Bunch of Amateurs Page 2

  Once you start looking for it, the only real shocker is how ubiquitous a figure the aspiring amateur is in America and yet how seemingly invisible these people are in our journalistic media.

  The title of the nation’s most watched program—an amateur hour, mind you—captures it: American Idol. The amateur breaking out and getting recognized—that is our secular God. We are the land of fresh starts and second acts; the promised land of immigrants starting anew.

  The elevation of the amateur is not just this season’s top-rated TV show. Prime time is now jammed with knockoffs and spinoffs of American Idol (America’s Got Talent, America’s Next Top Model, Project Runway, Dancing with the Stars, The Apprentice, The Voice). Before American Idol, which discovered Kelly Clarkson, there was Star Search, the show responsible for Britney Spears. But the pedigree of such programming goes way back, possibly all the way back. In the 1970s, the amateur show had already been such a staple that its parody was a huge hit. The Gong Show was straight-up ridicule of the genre (and yet managed to discover PeeWee Herman, Boxcar Willie, and Andrea McArdle—the first of the ginger ’fros who played Little Orphan Annie).

  Before that was Amateur Night at the Apollo, which gave us Ella Fitzgerald and Pearl Bailey. At that time, there was another glut of these shows. One could also watch Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour, a primetime show that launched the career of Gladys Knight and Pat Boone. The other big one was called the Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, where we first saw performers ranging from Patsy Cline to Lenny Bruce.

  Mack got his television show because he had been the band leader for a radio show called Major Bowes’ Amateur Theatre of the Air, which dates to the early 1930s and gave us the careers of Beverly Sills and Frank Sinatra. And before radio, various small theaters thrived on weekly amateur shows, like Miner’s Bowery Theater in Manhattan, which discovered Eddie Cantor, or Halsey’s Theater in Brooklyn, where Jackie Gleason first appeared. And before that, vaudeville would tour the country and perform in the local opera houses. The shows typically featured a local amateur contest—both to draw nearby audiences into the seats to watch their neighbors perform and, given the chance, to discover someone they could convince to tour with them, as they did Bob Hope and Milton Berle.

  These amateur nights weren’t just entertainments but confirmations of what Americans believe is true in every sphere. There is no realm that is understood to be off-limits to the lowest or newest citizen here. Americans affirm this idea in every aspect of their vernacular life (“Anybody can grow up to be President”). It’s the essential faith of the amateur and the creed of America. It’s why George Washington opted to be called Mr. President instead of going with the pompous alternative “Your Excellency.” Every four years voters typically affirm their suspicion of “professional politicians” by elevating an inexperienced pol to the White House (with, arguably, a very wide range of results). The amateur narrative is encoded in our national DNA.

  The cyclical return to the garage is happening now, as Americans sense that some great turn in history has come. It’s time to tear down the fortresses and build them again, which is always traumatic. When one of the New Republic’s professional writers, Lee Siegel, was discovered to have posed online as his own fan, fluffing himself with cringe-inducing praise, he was suspended. The people who brought him down were bloggers who figured out that he was engaging in sockpuppetry (yes, there already was a word for online onanistic praise). Later, Siegel wrote a book about how horrible these amateur journalists were that were attacking him. “I love the idea of the amateur—that’s what popular culture is all about,” he told New York magazine. “But what the Internet’s doing is professionalizing everyone’s amateuristic impulses.”

  I don’t quite understand what that sentence means, but I think it’s safe to say that the pros occupying the barricades of expertise never like it when it happens. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture was a bestseller devoted to the lament—also a perennial when amateurs appear—that the great palaces of tradition are being wrecked by constant attacks from unschooled outsiders. It’s one more entry on the bookshelf of apocalyptic American literature. But this is not the end of anything. This is the gyre of our own history coming around once again. What I want to argue here is that the cult of the amateur, once you step back, is the soul of America.

  After hiking out of the Gungywamp, I went back to the state archaeologist, Nick Bellantoni, and pressed him on some of the details. He suddenly shifted his tone, if not his position. “It’s well within the range of probability that Irish monks came here,” he told me. “It’s just that we still have no physical evidence for it.” It seemed strange that he would hedge so quickly, but once I looked into the history of this kind of history, Bellantoni’s caution did not seem so strange.

  The source of Gungywampers’ optimism about their theory goes back to 1960, when scholars ate a big helping of archaeological crow with the discovery of a Viking encampment in the New World, specifically at L’Anse aux Meadows, in Newfoundland. The man who made the find was a self-taught amateur and one-idea obsessive. Helge Ingstad was a lawyer by training and small-town politician (governor for three years of a Norwegian territory in the Arctic, the Svalbard Islands). Eminent scholars such as Harvard’s Samuel Eliot Morison sniffed at him, regarding his theories as crackpot stuff. As if it weren’t enough that the guy had been known to wander Mexico looking for a “lost tribe,” his claim to the Viking landing in America relied entirely on his reading of the Norse sagas.

  He had studied specifically the texts of Graenlendinga Saga and Eirik’s Saga. If scholars thought that these were fanciful poems full of invented imagery, Ingstad disagreed. He believed that buried in the heroic verse was a core story of journalistic truth and factual exploration. He insisted that the place called “Vinland” and the ferocious savages known as the “skraelings” were not metaphors but were North America and the Indians.

  Using the vague geography in the stories, he began triangulating the possible landfall sites along the northwestern Atlantic shore and spent years devising ways to visit harbors and inlets to examine the land for clues. In 1960 he was visiting a small village in Newfoundland on an unrelated medical mission. He happened to ask a local named George Decker if the village had any prehistoric sites.

  Decker said it did, and after nearly eight years of digging, Newfoundland finally yielded physical evidence: foundational remains of three long houses, a bronze ring-head pin, some nails smelted from a bog iron, and a spindle whorl for spinning wool—all of Norse provenance. As a result, the Viking presence in the New World in the year 1000 is now accepted as absolute fact. Canada has made the place a park. And even the Ivy League establishment has recast the story ever so slightly to make it fit the model of a properly credentialed expert whisk-brooming away dust from the Truth. In later editions of his books, Harvard’s Samuel Eliot Morison worked in a tiny tweak of stately revisionism. He referred to the Norse voyage, stiffly, as confirmed by “archaeologist Dr. Helge Ingstad.”

  If amateurs always seems to be fading away, it’s because that’s what most of them do. Most are failures, and that is a dead-end path to immortality. Those amateurs simply disappear. And if they succeed, then they spend a great deal of time trying to erase their amateur past. They collect piles of honorary degrees or massive stock options, either of which makes it very easy to look like a pro. And it makes it easier to write that memoir that explains how it was all inevitable anyway and airbrush out all that stumbling amateur striving. The first of these was, of course, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, an amazing piece of revisionist history. It’s what helped set up the image of the wise old jolly Puritan inventor at the expense of the naïve screwup, the liar, the rutting boy-satyr, the atheist, the self-promoter. The amateur’s redemptive memoir is practically its own genre in this country; evidence of them can be found on every year’s bestseller list. You can find the same structure in the summoning of the log cabin in William Henry
Harrison’s presidential biography—all true, but part of the narrative of unpolished origins that begins so many of these stories. Patti Smith’s Just Kids opens on her birth in a rooming house and with an evocation of a humble family learning how to pray. What awaits is a lovely tale of pluck and inevitability. It doesn’t matter who’s telling it: Jack Welch of GE or Helen Keller. We love these stories. It’s a world where we sweep away a lot of the details and make the path to glory seem inevitable. It can be a treacherous task, which is why this bookshelf is afflicted with so many scandals (A Million Little Pieces, Three Cups of Tea …).

  The cover-up is a key element in the amateur story and the main reason why the whole narrative feels like a hidden history of our country. We’re ashamed of our amateur status, so Americans love awards that deliver us from our low origins and elevate us in some way. Think of the famous prizes given out each year by the MacArthur Foundation. The intent is not merely to honor the already famous but also to find unknown people just following their bliss—amateurs, in other words—and reward their obscure good work with a large sum of money. But the money’s not even half of it. What better title (and cover) could any American hope for than the award’s nickname: the Genius Grant.

  When I started thinking about this idea, I considered focusing on just such characters. One could start with Ben Franklin, who famously broke with his apprenticeship in Boston as a teenager and ran away to Philadelphia to reinvent himself as a Great Man. And then I could have carried that idea into any of the hundreds of American success stories that seem to follow the Franklin model. Dropping out is a great American tradition, the very essence of amateurism, another recapitulation of the pioneer/immigrant narrative, the ultimate in starting fresh: no school! It begins with Franklin, and one can find these dropouts popping up in every era of American history—Thomas Paine, Davy Crockett, Mark Twain, George Eastman, Horace Greeley, Thomas Edison, D. W. Griffith, John Jacob Astor, Samuel Gompers, Jay Gould, Andrew Carnegie, Adolph Ochs, Charlie Chaplin, David Sarnoff, William Saroyan, Will Rogers, Al Smith, Henry Kaiser, Orville and Wilbur Wright, August Wilson, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, those Stanford undergrads who invented Google, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. But if that book hasn’t been written a dozen times over, it sure feels like it has, and then I had an even better idea.

  Why not try to break down the specific attributes and types of amateurism into different categories and then put them back together as a unified theory?

  Turned out, squirreled away in a corner of sociology was a man named Robert Stebbins, an American teaching at the University of Calgary in Canada, who has published scores of books on “leisure.” Stebbins found that some people took their weekending seriously, so he concocted a subdiscipline he called “serious leisure”—an ungainly phrase but one that circumscribed the same world, more or less, that interested me.

  To develop his grand unified theory of amateurism, Stebbins constructed a fairly complex framework he calls the “Serious Leisure Perspective.” Just to show you how large an idea it is, he always capitalizes it in his books. For example, Stebbins writes that “the Perspective has simplified and organized an undifferentiated mass of free-time core activities and experiences.”

  That’s right, Stebbins is literally attempting to categorize the world of amateur pursuits, aka “free-time core activities and experiences,” by breaking it all down—and down and down and down. His ability to map every cul-de-sac, blue highway, and back alley of amateur pursuit and compartmentalize the results recalls the Spanish bureaucracy that oversaw New World exploration, or maybe the final warehouse sequence of the first Indiana Jones movie. He calls this task the “Project,” and he capitalizes that word, too. If the Perspective is the process, the Project is the result. His analysis reveals that amateur pursuits possess certain “qualities” and that some of these can be further broken down into “dimensions,” and these divisions go on and on too.

  In one amateur sub-category he offers examples: “entertainment magic, Canadian football, stand-up comedy, barbershop singing, volunteering, and selected map hobbies.” No writer since Walt Whitman can list items in a series quite like Robert Stebbins.

  Another newly discovered sub-sub-category called “project-based leisure” can include: building a stone wall, making a relative a sweater, surprise birthday parties, a genealogical project, developing a basement, setting out Christmas decorations, volunteering for an arts festival, climbing Kilimanjaro, and “knot making from kits.”

  Knot making from kits? What century is this? Where am I? What bellum am I ante?

  As I read one of Stebbins’s books after another, what I had thought was a gold mine turned out to be a rabbit hole. I read almost all his books, mostly in a state of wonder at Stebbins’s Project: One study brings the Perspective to tournament bass fishing, and then turn the pages, and the same Perspective is bearing down on dildo parties in England. (Swear to God.) One book compares “tolerable deviance,” which includes “cross-dressing, homosexuality, watching sex …”), with the other sub-sub-sub-category, “intolerable deviance,” which covers “incest, vandalism, sexual assault.…” These lists are luxuriously odd—considerations of elderly shuffleboard players alongside mushroom collectors alongside figure skating. I don’t know how Stebbins will ever finish this Project unless he calls in Jorge Luis Borges and his infinite library for backup. Many splendored things happen “outside work.” Maybe another word for the Project is “Life.”

  If you spend too much time looking at amateurism this way (and I have), you wonder if you’ll ever end up seeing it at all. Like peering through a telescope, constrict the aperture too much and you get the Ten Success Stories. Open it too wide and you end up lost, Fitzcarraldo-style, macheteing a trail across the Continent of Stebbins.

  Somewhere in the middle ground was where I had to be. I wanted to catch amateurs before they got famous, observe them in action, and not be lured into the usual quicksilver arguments about creativity. I wanted to catch a glimpse of what improvisation looked like and how one went about pioneering into the muck of a new frontier (or idea); or to understand how constant assaults by amateurs shaped the profession attacked; or to see a new idea emerge among those unconvinced by familiar habits of mind.

  One organizing idea immediately jumped out at me as I began to collect evidence of amateur enthusiasm. It’s not as if amateurs can be found in every discipline and pursuit. Like any invasive species, amateurs gather where there has been some kind of stress to the system, some kind of disturbance. When they clump together by forming a group of websites or a weekend club, it reveals something about where the inventive surges in a culture are located. I began one line of research by hanging out with weekend robotics clubs until I realized that those were already past their maturity. It was a while back that the Pentagon would regularly send talent scouts to sit in the back of robot club meetings in order to recruit the freshest thinking for DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). One thing led to another, and I quickly learned that another kind of gathering was beginning across town, in abandoned warehouses, and the aim was not a mechanical robot but a living one—synthetic biology. It was easy to find truly good examples of pursuits that revealed precisely how the amateur impulse asserts itself against a well-known, well-defined professional elite. One I considered was the rise of amateur porn on the Internet and its sudden takedown of all those old film and video outfits in California’s San Fernando valley. I ultimately decided against porn as a story because, honestly, porn as a story is always boring. Visiting the set of a porn movie or the porn awards banquet is another of those journalistic chestnuts (the word “zany” shows up in editor conversations on this one, too). I have read so many of these over the years—including Martin Amis and David Foster Wallace—and the results are always disappointing, even in the hands of masters. Turns out porn stars are about as articulate about their craft as, say, hockey players. And yet, the elements of the story I was looking for are right there: the professional e
lite who have reduced their work to known points of order—massive breast implants, shaved pubic hair, clichéd plot lines (the hitchhiker, the pool boy), the four or five basic moves, the same essential sets (gilded parvenu mansion, suburban den, a van), and the well-worn conclusion, the money shot, as predictable as the suspect on a detective show tearfully breaking down in the interrogation room in the last four minutes of the program. Into this plasti-coated, stylized world of same ol’/same ol’ arrived a handful of amateurs, actual real people, who videotaped themselves with real bodies in their own homes, fooling around. And there it is: Amateurism is often about reclaiming some kind of primordial authenticity. (Think of punk music in the late seventies trying to recover some primal thing lost under the similarly plasti-coated sound of Lionel Richie, ABBA, Captain and Tennille, Rupert Holmes, and the canned world that produced them.) It’s easy to see in the exponential growth of amateur porn websites and online video sales that this new porn is a classic story of weekend dabblers trying to reclaim some important, lost, funky thing. It’s a classic story; I just won’t be telling it.

  Out in the forest with the Gungywampers, I came to understand that the conventional wisdom about the Age of Discovery is deeply flawed (even if they never won me over with their Chi-Rho evidence). I would hear one withering critique of Christopher Columbus after another. Not of the anti-imperialist sort; there were no mentions of blankets infected with smallpox. The Gungywampers trash Columbus because they think his big, bold, much ballyhooed “risk” of sailing across the Atlantic was in fact not that big a deal and has been hyped by academics who don’t want to even consider the possibility that crossing the ocean was not that difficult. Goaded by the Gungywampers, I started calling around the history departments and wound up talking to a historian who had taught at Brandeis and NYU, Cyrus Gordon, who specialized in archaeology and ancient languages.