What's New

Today we are bombarded by newness. The new movie. The new star. The new show on the new network. The new song by the new group. The new style by the new designer as worn by the new supermodel. The latest development. The latest craze. The hot restaurant, the hot car, the hot computer. The new lingo. The news. Newt. So rapidly and irrepressibly do phenomena appear that they compete for attention in our poor minds. New science has even come up with the field of memetics to study how cultural ideas---memes---rip like viruses through the media and into our consciousness.

Memetics. The hot new science. For now, anyway. While it may be advantageous to be a certified memetician (memeticist? memetier?), when it comes to predicting new trends and figuring out the meanings beneath their meanings, it's probably enough to be mere magazine writers and editors, like us. After all, we know predicting is hot. We have been sitting on a vaultful of new stuff for years and have waited for just the right moment to let you in on what you'll be talking about for the next few months. We hope it will be enough to prevent you from being the guy who smacks his forehead and shrieks, "Why didn't I know about that?" the first time he sees something like no-lick stamps.

Let's begin with an eternal verity: The best hot new thing you can be is old. Not old like Senator Strom Thurmond (ancient, bordering on decrepit), nor old the way mattresses or screen doors are old (once hot new inventions, now routine), but old in the sense of being so old that you can be rediscovered--- in other words, retro. This explains why the hot new star is John Travolta and the hot new band is the Beatles and the hot new action hero is James Bond and the hot new look is from the Sixties. Not surprisingly, then, the hot new subjects for cinematic auteurs to capture on film are Richard Nixon (Oliver Stone) and Jack Kerouac (Francis Coppola). Even though some owners in the NFL think the hot new move is to put a team in a weird midsize city (Jacksonville, Charlotte, Nashville), the point spread favors retro. The real hot new move is to head for an old NFL city (Oakland, Baltimore, St. Louis and, before long, Los Angeles). Retro also explains why the hot new peace dividend (freedom) in eastern Europe is allowing voters in fledgling democracies to elect ex-Communists. Finally, it prepares us for our own political parties' hot new approaches to government---Clinton's Great Society Lite versus Gingrich's Ike Plus! By the way, retro can happen only to people or things worthy of rediscovery. When they aren't worthy but get rediscovered anyway, we call them camp. Or gasoline crises.

Closer to home, the hot new gender to be is male. This has been true before (see History of the World, Most of), though during the past few years Hillary Clinton and lipstick lesbians sent the title the other way. Despite the mixed blessings inherent in the crown, old-fashioned patriarchy (the hot new fundamentalist practice) is on a roll. Louis Farrakhan didn't invite women to the Million Man March, the Promise Keepers don't invite women to their rallies and the Pope still says women can't be priests. Traditional Republican women such as Bob Dole say their wives won't have much desk space in the Oval Office. Traditional Republican women such as Congresswoman Enid Waldholz even let their husbands handle their finances---and all the right-brained, manly manipulations thereof. It's getting to the point that being an old throwback is so in, the sensitive New Age man is the butt of ridicule. ("I love you, man" from the Bud Light ad, 1995's hot new commercial tag line, is the one to beat in 1996.)

Being a guy is good, being an old-fashioned guy is better, but being a big old-fashioned guy may be best of all. Big guys are finding it easier to drive. They are buying up the Humvee, the hot new military-vehicle-turned-suburban-runabout. It's easier for big guys to eat hearty---not only is beef back, wild game is the hot new entree. (Chicago, apparently, is nutty about ostrich---the sandwich, not the shoe.) It's easier to dress. Big and tall, now at ten percent of the menswear market and growing, is the hot new size. But, then, everybody is finding it easier to dress. Casual Friday has caught on, and dressing down every day is the hot new fashion statement. (Given that a lot of companies will always be unenthusiastic about jeans, the future appears to belong to Dockers men.)

Being big and tall could explain how big and tall Michael Eisner and (just) tall Ted Turner have come out so well in the media merger game (the hot new corporate pastime), while the rather smaller Larry Tisch has not.

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Undoubtedly, the inexorable sales of Humvees---along with Explorers and Jeep Cherokees---are part of something larger. Owned by suburbanites who seldom drive them to places more treacherous than the pitted parking lot of a Wal-Mart, Range Rovers and such belong to the same trend that has leggy models wearing Doc Martens to fashionable restaurants and soft-bellied attorneys sporting Timberlands to rake leaves. They all share the hot new perception that life is hard and dangerous and that we ought to prepare ourselves for a difficult and perilous journey. if we can't do it by girding our loins like ancient Israelites, then at least we should get ourselves a roomy four-wheel-drive vehicle and a canvas vest with lots of pockets for such important survival tools as grocery coupons and credit cards. Of course, life isn't getting physically harder, just psychologically harder. Owning a lot of rugged gear won't help many people---except, perhaps, those who relieve their stress by shopping.

That means all this stress must find other ways to manifest itself. Often it ends up producing the hot new emotion, which now is anger. It's everywhere: in Internet flaming, in the Michigan Militia, in the inner city, in post-O.J. hostility, in the Oklahoma City bombing, in European soccer-style brawls in American sports, in the Marlin Fitzwater-Mike Wallace snarlfest in the greenroom of Politically Incorrect, in Roseanne telling The New Yorker: "I think more women should be more violent, kill more of their husbands," in Gordon Liddy saying, " Head shots. Head shots." Even though Roseanne and Liddy are not the hot new avatars of nuttiness---unlike challengers Courtney Love and Pat Buchanan, they are longtime, consistent performers---we are reaching new and increasingly unhealthy depths. During last fall's government shutdown, one congressman walked into the members-only cafeteria on Capitol Hill and, for the first time in his career, saw Democrats sitting only with Democrats sitting only with Democrats and Republicans only with Republicans.

In at least one respect, all this anger is a good thing, because anger that isn't expressed turns into depression. When people are depressed, they are either withdrawn, uncommunicative and abusive or they participate in the hot new baby-boomer trend of dysfunctionality. Like anger, which has its own economy built on class-action lawsuits, dysfunction is big business. Consider the market for new, better antidepressants (watch out, Prozac, here comes Zoloft), the big bucks for tell-all memoirs about crazy families (Quivers: A Life, by Robin Quivers, and The Lair's Club, by Mary Karr) and the high ratings for talk shows.

Unfortunately, people are angry and depressed about something a fractured Washington and a little blue pill can do nothing about: their future prospects, which have become the hot new subject over which to develop anxiety. Today, with the rich at work to build their self-steem, with the nouveau riche at work because they aren't good at anything else, with everyone else at work to keep the wolf away from the door and with downsizing the current corporate religion, employment prospects are growing scarce. This means that the hot new status symbol of now and the future is not a Lexus or a Rolex. It's just a good job.

Anyone involved with professional atheletics ought to pay particular attention to indulging in their anxieties about future prospects. The people in pro sports, owners as well as players, are swiftly becoming the hot new victims of their own successes---replacing the most recent titleholder, Mike Milken. There's no need to go into their innumerable self-inflicted wounds, but to those who argue that the popularity of sports is just too ingrained to go away, consider this: People once went to church every Sunday. They once went to the theater a lot. Boxing was once big. The speaker of the house was a Democrat. Disco ruled the airwaves. Things change. Things go away.

Of course, they can always come back. Moving on to another capital of memetic America, Hollywood, the hot new concept is regurgitation (retro of a particularly pernicious strain---call it Ebola retro). Deciding that previous visits to atomic-era television worked well (The Addams Family), or at least well enough (The Brady Bunch), studio executives are poised to release Mission: Impossible, Flipper, The Saint, Flash Gordon (again), Sergeant Bilko, McHale's Navy and the Love Boat. Underlying these releases is Hollywood's hot new motivation, which is actually the same as Hollywood's old motivation, namely, fear. The marketeers who run the studios get nervous when confronted with anything they don't know how to advertise. They save their enthusiasm for sequels or remakes or big-screen versions of anything that comes ABE---Already Been Enjoyed. This is true of Highbrow Hollywood as well. One of the most anticipated movies is a remake of Nabokov's Lolita. Then there are the new version of Othello (or O.J.: The Prequel, as it's known), a new versions of Hamlet and two new versions of Richard III. The Bard notwithstanding, the hot new writer is the author of Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion and Emma (the inspiration for Clueless), Jane Austen. (There are so many classy costume productions, they have spawned their own hot new lingo. For example, Kate Winslet, the hot new actress who stars in Sense and Sensibility and Hamlet, is described as a Period Babe.).

The current situation is dramatically different from the way Hollywood functioned during the Seventies, when bold and intelligent movies such as The Godfather, Nashville and Taxi Driver led people to call movies the hot new art form. Today, the hot new art form is television. (Unless you happen to be Damien Hirst, the controversial Brit artist whose work includes animals split by a chain saw and a sheep immersed in formaldehyde. In that case, your hot new art form may be goat.) The Larry Sanders Show and Seinfeld are routinely funnier and more sophisticated than any screen comedy. Shows such as E.R., NYPD Blue and Homicide are causing critics to say that TV has replaced the novel as middlebrow entertainment.

It may not last long. Some of us whose art once involved sitting in front of a television are answering a higher calling by riding the Internet. The Internet, as most primates now know, is really the hot new way to do everything. The decision by Associated Press to distribute stories over the Net has made it the hot new way to get news. NBC Desktop is the hot new way to get financial information. Cyberbrothel experiments involving. Brandy's Babes and Net Mate (also called Screw U-ScrewMe, thanks to CU-SeeMe two-way software) have made it the hot new way to have sex and have ensured that at least some of us will greet the new millennium by masturbating. (Oh, all right, there's no point in denying it---all of us will greet the millennium by masturbating.) With video compression that makes CD-ROMs more like TV and with the arrival of Java, the new World Wide Web software that will replace current versions of HTML, the hot new future is here.

So much so that we have a hot new disorder. Virtual reality is still only virtual, but people who insist on wearing VR goggles are getting real headaches and blurred vision, a condition doctors call binocular dysphoria. Hurry---there still may be time to be the first kid on the block to catch it.

By the way, we certainly don't mean to give short shrift to masturbation, which even outside cyberbrothels is staking a respectable claim as the hot new way to have safe sex. It's also, for nearly anyone out of puberty, an amusingly retro way to have sex. Around the country, aficionados of the swingers network are singing the praises of masturbation parties to attract new, clean blood, while in New York, businessmen seem to have acquired a taste for Korean massage parlors. (The harried executive can get a relaxing back rub and hand job while waiting for his new Big and Tall suit to be cleaned and pressed.) Meanwhile, fetishists are flourishing, thanks---again---to the Internet (the hot new home of the fetishistic). Whereas once they might have dwelt in loneliness and fear, S&M devotees, foot worshipers, amputee buffs and other enthusiasts of the esoteric now find one another online, where they exchange equipment and techniques and organize support groups and bake sales and defense funds and God knows what else. (Just so you know, the hot old ways of having sex continue to have their adherents.)

One offshoot of the cyberrevolution (or perhaps just an offshoot of the Sandra Bullock revolution) is that the hot new property for nearly anything to have is speed. Souped-up computers were just the beginning; then came Rollerblades, longer tennis reckets that add zip to serves, the Republican mania for cutting red tape, higher speed limits and the continuing rise in the popularity of Dale Earnhardt.

There are plenty of other ways to partake in the 21st century. You could go to Saigon, a very retro town---so retro, it's once again being called Ho City (with good reason). It's rapidly replacing Prague as the hot new Goa, which, you'll certainly recall, was for a long time the hot new place for disaffected Gen X-patriates to live a sybaritic, bohemian and somehow more authentic existence than was otherwise possible. If you can't get it together to go to Saigon, wait awhile and take a shorter trip to Havana. One day Fidel (essay question: When Castro is rediscovered, will he be retro or camp, and why?) will no longer reign. An explosion of freedom, joy, avarice and greed will fuel an unimaginable number of enterprises. And if you can't get to Cuba, go to Los Angeles, where earthquakes, fires, mudslides, gang wars and riots have turned the old utopia into the hot new dystopia.

If you can't go anywhere, stay home and work on developing a hot new lifestyle. Get rid of your glasses. The hot new elective surgery is about to be photorefractive keratotomy, which is laser surgery to correct nearsightedness. More and more doctors are being trained in the technique. Laser manufacturers have planned a market blitz, and they project that 500,000 people will opt for this surgery in 1996. Soon glasses will become a thing of the past. Or, from time to time, merely the hot new fashion accessory.

Or take up gardening, which is the hot new hobby. Even urbanites whose gardens are limited to fire escapes and roofs are getting green. If you have a yard, play croquet, which is the hot new weekend lawn diversion.

Or go to the hot new beverage bars and drink the hot new liquids---tea and water. This may sound blasphemous, but there's only so much Starbucks you can consume.

Or maybe there's not. Maybe you can drink the same thing in the same joint for years, wear the same clothes, listen to the same music, drive the same car, live in the same place, work at the same job, believe in the same God, data the same person and let the same people call you Dad. People will admire you for your consistency. They'll say, "Hey, there's a guy who really knows who he is." Then, when you die, they'll plant you and you'll stay in the same box in the same damn plot for eternity.

Wait---there's hope. Put some money into the hot new franchise chain, which, as hard as it is for some New Yorkers to believe, is bagels. Fat-free, low-cal and limitless in their variety, bagels are the food of the future and taste much better than soylent green. Or you could start munching tomatoes, the hot new health food blessed with such miraculous properties that eating up to ten a week is supposed to ward off prostate cancer. Or get into the hot new racket, telenetting, by which you make a long-distance digital phone call by modem for the price of a call to a local network. Or watch Hercules, the hot new so-bad-it's-great TV show. Or listen to a pirate radio station (the hot new illicit pleasure) or swing music (the hot new revived genre taking over one night a week at Los Angeles' Viper Room). Or you could become an extropian and learn to believe that technology will relieve us of all our troubles (the hot new delusion), or have a kid and name him Baxter or her Mathilda or some other uncommon and sort of weird name (the hot new inside joke), or have a conversation about the hot new subject:

The weather. And how crazy it is.