Welcome to Gum
If you've cast a wet finger to the wind lately or perused a recent audit of human affairs, you get a disquietingly similar drift. All the popular indicators seem to tell us we're in for a bumpy ride. In the shadow of That Day last year particularly, lots of us looked up from our busy-ness for the first time in a long while and set to pondering a niggling new question: namely, whether all of our erstwhile interests and endeavors were really that worthwhile to begin with. With this in mind, two old friends (us) called each other, and after a hard minute's reflection, declared as one with absolute confidence, "Um... YES! Yeah. Definitely. Of course." And then we shook hands over the telephone and set to work immediately on something brand new. GUM.
We're reminded at every turn: It's a Different Kind of World Now. Those of us in the U.S. may have floated happily inside a gilded bubble for the past half-century, shielded by distance and affluence from the coarser chunk of the human experience. If in our baptism into the new, grittier reality, we catch the demise of the Entitlement and Impunity that characterized America Version 1.0, then we'll take that, chastened, in stride. But there's another hallmark that equally typifies America of the last 50 years, endowed by the same culture of abundance, privilege and stabilityÐand presumably naivitŽÐwhich we can't help but embrace totally, without apology. For all its foibles, American culture is Optimistic. Sometimes in moronic ways. But the notion of a vibrant popular culture, out of which this grew, and which now informs a much broader collective culture, could not have taken shape in any less enriched an environment. That's our heritage. We love it. And it's a heritage that has evolved over time to transcend American claim. It's British now. And Japanese. And Brazilian. And...Bulgarian. At least in principle, anyway.
When, as lately, the earth shakes under our feet, people do all kinds of things. But mostly they seem to hunker down, take a defensive position. It's sensible. But when enough people do this, things get austere, and austerity tends to be ugly. And ugliness bruises the soul. We get the sense there are legions already hard at work, actively camposing new waves of ugliness to compound and amend the existing excess. There are vast reserves of joy and intelligence, humor and beauty still out there to be engaged, in spite of the forbidding tenor.
Now, we know there's no shortage of pop-cultural offerings already on the shelves out there. It's just that a lot of them seem more and more like hollow mannequins wearing great clothes. But we didn't build just another sexy mannequin, no. BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN was more our template. Except maybe less scary and with a better makeup job. The monster we set out to animate should be many things at once. Smart. Stupid. Serious. Blithe. Demure. Good looking. If pop culture is candy, then this would be palatably sweet, you can bet,Ðbut with a healthy, residual hook. Something to chew on that tastes great, too. An infectuous sort of confection. Or as we say, confectious. Is that silly? Of course...it's part of the mandate!
We had a lot of help in bringing this issue to life. Robert Bundy, Jane Grady, Troy Tyler, Janet MacKenzie, Jim Marcus, Mandana Towhidy, Jeanne Hilary, Cintra Wilson, Guido Vitti, Steve Illing, Rich Herstek, Kostas Seremetis, Phil Frost, Bigfoot, Greg Weber, Matthew Herbert, Andy Thomas and Rick Miller. It's a group effort, really. And that's the way we want it. A shared experience. Unlike other sorts of gum, this kind is actually better when passed around. The Great Gilded Bubble may have burst. But we're replacing it with a little pink sugar-coated one instead. Everyone's invited.
Welcome to GUM.
Colin Metcalf and Kevin Grady
editors@gumweb.com
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