerouac the man was too fragile to withstand the glare of fame for more than a few years, whereas the legend has survived a half-century of relentless media revolution. The anniversary publication of the fabled "scroll" edition of his paradigm-shifting novel On the Road has prompted me to reflect on the many assumptions about writing and publishing that have changed in the half-century since the debut of the original. We are all Jack's children, I think, in profound and superficial ways.

Kerouac's discovery, the freedom to move, to finally get down that novel in a seamless thought/hand/key/paper gesture without the distraction of having to swap in each fresh sheet is something we all now take for granted, especially bloggers. What is a blog, or any Word document, really, but a scroll? The second-guessing and self-censorship he struggled against will always be with us, but technology is now more of a balm than an irritant. Where Jack improvised a new seamless format with tape and scissors we now fashion our own contours with the click of a few options and virtual buttons— we post hourly, daily, weekly or randomly, we tag and categorize; we revise instantly as we write, or we revise stealthily right on the "published" page in broad daylight and hope no one notices.

Even the stigma of being "unpublished" has lost some sting. Nowadays many a fool with nothing to say can reach thousands in minutes from his or her laptop. Kerouac crisscrossed the nation for most of the 1950s with a rucksack full of unpublished, unseen, unread, brilliant manuscripts, adding to them as he went — scratching into notepads his lonely dispatches from hill, dale and half-empty coffee shop long before WiFi was even imaginable. He carried his life on his back like a snail carries its shell, finally letting down his load in 1957 after Viking published the heavily-edited and forcibly-punctuated On the Road. Had he survived until 2007 he might very well have disowned most of us, his speed-typing, Warbucks-coffee-swilling progenitors, much as he disowned and disavowed the media-empowered beatniks and hippies of his waning days. Certain particulars of the Kerouac (or "Duluoz") legend— i.e. breaking the shackles of conventional syntax and conventional writing tools — have become technically irrelevant, though powerfully mythic. The core of the legend, his vision and sheer empathy as a writer, are still rare and valuable qualities, not widely parsed out amongst us digital-era coffee bar typists.

But I dare say poor Jack would have swapped that heavy rucksack-full of manuscripts for a nice 1GB thumb drive in a heartbeat. He may have been a Holy Goof, but he was no fool.