BOOK
In our age of runaway acceleration, dreams of deceleration sit side by side with counterstrategies for becoming one with the blur. For every digital refusenik like David Shenk bemoaning "life at hyper-speed," there's a speed freak like US Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger, the Icarus in a partial-pressure suit who became, in 1960, the only human to break the sound barrier with nothing but his body. He leaped from a balloon at the very edge of Earth's atmosphere and proclaimed, "I am a bullet."
Kittinger's words title a new book with text by Dean Kuipers, former managing editor of Ray Gun magazine, and photographs by visual artist and music-video maker Doug Aitken. Descended from The Medium Is the Massage - Marshall McLuhan's eye-boinging explosion of images and oracular one-liners - I Am a Bullet is an extended essay on acceleration: "the prime physical, technological, and even spiritual engine of this moment." Its montaged photos and crammed copy evoke what McLuhan called the "allatonceness" of our times. Good-bye, Gutenberg: This is the print medium with afterburners.
Kuipers and Aitken seek people who are pushing the envelope of technological or social speedup, like Kittinger or test driver Andy Green, who shattered the sound barrier on land in a big black wasp of a car fitted with jet engines. When Kuipers forgets to be deep, in his bumper-sticker Baudrillard way - what exactly does "money is speed" mean, anyway? - his New New Journalism is blow-your-doors-off good fun. The sections on the demo-derby kings of Carpinteria, California, and the test drivers who dream of setting the supersonic land-speed record, are pure adrenaline, as are the photos of head-butting demo-derby deathmobiles.
But apparently it's hard to think straight in a wind tunnel. The section about truckers, "Speed as Identity," confuses a nomad's obsession with movement - the freedom promised by the open road - with a fetish for speed. And "Speed as Economics" focuses on auctioneers who can talk a blue streak - but haven't auctioneers been outracing the human ear for generations? What analysis the book offers on the technological and economic forces that have jammed postindustrial societies on fast-forward howls by in a kind of philosophical Doppler effect.
I Am a Bullet is a victim of its times. Even including shout-outs to Bowie and Iman in your acknowledgments and recruiting what the publisher's hype calls "one of the hottest design outfits in the country" can't save your postcards from the future from being obsolete by the time they arrive. Speed kills.
I Am a Bullet: Scenes From an Accelerating Culture by Doug Aitken and Dean Kuipers: $35. Crown: (800) 726 0600, www.randomhouse.com.
STREET CRED
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Cardiac Arrest
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The City That Never Sleeps
Just Outta Beta
Atlas Shrugged
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