Gear-Queer
crows still make me smile
an omen? no, more that they
laugh in mourning black
I'm a big fan of William Gibson; he's got a fun writing style, interesting plots, and memorable characters. But the real reason I love his writing is his habit of throwing bizarre incidental details into a story - stranger-than-fiction stuff, like the Babbage engines and karakuri ningyo in The Difference Engine, the run-down-but-delicious restaurants his characters eat in, and various surreal technologies that sound like science fiction but really do exist, Virginia. Which, because William Gibson's taste in eccentricities aligns with my own, has always been rewarding. This tendency has been particularly pronounced in his latest trilogy, which I don't think has been dubbed yet, but revolves around the dealings of one Hubertus Bigend, a Belgian/British ad executive with a similar fixation on cutting-edge and obscure oddities and the wealth to indulge it by sending two different young women [Cayce Pollard in Pattern Recognition, Hollis Henry in Spook Country and Zero History] on wild-goose chases for mysterious Macguffins, with the result that the "Bigend Trilogy" [AP has to pay me to use that now, right?] is a positive smorgasbord of weird shit.
Which is why it's so weird to find my own little pocket of strangeness dredged up in the pages of Zero History. Exposed with penetrating insight. Embarassingly accurate insight.
Without further ado, here's an extract from a scene in which Bigend explains his company's recent interest in mil-spec gear production to Hollis Henry, rockstar-turned-journalist-turned-private-eye-for-an-eccentric-millionaire-ad-executive.
===
"... Sleight had arranged for us to have a look at a garment prototype. We'd picked up interesting industry buzz about it, though when we got the photos and tracings, really, we couldn't see why. Our best analyst thinks it's not a tactical design. Something for mall
ninjas."
"For what?"
"The new Mitty demographic."
"I'm lost."
"Young men who dress to feel they'll be mistaken for having special capability. A species of cosplay, really. Endemic. Lots of boys are playing soldier now. The men who run the world aren't, and neither are the boys most effectively bent on running it next. Or the ones who're actually having to be soldiers, of course. But many of the rest have gone gear-queer, to one extent or another."
"'Gear-queer'?"
Bigend's teeth showed. "We had a team of cultural anthropologists interview American soldiers returning from Iraq. That's where we first heard it. It's not wholly derogatory, mind you. There are actual professionals who genuinely require these things---some of them, anyway. Though they generally seem to be far less fascinated with them. But it's that fascination that interests us, of course."
"It is?"
"It's an obsession with the idea not just of the right stuff, but of the special stuff. Equipment fetishism. The costume and semiotics of achingly elite police and military units. Intense desire to possess same, of course, and in turn be associated with that world. With its competence, its cocksure exclusivity."
"Sounds like fashion, to me."
"Exactly. Pants, but only just the right ones. We could never have engineered so powerful a locus of consumer desire. It's like sex in a bottle."
"Not for me."
"You're female."
"They want to be soldiers?"
"Not to be. To self-identify as. However secretly. To imagine they may be mistaken for, or at least associated with. Virtually none of these products will ever be used for anything remotely like what they were designed for. Of course that's true of most of the contents of your traditional army-navy store. Whole universes of wistful male fantasy in those places. But the level of consumer motivation we're seeing, the fact that these are often what amount to luxury goods, and priced accordingly. That's new. I felt like a neurosurgeon, when this was brought to my attention, discovering a patient whose nervous system is congenitally and fully exposed. It's just so nakedly obvious. Fantastic, really."
"And it ties into military contracting?"
"Deeply, though not simply. A lot of the same players, where the stuff actually originates. But your civilian buyer, your twenty-first-century Walter Mitty, needs it the way a mod, in this street, in 1965, needed the right depth of vent on a suitcoat."
"It sounds ridiculous to me."
"Almost exclusively a boy thing."
"Almost," she agreed, remembering Heidi's IDF bra.
===
Aside from the fact that Bigend talks almost exactly the way I do, which horrifies me a little [he's portrayed as kind of an irritating bastard in the books], I find this unsettling because this is the exact train of thought that goes through my head every time I walk into Irving Rivers. Except, you know, better written, and published by a successful author instead of a neurotically self-aware mall ninja. I put a considerable amount of effort into avoiding this kind of behaviour---because I hate looking like a cliche, even though I know I am---while still satisfying my military fetish. Case in point: my favourite pair of pants are a pair of paratrooper BDU bottoms which can still pass for business casual wear. What makes them special is they've got these extra little pockets under the regular cargo pockets, you see, which are great for... um... well, nothing, really. Then there's my combat boots, surplus parka, tiger camouflage pants, porn folder of women in uniform... you get the idea. Welp, guess the cat's out of the bag now. Oh well. At least the internet accepts me for who I am.
... right?
Yours in Wonderland,
Sushi Jones