by Eolake Stobblehouse

What do the following things have in common:

• Pamela Anderson
• An iMac without its processor
• Wheel Of Fortune
• Chocolate

The answer of course is attraction without substance.

Attraction is great. Without it we would not only all be unable to get out of bed in the morning, we would actually be nonexistent as a species, since hunger and sex drive wouldn't have been there to make us survive and procreate.

Substance, however, is what attraction should attract us TO. Without substance you have a drive without a goal, you have a shell without a center, you have desire without a subject.

Often, in the daily struggle to survive, we can forget about the substance, and focus too heavily on attraction. In doing so we can end up buying the wrong brand of cereal (corn flakes) because they have a prettier commercial than the others. We can marry the wrong girl because she has a nicer pair of hooters than the right girl. We can eat chocolate for lunch because it tastes really good.

The early PC apologists predicted that the iMac would be a failure, because they looked at the great-looking surface, and they wrongly assumed that the inside had to be weak if it needed to look so good. I guess that is as telling as anything about how far astray this world is: the only right way to do it, a balanced combination of attraction and substance, is so rare that people assume it doesn't exist. Many people, for instance, seeing a very pretty girl, automatically assume that her head is a balloon.

This is also what is wrong with advertising, other than their casual relationship with truth: They put a really strong attraction to something that has no substance. I see beautifully made commercials with very honest-looking people telling an interviewer about their deep and loving relationship... with their breakfast cereal. What is so particularly disgusting about it is that they are so damned well done. The deeply felt love that these people have for their personally selected cereal is so real that Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks must be having nightmares with envy.

This is very relevant to the artist. Substance is what the artist gives to the world. And attraction is what convinces the world to give something back to the artist. If the artist arrives at a point where he focuses too much on what he wants back from the world (typically wealth and admiration), then he easily will end up making products with too much attraction compared to the substance. This is what is known as "selling out".

Why do we hate a particularly "popped" pop song? Because the attraction is so great that we cannot get rid of it (in our head or in the radio), and the substance is so small that it was exhausted very quickly, if it was there at all.

An artist has a duty to the world to put some substance in his art. And he has a duty to himself to put some attraction into it as well, so he gets something back. If the latter feels selfish to some, consider that without attraction, a great part of the world will be robbed of the substance.

In the past I had the misunderstanding that the attraction part was a "necessary evil" to make people get to the substance. But then I had a conversation with a violinist who was known to be "substantial", and sort of a guard dog against too much pop. So I thought that she would speak against pop. But she surprised me when she said: "But you like it too, don't you? You like the pop?" And I realized that she was right. When I thought about good pop, the really great pop, I really liked it. From which I learned that attraction is a nice thing, and a good thing. It is only when it stands unnaturally alone, robbed of the substance it is supposed to be supporting, that it becomes loathsome.

Healthy food, which is well made, tastes great too.

- Stobblehouse