Tuesday, April 17, 2012

"Today's the Day"-- A Brief Consideration of Timeshares

[produced in fall, 2011]

Wyndham Vacation Resorts, a division of Wyndham the mega-corporation, owns properties across the continental States, and around the globe through its sister corporation. Having evolved since its inception in 1966 into one of the world’s most ethical companies (according to Ethisphere, an independent ranking organization), Wyndham’s 21st century manifestation of the timeshare may or may not be their bread and butter. So who can afford their stately pleasure domes? To them, the question is actually: who can afford to pass on the opportunity to secure and insure one’s meaningful interactions with one’s own family, for generations to come—or at least across the three nights and four days offered, in exchange for “keeping an open heart and an open mind” over three hours’ presentation on the benefits of timeshare ownership? What are the new stakes of these, our Leisure Dollars?

The world had changed, between my nights in the Poconos in 2010 and my sleepy afternoons basking in the sun. I was curled up on a leather couch, felt the radiant heat through tinted windows and thirtieth-floor curtains: in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, the continued climate of economic collapse in the United States summed up to make timeshares look even sillier. On the second presentation, I dragged along my mother, and Wyndham offered my mother the deed to an Atlantic City condo, with enough subsequent points in a network of properties to book about forty nights’ worth of relaxation. What leaves me reeling is how one of our civilization’s most evolved corporations can gain such ethical corporate clout while offering my mother—a nurse for forty years, with excellent income and credit—the purchase of a New Jersey condo for over $67,000 (“today’s special price”), at an interest rate of 17.99%.

I had always heard maintenance fees were timeshares’ downfall, and Wyndham Vacation Resorts seems guilty of this as well. While none of the figures thrust before me were over a hundred bucks, no assurance could be made that a seventy-five dollar monthly payment, in perpetuity, wouldn’t, or couldn’t skyrocket. If Wyndham wanted to espouse a true and salable policy of sustainability, they’d make clear how they’re working to keep maintenance fees separate and uninfluenced by the rising price of gasoline. As it is, purchasing a chunk of Wyndham’s network of vacation destinations was described as a decision of eternity: a deed and title, to be passed to children and children’s children, that our descendents may experience a legacy of 2br/2ba accommodations, of corporate game rooms, free laundry and parking, and, in every kitchen cabinet of every unit in every property in the Wyndham family, the same Tupperware™, Pyrex™, and wide-screen television.

Once you’re in, you’re in: who Wyndham invites to enjoin these presentations may reflect their research on individuals’ trends in leisure, income levels, and existing relationship to Wyndham. I had stayed at a franchise for eight nights while participating in an academic program in Ohio in July, 2010; this was likely what flagged my name in their system, and identified me as someone who might bite. “It’s my job,” my sales associate in the Poconos explained frankly as we both leaned our elbows on a small, round, black table. My sales associate—I’ll call him Gil, after the recurring hard-luck character on The Simpsons™--ran his fingers through his thinning hair as he followed corporate training on how to develop rapport. Gil’s stress—of this work, and likely the work that preceded this gig—showed most in the corners, and deepening grooves of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. “It’s my job,” Gil repeated as I sipped my complementary coffee, “my job to show you these offers, and explain what’s available to you.” His glasses never fell from his nose; his complexion almost grew more pale as I grinned. His starched dress shirt seemed to help him stare me down and read my smile: “So let me do my job,” he said as he rose from our small table. I waited as he consulted with his boss, about the best timeshare vacation package to meet my leisure needs. Elsewhere in the large meeting room, fifty consultations like mine could have been taking place, but only two were: other sales associates sat around casually, preoccupied by cell phones, newspapers, and the gathering clouds in the gray northeastern sky, in the few days before Christmas.

The Poconos are a good example of contrived twentieth-century tourism: at the beginning of the 20th century, affluence meant affording to spend the summer at a resort hotel, with unparalleled amenities and natural beauty: these were built near racetracks (Saratoga Springs), bodies of water (Lake George), and places of recreation (golf courses and ski resorts in the Poconos). After passing requisite strip malls and gas stations surrounding the highway’s off ramp, I pulled in to Wyndham’s Welcome Center beside Route 209. The Welcome Center is one of those buildings that one could mistake for a large house, were it not for the large parking lot and trickle of foot traffic. The Welcome Center serves as the gateway to Shawnee Village, what was Pennsylvania’s first timeshare development, not far from where, in times much more difficult than these, General Washington chose a spot nearby on a Christmas night to cross his army in secret, and surprise the British. Before checking in and meeting up with Gil, I drove up and down the New Jersey side of the Delaware, seeking such an alternative crossing to I-80. I found only the temporarily-defunct infrastructure of a summer resort town: ice cream stands stood empty besides the semi-frozen river, while miniature golf courses got pocked by small blankets of drifted flurries. An open liquor store had no cars in the parking lot; I wondered if the manager himself had scored a DUI during the sleepy off-season. I drove south, gained the attention of an elderly Belivdere, New Jersey police officer in an extravagant Cadillac Escalade™. He had followed me and my foreign license plate as far as he could; I kept going until I found myself among scant patches of farmland surrounding the Peach Bottom Nuclear Plant. I dreamed of Washington’s famous portrait in the boat made new, by having nuclear cooling towers pictured in the background; I imagined the remarkable size and possible mutations of vegetables produced by the fields through which I drove. Rolling back north through Belvidere again, I waved at the officer as I rolled slowly through a vacant crosswalk; he squinted to see where my green license plate was from, having been spattered and obscured by many dirt-road miles across New England. He kept his Escalade in park and didn’t wave back.

I had never considered purchasing any shares of any time; if I had been, Gil’s first and fatal flaw in his pitch came in his introduction, inside the preamble banter that preceded the hard sell: Gil had moved around a lot in life, between jobs and his children, who live in Massachusetts—“I’ve been staying in Belvidere while I’ve been here,” he told me. Among other jobs, Gil admitted that he had once worked for a pharmaceutical company. If peddling dubiously-beneficial medications was a racket that didn’t work out, I wondered how persuasive Gil had been, in the few months he’d been stationed at the Welcome Center, in peddling these virtual, and virtually intangible vacations. We both knew my immediate leisure—a voucher for three nights at the nearby Shawnee Inn—was already in my pocket. I sat and feigned no interest, but tried to look bemused as Gil pitched on about the virtues of The Security of Timeshares, of Deeds “In Perpetuity,” and of locations far more exotic than the one we faced right then: the grey afternoon of a Poconos Solstice. We both knew that, regardless of my decision to purchase or not, his cold return back across the Delaware that evening, like Washington, would be a short journey made alone: Gil would sleep having fought, and fought hard, and having gained some ground in the larger war, but having thoroughly lost the battle for my signature, and my promise of income to come.

After over an hour of jabber, a scrawling, frantic circular diagram regarding ownership and investment, Gil appeared to invent stories of he and his buddies getting a condo somewhere tropical; of he and his children at Disney in Florida; of a family reunion and lavish accommodations for over fifty in the Midwest. None of these delivered the response Gil was looking for, so slyly, as if fishing for some piggish streak in me, Gil paused before showing another resort from a catalog: “and this one, this was where I took my honey,” he said, and looked up to read my face. Were these true adventures or regurgitated fiction, taken from some sales associate manual, some encyclopedia of leisure-time ploys? Even the negotiation room’s climate was strategic: the blinds were drawn, hiding the casual holiday traffic that rolled by outside. Piped-in instrumental muzak kept us from anything but corporate concentration. We sat at a a few different tables for as long as we could both stand it; Gil first broke a sweat as he struggled to find a ball-point pen that really wrote, breaking his stride as he continued to add to his improvised and meaningless circular diagram.

I imagine the same corporate training manual that taught Gil about eye contact and persuasive fictional vacation stories contains a policy regarding the transport of potential customers in sales associates’ personal vehicles: after riding over to a model unit in Gil’s unkempt late 90s Chevy Impala, and squirming uncomfortably on his cracked leather seats as we drove the half-mile, I was far more interested in learning about Gil’s musical tastes, given clues of scattered and loose compact discs stuffed above the sun visor. Small talk grew more awkward in transit as I wondered, of the women he had mentioned to me, whose feminine handwriting graced his burned CDs of Dave Matthews Band and Hootie and the Blowfish.

We walked across the highest-class of condo available in the Wyndham Vacation Resorts’ glossy directory: a four-bedroom, sleeps-ten-plus, lavish suite. Each luxury bathroom contained not only a glass shower stall, but a private plastic-shell Jacuzzi tub; each kitchen cabinet and drawer was full of silverware, dishes, cups. Gil, and all the other agents looking to sell memberships, left the lights and television on in the showcase properties, so that one walks in to find what appears to be the set of something like MTV’s Real World, or other plasticized media garbage like Rehab House. The beds are made and the windows are dressed tastefully, simply—and the lights and television are left burning constantly in the model unit, because it’s worth the energy costs, to the global, multi-billion dollar corporate collaborative that is Wyndham. As Gil used his best words to describe how such accommodations provide owners a stability and ease in their choices of leisure, I wondered if anyone, ever, would truly reside, long-term and within their means, in the model unit itself. Ethically, someone had to, someday, I realized.

Gil and I parted ways, and I refused any of his offers. I sipped my third complementary coffee and displayed a new stoicism, waiting in a new office for the processing of my refusal. After his final plea I was bounced between a maze of associates and offers, ranging from reduced prices on timeshare packages, to a bizarre offer from Wyndham, completely separate from my recreation dollar: though his broken English made my understanding difficult, an associate asked if I’d contribute three thousand dollars to Wyndham today, and on a specified date in a few years Wyndham would return to me $10,000. As with all other offers, no paperwork was available, to take home and think about and review and make decisions upon—the immediacy of the deal was important to all those dressed formally, in pressed shirts and sharp power ties.

I went on to check in at Wyndham’s complimentary accommodations, at the Shawnee Inn, a mammoth and beautiful antique, built during a time when individuals’ and families’ recreation was framed quite differently than condominiums laden with MTV-style accommodations. The Shawnee, built in the early 1900s, sprawls to face the floodplain of the Delaware River. Its original owner, a New York City businessman named Charles Worthington, sought to establish the hilt of turn-of-the-century luxury, so much so that by 1910, the hotel’s restauraunt served products of its own dairy and creamery, vegetable garden, its own gravity-fed-spring water. The hotel ran a ferry that took guests across the Delaware, to a private nature sanctuary, and the golf course had its own Scotsman, who had his own sheep--not to mention Worthington, not unlike a Monopoly board, built two streets in the town adjacent to the hotel, allowing hotel workers to reside within walking distance of their job. Other attractions at the Shawnee fell away as the golf course gained reknown; because of Worthington’s meticulous attention to detail in running his hotel and golf course, the Inn’s website boasts that it’s likely the PGA was conceived in conversations that took place on the grounds of the Inn.

Worthington’s exclusive resort, however, was built on a clientele that stayed through the season; through the Great Depression and beyond, the hotel’s revenue suffered, becoming a summer-only destination. Skimping on maintenance over all else, the hotel was sold in 1943 to radio personality Fred Waring, a Lawrence Welk/Mitch Miller bandleader type, who was determined to make the Shawnee Inn thrive. Much of the 1950s took place here, it seems: the brass elevator gate on every floor stands defunct across from the modern equivalent, its car having carried Ed Sullivan, Art Carney, Jackie Gleason, Dwight Eisenhower, Bob Hope. The opulence of the winding staircase, the majesty of the lobby’s hardwood floor, and the wide, sweeping porches that extend and face the ever-creeping Delaware: none of these could be found on the ramp that led to Wyndham’s most lavish Poconos unit.

Gil’s persistence did not extend past our meeting, but his corporation didn’t give up on me or my income stream. I found myself in early May in Atlantic City, currently Wyndham’s only other Northeast Resort besides the Poconos and at a ski resort in western Massachusetts, shuffled again with free coffee into a second extended game of information, persuasion, and refusal. Gil was not there, but many more associates were: the stakes seemed higher as the sun shone and warmed up the resort town for summer.

It all made more (but not enough) sense in Atlantic City: the full size coffee pot, the complete kitchen, the two bathrooms and one master bedroom, the living space, the DVD player, the balcony with a tragically low railing and view north, to the Absecon Lighthouse and beyond, to the next barrier island up. Exploring closets and cabinets, I imagined returning back to such a contrived and habitable space—to cook one’s own meals, and live out an existence as best as possible, for however long such would be available.

The Softest Bullet Ever Shot: Philosophical Consolation of the Individual in The Soft Bulletin (1999)

[Produced through Union Institute and University's Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies program, 2011]

In 1999, the Flaming Lips released The Soft Bulletin. The album's critical, musical and philosophical acclaim has grown wildly since its release; it is regarded by some as the band's masterwork, as well as a final defining work in the field of rock music in the twentieth century. Like Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy, the Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin (1999) contains the notable lyrical construction, and an according embrace, of a specific philosophy: one of individual accomplishment and triumph. This discussion will define philosophical and theological themes found in The Soft Bulletin (1999), and will identify some beliefs shared by Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy-- namely, problems located between human reason and “passion,” and, a useful reconciliation of a God existing in a world containing evil.

Context for Boethius' Consolation

Boethius (524) in The Consolation of Philosophy offers a classical example of the Lips' philosophical aim; this jail-cell treatise on the abilities of faith, outside of a strictly religious discussion was widely popular during the Middle Ages, having been translated “into Old, Middle and Elizabethan English by Alfred the Great, Chaucer, and Queen Elizabeth respectively” (“Introduction to Boethius,” n.d.). This work was written while Boethius was imprisoned; he would be executed shortly after the completion of this work. In his introduction to the Consolation Seth Lerer (2008) described it as a work that seeks “to create a kind of parallel dialogue between the discourses of literary and logical inquiry” (xv); and, a dialogue that “transmutes the central myths of classical paganism to provide allegories of wandering, struggle, and reward that prisoner and the reader may use to locate themselves in the spiritual world” (xv). This action of location as promoted by The Consolation of Philosophy may be related to the difficult environment of prison, where the work was conceived; the themes of “wandering, struggle and reward” relate distinctly to the first-person narrator.

Context for The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin (1999)

The Flaming Lips began in the 1980s, the product of two brothers-- Wayne and Mark Coyne-- and bassist Michael Ivins. After moderate commercial success and collaboration with producer Dave Fridmann, their 1993 hit “She Don't Use Jelly” was chosen for use in a number of popular television shows; Clouds Taste Metallic (1995) and Zaireeka (1997) both represent transitional periods for the band, as the former included a remarkable but unstable lead guitarist who left the band shortly after the album's release, and the latter being an experimental album, to be played on four compact disc players at once. Warner Brothers' support for the Flaming Lips' experimentation following Zaireeka (1997) led to the production of The Soft Bulletin (1999); enabled by the financial and creative support of their label, the Flaming Lips-- now Wayne Coyne, Michael Ivins and Stephen Drozd-- set forth to compile and complete The Soft Bulletin (1999).

Rock was marked by an evolution in the philosophy espoused by its players during the 1990s; notably, Kurt Cobain, both in and out of his band, Nirvana, helped define “grunge” as being more than a musical style, but rather an attitude of apathy and resignation, until his suicide in 1994. While drummer-turned-instrumentalist Stephen Drozd battled heroin addiction throughout the 1990s, the Flaming Lips sought consistently on The Soft Bulletin (1999) to promote in individuals a compassion and secular sense of purpose and intention, regardless of a band member's abilities or choices. In partial answer to the apathetic stance of “grunge” musicians, the Flaming Lips' productions during the 1990s reflected an able, capable, and willing view of humanity (“all your bad days will end/you have to sleep late when you can” said one song from Clouds Taste Metallic (1995, “Bad Days”)); this view culminated in the production of The Soft Bulletin.

The need for philosophical consolation is built in both works of the reconciliation of an individual's rational and emotional perceptions and responses to their environment. A mysterious and powerful woman enters Boethius' room, and chases out the muses of poetry, exclaiming: “what we want is the fruits of reason, while all they have is the useless thorns of intemperate passion” (Boethius, 2008, p. 16). These fruits are products of human individuals, their best and rational perceptions; the thorns of “intemperate passion” plague and cloud understanding of reason. In “The Spiderbite Song,” from The Soft Bulletin (1999), lead singer Wayne Coyne describes an actual incident involving bandmate Drozd:

when you got that spiderbite on your hand

I thought we would have to break up the band

to lose your arm would surely upset your brain

but the poison then could reach your heart from a vein

I was glad that it didn't destroy you/how sad that would be

cause if it destroyed you/it would destroy me

Through fruits of reason, Drozd's survival of the spiderbite may be questioned; the dire circumstances are described, and the fate of the individuals involved is intertwined. Through “thorns of passion,” the destruction of the individual due to a spiderbite is seen as a sad and mournful loss. The second verse of this song describes a car crash, while the third and final verse describes being in love: “...the greatest thing a heart can know/but the hole that it leaves in its absence can make you feel so low” (Flaming Lips, 1999, “The Spiderbite Song”). Enduring nothing but the “thorns of passion” (Boethius, 2008, p. 16), love and only the loss of love itself, still incites the Lips' fear of mutual destruction.

Images of individuals, their bodies and actions, help construct other songs on The Soft Bulletin (1999): following a pattern of long parenthetical song titles established on earlier albums, these titles reflect a persistent relocation of an individual within time and space:

“The Spark That Bled (The Softest Bullet Ever Shot)”

“The Gash (Battle Hymn for the Wounded Mathematician)”

“Race for the Prize (Sacrifice of the New Scientists)”

“What is the Light? (An Untested Hypothesis Suggesting That the Chemical [In Our Brains] by Which We Are Able to Experience the Sensation of Being in Love is the Same Chemical that Caused the “Big Bang” That Was the Birth of the Accelerating Universe)”

(The Flaming Lips, 1999).

Of these, the last serves to illustrate an essential tenet of the Flaming Lips' philosophy, as described by The Soft Bulletin (1999): whatever larger powers may be at work in the world exterior to human individuals, some amount of that power-- and its requisite capabilities-- must be located within each of us. Divine and higher powers may reside beyond the full environments of these, our conflicts, but their presence is immaterial; the song “The Gash,” in its triumphant and orchestral bridge, asks not of God, and seeks not to take comfort in any notions of predestination, as it asks: “will the fight for our sanity/be the fight of our lives/now that we've lost all the reasons/that we thought that we had?” (The Flaming Lips, 1999). The ability of the individual to triumph trumps all other responses; the “fight” for “sanity,” perhaps the reconciliation of reason and emotion, may consume any of us, but will likely remain our philosophical preoccupation, if we are to harbor any at all.

Waiting for a Superman: Theodicy in Boethius and The Soft Bulletin (1999)

Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy notes the presence of God as above and outside of humanity, defining the relationship perhaps dominantly as one of a creator and its creation: “...He who gave the sun his rays, and horns unto the moon. 'Tis He who set mankind on earth, and in the heavens the stars. He put within our bodies spirits which were born in heaven. And thus a highborn race has He set forth in man” (Boethius, 1902, p. 71). The aspiration and intention God has for His creation in The Consolation of Philosophy may be unrecognizable to the created; the “wandering” described by Lerer (2008) earlier is not only an emotional movement, but a fluid and transforming spiritual and psychological state.

Many critics have identified in Boethius' Consolation the concept of theodicy, defined best by the question: 'how may God exist, and be seen as retaining a full and complete power, while evil is permitted to exist in the same world?' This theological dilemma has been carried forward, all the way to The Soft Bulletin (1999), in which , God is not named or defined. The closest construction of a higher power may come in the album's morbid centerpiece, “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate,” which describes an individual's passing away, through only a few lyrics, spread across dramatic minutes:

love in our life is just too valuable

oh, to feel, for even a second, without it

but life without death is just impossible

oh, to realize something is ending within us

feeling yourself disintegrate

Perhaps, for such ambition-- even in the face of utter disintegration-- the Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin (1999) suffers no discussion of theodicy, but heralds the ability of the individual, beyond even the grave. The action of love is regarded as defining life, both in this song and elsewhere on the album; while the action of giving and receiving love may fulfill the Creator's expectations in Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy, the potential within individuals to prevail and succeed, in however fleeting a moment is available to them, shifts the focus of the Lips' work to the literal and practical abilities of the listeners.

Successful Philosophical Rock: Conclusion

The Soft Bulletin (1999) helped establish new philosophical dimensions for rock music, far beyond the shallow apathy of grunge: like Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy, The Soft Bulletin (1999) sought to regard an individual's abilities themselves a profound remark on the nature of divinity. While the Flaming Lips may avoid direct confrontation of the dilemma of theodicy, the context for all of the actions described by the lyrics of the album are the same: love. This too serves as profound philosophical consolation. The further embrace of philosophical discussion in rock music is useful; as with the Flaming Lips, the genre may prove rich and persuasive.

Works Cited

Boethius. (1902). The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. W.V. Cooper. Retrieved from http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=BoePhil.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=3&division=div1

Boethius. (2008). The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. David R. Slavitt. Intro. S. Lerer. Retrieved from http://www.hup.harvard.edu/resources/educators/pdf/BOECON.pdf

Flaming Lips, The. (1995). Clouds Taste Metallic. [Compact disc]. Burbank: Warner Brothers.

Flaming Lips, The. (1997). Zaireeka. [Compact disc]. Burbank: Warner Brothers.

Flaming Lips, The. (1999). The Soft Bulletin. [Compact disc]. Burbank: Warner Brothers.

“Introduction to Boethius.” (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.san.beck.org/Boethius1.html