LA-area: FW/McLuhan reading group
Jorn Barger
Thursday, July 1, 1999
VENICE PEOPLE GERRY FIALKA
HE IS
Media Ecologist Gerry Fialka, 46, independent promoter, former employee
of Frank Zappa, and host of the Marshall McLuhan-Finnegans Wake Reading
Club.
A MEETING OF MINDS
Marshall McLuhan, playful and pioneering cultural critic and originator
of the aphorism "The medium is the message," was a huge fan of James
Joyce's "Finnegans Wake," calling the notoriously obscuritanist novel
"the greatest guidebook to media studies ever fashioned by man."
Fascinated by both thinkers, Fialka formed the reading club in October
1995 to discuss the places where the two men's views meet -- and where
they don't.
NOT JUST BLACK AND WHITE AND RED ALL OVER
"McLuhan didn't just think of media as newspapers, radio, TV, and now,
the Internet," Fialka says. "Media were anything people have invented
from a toothpick to a bulldozer. And every medium takes us over after
we invent it. The car is a good example: Henry Ford said, 'Look, we
gotta invent the car so we can go into the countryside and see how
beautiful it is.' Well what happened? The countryside was ruined by
cars." Joyce and McLuhan, Fialka says, "were trying to shake you out of
this dream state you get into when you drive your car or read a book.
It'll be fun to see if your copy editor puts an apostrophe before the
's' in Finnegans, because it shouldn't have one. That's because Joyce
was talking to all of us Finnegans. He was saying 'Finnegans! Wake up!
Realize what you're doing! You're reading a book!'"
READING BETWEEN THE LINES
Fialka is 46 years old, raised Roman Catholic, a 19-year Venice native,
and possessor what he calls a "bachelor of general stuff" degree from
the University of Michigan, which he attended in the early 1970s.
Before that, he says, "I was raised a vidiot, basically. I was raised
in front of the TV; we watched dinner in front of it and everything. I
got good grades in class, but I never really established good reading
ability. It's ironic that I run a reading club, because I'm really a
horrible reader.
"But that's the beauty of this club. It's not 'I'm a reader, I'm an
intellectual.' We're not into that, man. We read Ted Nugent into it."
A SURREAL SET OF INTERESTS
Fialka was founder and director of two local film and video festivals:
Documental and PXL This. In the latter, all entries must be shot on the
PXL 2000, a cheap, short-lived Fisher-Price toy whose rich, grainy
images made it a favorite with starving artists. He is also founder and
director of MESS, the Media Ecology Supersession, at Midnight Special
Bookstore. The next installment of this ongoing lecture series takes
place July 20, featuring guest author Robert Guffey, author of the
article "You Name the Dwarfs: Surrealism, Advertising and Mass Mind
Control."
SO WHAT EXACTLY IS A MEDIA ECOLOGIST?
"McLuhan discussed the term media ecology -- because most people think
ecology just applies to nature, like save the trees, save the whales,
save the ocean," Fialka says. "Basically, we need to be ecology-minded
when it comes to media, because there's such an overflow of everything
we've invented coming at us." At meetings of the club, 30 or so minutes
are dedicated to media critique from a McLuhanesque perspective,
followed by an hour of reading "Finnegans Wake" out loud. The group
reads two pages per month.
A CIRCULAR BOOK NEVER ENDS
"I knew you'd ask that!" Fialka says. "But it doesn't matter. There is
no 'done.' Dig this: the last page of the book ends in the middle of
the first sentence on page one. It's a circular book that never ends.
It doesn't matter."
-- Story by Richard Fausset, photo by Stephanie Diani
FYI
WHAT: The Marshall McLuhan-Finnegans Wake Reading Club WHEN: The first
Monday of each month from 6:30-8 p.m. (This month's meeting will be
held on Tuesday July 6.)
WHEN: The Abbot Kinney Memorial Branch of the Los Angeles Public
Library, 501 S. Venice Blvd., Venice.
CALL: 821-1769 or 306-7330
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