The Squire Quartet - Brian Aldiss

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we call the Playfield and the Backflash. Usually, the Backflash will have on it a moving score where often vast figures without meaning are available – obtainable to the participant. The Playfield may have such devices as Thumper Bumpers, Roll-About Buttons, Flippers, etc., all brought into action by a plunger which will propel balls precipitated by the insertion of a coin.’

      This could go on for ever. Perhaps there is a law about rubbish going on for ever.

      It’s up to me to behave myself. It was stupid to speak to Camaion as I did at breakfast. Everyone’s perfectly friendly and agreeable.

      Old Fittich producing that photograph of Tess as he did has upset me. When he took the shot, I must have been in retreat in the Travellers’ Club. Matilda Rowlinson was looking after the house. What was Tess doing there that day? And with that little bugger Jarvis. I could kill him.

      When I get back to London next week, I’ll have to do something decisive; everything is going downhill fast. In the old days I’d have taken up my gun and settled the problems that way.

      Churchill … Do they think they’re flattering me? At least the old man had plenty of guts and the ability to take decisions. They weren’t always the wrong decisions, either.

      ‘Backflash and Playfield are united in a theme. Like a bright-coloured flower seeking to attract insects, the manufacturers create many scenes of pop art, drawing for subject-matter upon all types of the decadence of their culture. Most manufacturers are Jewish and based in Chicago. Such scenes may be of rock and roll music, negro musicians, hillbillies, teenage sexuality, railroads, space antics, or many science-fantasy scenes such as time-travel, robots, and future warfare. Also gambling, the turf, pool, baseball, or film stars and of course the exploitation of female figures (as in Gottlieb’s Majorettes), and funny animals, children of a Walt Disney style, and all other races, in heavy ethnic humour of a Judaic kind.

      ‘Whatever degrades, it will do.

      ‘Also some mythology of an auto-mechanistic kind, designed to attract perhaps those sectors of the populace believing in astrology. An example is from the firm of Bally, called Fireball, where a demonic figure in red encourages extravagance, and such imaginary old gods as Wotan and Odin may be released to flash up giant scores via mushroom bumpers, which signify a mushroom nuclear attack of favourite militaristic thinking. This table has a big reputation, and may once be regarded as a classic masterpiece of the 1970s comparable with, say, a landscape by Maxfield Parrish.

      ‘Internally, these machines are elaborate. Its circuits and subassemblies are very elaborate, resembling the kind of thing in a Saturn rocket. This technology is a different sort of war game, aimed at nothing less than enslavement of the masses when they escape from their work of the day. We appreciate their beauty as of that of the deadly pitcher plant or rafflesia. They are worthy of a serious study as metafiction or socio-economic artform.’

      Krawstadt continued. Manufacturers’ names punctuated his talk like a roll call of the illustrious dead. Burrows Automatics, Hardings, Rock-Ola, Gottlieb, Genco, Bally, Williams, Chicago Coin. The Hall was silent, the delegates slumped back in their chairs or sprawled forward over the green baize. Some smoked cigarettes, taking a long while over the gestures of flipping the box, tamping the tobacco, flicking the lighter into action, performing the first inhalation; others doodled with frowning concentration. Some stared at the speaker, some at the ceiling, some into a mysterious beyond.

      The paper concluded with Krawstadt pointing out that growing political awareness would perceive that pinball machines were analogues of the capitalist system in decline. Beneath a bright veneer of religion or mythology or sex was merely a cold solenoid-operated system set up by cosmopolitan forces against which no one could win, designed to keep the working classes enslaved.

      When Frenza called for questions, Albert Russell Cantania stood up. This representative of the USA was still in his twenties; his book Form Behind Formula had already made him powerful in academic circles. He was compactly built, with a lock of hair that drooped over his tanned face. He brushed the hair from his forehead as he started to speak.

      ‘I guess our colleague Krawstadt who has just spoken knows his subject pretty well. Maybe he even has a connoisseur’s love of pinball. But I wondered during the time he was talking if he ever got round to slipping a quarter into one of those machines and playing, just for the hell of it. Maybe his politics wouldn’t let him, the way puritan morality stops a lot of other killjoys from playing.’

      There was a stir in the conference chamber. Those sprawling tended to sit up, those sitting up to sprawl.

      ‘In my time, I’ve played a lot of pinball, the way I’ve played a lot of poker. I must have dropped a whole lot of dollars on pinball, like I have on poker. More on poker. But there is one factor our colleague neglected to mention. You play voluntarily, because you want to play. There’s no state or federal law saying a man has to play pinball; no one sticks a gun in your back. Another factor, okay, you put a coin in, but you get enjoyment in return. Why not mention enjoyment? Enjoyment is what you get out of pinball machines.

      ‘Pinball machines need skill, they need a quick eye. Exercise of skill and speed yields enjoyment. There’s no law against enjoyment either, not where I come from.

      ‘All this talk of exploitation is crazy. You want something, you pay for it; you don’t want it, you don’t pay. That principle is so basic, and goes back so far beyond the Neolithic revolution in agriculture, that it has nothing to do with politics or morals. I’d say it was a law of nature, human nature. You want a stalk of corn to grow, you plant a seed. No seed, no corn. Everyone ought to get that clear in their heads.

      ‘I mentioned the pinball-table industry in my book, Form Behind Formula. I said then and I’ll say it again now that pinballs obey the law of supply and demand which drives a vast entertainment industry. Look, pinballs are like a pop song or a paperback novel or a movie or a TV programme – anything to which the general public has easy access. Nobody will ever subsidize them the way opera is subsidized, so they depend purely on popular appeal. That’s the basic fact of life – satisfy the public. Happily, in a democracy, there’s a big diverse public which gives a lot of artists a living. Some are better than others, some more limited in appeal, some succeed by fulfilling formulas, some by subtly breaking them.

      ‘Same with pinball machines. Let me ask Mr Krawstadt why he thinks Bally and Chicago Coin and the others go on turning out so many models if the whole operation is just a big con foisted on the public? Why isn’t there just one standard model which goes on for ever, or maybe gives you an extract from one of Lenin’s longer speeches if you put your quarter in?

      ‘The answer, the simple answer, is that people like playing pinball, they enjoy it, and they demand variety. They like their playtables and backflashes big and bright and brassy. They play while consuming a beer, and in a capitalist society they generally have a spare dollar in their pocket they can lay out on entertainment.

      ‘One further point before I sit down. As I understand it, we are here to further the objectives of the Society for Popular Aesthetics – with which I heartily concur, by the way – in raising the cultural estimation of mass art, or future culture, or whatever you want to call it. The sort of attitude we are fighting against is the elitist one which declares that a best-selling paperback is ipso facto lousy, a song millions sing is ipso facto lousy, a movie that turns a profit is ipso facto lousy. The corollary of that attitude says that the novel scarcely anyone reads, the song nobody wants to sing, the movie people stay away from in droves, has to have something special which makes it real art. We fight such pernicious attitudes.

      ‘How is it any different for Krawstadt or whoever to point to all these enjoyable things and say they are merely market devices to put the boot in on the proletariat? All this Leftist crap we’re getting handed is just as damned much an enemy of enjoyment as the old structure of aesthetics we’re trying to kick out. For God’s sake, leave politics out of this and get to proper scholarship, proper appreciation. Else we’ll make ourselves a laughing stock.’

      He sat down.

      Gianni Frenza, who had been conferring in whispers with d’Exiteuil,

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