Friday, February 16, 2007

Some good words about Philip Johnson


Witold Rybczynski takes the usual line against Philip Johnson by insisting that his work were the same old assemblages of old and new welded together, and once again I respond that Johnson had those qualities that are, for the most part, lacking in post-modern architecture; grace, symmetry, style, simple elemental elegance.

Indeed, postmodern architectural style in the wrong hands is a nightmare of bad taste, bad ideas and bad faith foisted on perfectly good pieces of the city scape, but Johnson wasn't one of the dullards. In his best moments he would size up the curious advantages a plot of land would give him, and would render a structure that was a curiously satisfying synthesis of other designer's notions of outrage and an sense of how to make things fit, compliment, enhance as well as challenge a city's high rise profile knew how to make his buildings fit into a skyline, particularly one that studded with structures of historical import; and have his buildings seemingly converse with the history of a given city's urban center. It is not an insult, indeed a compliment, that he had an interior designer's sense of an area's elemental gestalt; what was being added was an organizing principal that could enliven and calm a turmoil being played on the urban eye simultaneously.

His One Detroit Center in my home town does this wonderfully; the elements of the past, particularly the pitched topping and the alteration of cement and glass are an effective and underplayed homage sorts of Louis Sullivan aesthetic from Detroit's great the twenties through the forties, and yet whose lines and playfully exaggerated proportions offers an idea that there is a future for this city that is not cut off from it's past.

Johnson's best work shows that he understood this need for connectedness, and why he felt that the social engineering agenda behind embedded in the modernism in which he started was inadequate. One shapes the future by understanding the best the past has given us, and establishes within institutions a continuity of the best virtues in a manner to motivate the best good one can do for their community. This is a totalitarian impulse at the farthest edge, insisting that citizens live and work a certain way within spaces designed with it in mind to engineer away human shortcomings; the need for order of things made from materials and blue prints contains the conceit that populations can likewise be organized and kept in place. Johnson, though, appreciated the inconsistency of the human element , strong, individualistic despite an innate need to gather in communities and to create shared culture. Rather than regard his buildings as a means to mold human personality, to act as a corrective, he admitted, in the best post-modern spirit, the need for fun, play, surprise with new buildings. Structures needed to amaze, amuse, engage with an elegance that made city life a tolerable concern, even an inspiring locale. His aim wasn't allowing form following function, the cityscape needed to be fun. If function only produced anonymous reminders of corporate power, doing anything at all was , in essence, pointless. Johnson was not a soul killer. Theory of form was reduced to the practical aspects that combined function with an aesthetic grace which
welcomed workers, residents, and visitors to walk within and around, channeling a large spirit of metropolitan life.


It's a lot of bluster, yes, but it's a principle Johnson believed in all the same, and however suspicious his motives might seem in retrospect in view of his youthful dalliance with Nazism, what came from his life's work are wonderful buildings that have more often than not graced downtown areas everywhere one might look. Johnson's instinct was about order and grace and returning style and form as a means in which functionality in urban structuring would achieve beauty and maximum service at once. This is the idea that art can inspire men and women and change them and their society to a higher calling--this is the dread promise and ghost of modernism--and as seductive as the idea remains, it is a slippery result to fascism, the government that comes to worship and deify the individual of genius who is able to inspire legions into an Aryan future. Johnson fell under this seduction, and didn't speak of it much as he began to pick up commissions in American and Europe, but you wonder if he ever had faith in American democracy and its promise of limitless pluralist vistas. I doubt it, but I am grateful that he left the company of evil men and contended himself with what he could humanly do in this world that was a social good, which was to design and build.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Camille Paglia's back at Salon: a floundering wallow of self-regard


Erstwhile firebrand Camille Paglia , a maverick humanities professor who chose some time ago to be equal parts genius and fool in an effort to get a general public to think outside their flimsy catagories and frames of reference, has returned to an old writing gig, as a columnist for Salon. She wrote the column from 1995 to 2000, and then left the gig to concentrate on writing her 2004 book, the punchy collection of poetry criticism Break , Blow, Burn, and now returns to Salon's cyber pages, declaring herself in the first column that she was a pioneer of all that internet geeks and pundits and blogoholics take for granted. She essentially provides the "About the Author" box in the column's first paragraphs rather than at the end of the piece, where it traditionally appears. She has written important monographs, she has appeared on C-Span, she was in the advance guard in speculating our the cyber realm will effect politics and culture, she is a lesbian liberatarian Democratic pro choice aethiest, she wants you to know who she is. It is tiresome, of course, and yet you keep reading knowing that parsing Paglia isn't a waste of time. For all the prate and prolix , there are the fabled "flashes of brillance", ' though I fear, as the late Molly Ivins has said about this claim, that any such glimmers are lost in the yammering.


I'm a fan of Paglia when she gets beyond herself and writes about the culture and the arts it produces. It's here, and nowhere else, where the claims of her intellectual virtuosity and originality have merit. Sexual Personae had more outrageous and wonderfully defended propositions than any bit of academic criticism I've read, and Break, Blow,Burn brought an old school rigor to discussions of poetry , prate and self-consuming criticalese and connecting her selection of poems to the world. With those two books she makes the life of the mind exciting and attractive to someone wondering whether they should bother with Great Books and avant gard posturings. As a columnist, though, Paglia tries her hand at being the public intellectual, or worse,the celebrity intellectual,and comes up seeming comic rather than compelling. Doubtless she has Norman Mailer in mind as the self-aggrandizing firebrand, but strange as it seemes she lacks Mailer's charm and musical finess as a prose stylist.

Mailer might have been a boor and a lout, but he could write rings around his peers and segue into a metaphor rich discussion of war, poverty, women's rights, sexuality , theology, architecture with an intoxicating urgency. One need only compare Mailer's essay collections like Advertisements for Myself and The Presidential Papers to realize that Paglia has modeled her public persona on his amazing self confidence. What she lacks in this fast-paced world of instant opinion, though, is grace or a sense of her own absurdity, a quality that Mailer had , expressed and which endeared him even to this critics. He had a sense of irony about his attempts to light a fire in the conciousness of a post war generation he knew had been seduced by television.Paglia, I'm afraid, is just another typing head as this stage; pioneer she may be as an ur-blogger, but her return to Salon is not a return to form. An extended bout of self-congratulation makes her sound like she's interviewing for a entry position in a new media company. The remarks about Hillary, Obama, John Edwards, et al ,are likewise unremarkable.She sounds like she's the last one to have heard the news; she sounds several beats behind the rest of the band she's trying to join. I hope that Paglia's columns yet to come are better than this slogging mass of egomania and trite conjecture. Sad to say for someone of her daunting intellect, but she seems out of her depth.

Friday, February 9, 2007

"Major Third" by Jeffery Bean

I worked in the carnival for a number of years when I was half the age I am now, and it was a pleasant memory Jeffery Bean evokes with his opening stanza of his poem Major Third, ] the most recent selection by Robert Pinsky for his column in at Slate.

It comes from gravel lots where the state fair
pushes fried dough and bagged fish out the mouths
of red-lit tents. It's pumped out of dunking booths
across the blocks and into windows, up the stairs


My recollections of the carnival are fun and joyous , for the most part, hard work and rough life as it was, mostly because I was young, resilient enough to withstand insane hours, gross monotony, and , being relatively rudderless as a young man, having nothing really better to do. It was an extended lark. Bean's poem, though, does little to reinforce my simpering revelry, as the piece lurks toward the inevitability of death and the details of a departed person's interior life of associations that made his time in life worth the pains it takes to breath comfortably "it" that Bean addresses is undisclosed, but that is the case of reaching for a far recessed memory when one's accumulated life experience becomes crowded and unsorted. It is the essence of experience, perhaps, that sensual texture that is for a second very strong and then recedes as one follows the rhythm of daily life, moment to moment, second to second. "It" , undisclosed, is fluid, ephemeral, but strong in it's allure that we follow it, from one thing to the next, the meaning of that essence, that center of vivid recall, altering as it touches the hems and trouser cuffs of passing phenomena.

...up the stairs

of the apartment where my grandfather is
dying in a room of mums. It's the song of Sunday
traffic, the car horn's hot punch to which he
tunes his hymn, the last tune he remembers.


Something begins to swell, something real is about to emerge from the familiar clanks and clamours of street life, and yet this fades as well, reduced to something tangibly minor and insignificant, puzzling to the casual observer, inscrutable.


It's where the voices in rooms above him drift when
they cheer, or sing, when they ooh and ahh
or rise in anger, say where have you been,
when they call out for help or to mourn—even then.
It's "La Cucaracha".
It's "When the Saints Go Marching In".


"It", after we follow the trail and appreciate the world where it floats on the air, is unknowable to anyone who wants to know the inner experience of a departed they felt they were close to. Sometimes things are revealed soon after the fact that are just baffling and are destined to be just that. Some things are taken to the grave.
Inane songs, quaint aromas, the comings and goings of neighborhoods; all we are privy to are assumptions that these odd elements indicated to the mourned that they belonged someplace in this lifetime. What that means beyond that is a matter for us to infer from our experience, a task too many of us defer until the day before the sightings of daylight. Wonderful poem.

Thursday, February 8, 2007

Letters from Iwo Jima: Another Eastwood Masterpiece


Letters from Iwo Jima is yet another addition to Clint Eastwood's late blooming hot streak as a film director, a suitable and splendidly paced companion piece to his earlier WW2 movie Flags of Our Fathers. Bearing in mind that Eastwood had a mere twenty million dollar budget and had to significantly reduce the scale of the battle in which we meet the Japanese soldiers defending the Island against American invasion, we have all the same where character is constantly tested in the face of churning, devastating battle.

Small ironies, nuanced truths, and personality transformation are all to be had in this rag-tag gathering of island defenders, and it is well managed orchestration of story lines. The cowardly, the brave, the sadistic, the conflicted, the insane and deluded make up the character ensemble--what else would one want from a layered war story?--confronting demons and recall a life they've left behind or a life they've never had as the inevitability of American invasion gathers, literally, like dark clouds. Sappy as this may sound, Eastwood is a savvy enough director to pick up the cues of Iris Yamashita 's screenplay and not allow the character development hijack the harder point of war itself; while the performances resonate grandly (especially the performance of Ken Watanabe as the conflicted General Kuribayashi), it serves as texture, not narrative direction. The battle sweeps,blasts and burns regardless of what bonds the audience might have been formed with the pitiful soldiers, and what remains is a sense of what is destroyed as men are focused on destroying one another.

Long, yes, the movie is long, but Eastwood's style is the slow build; one may say that his slow moving films at least move, in the sense that there is a rich development the range of human quirkiness under duress in the shadow of oncoming disasters and fiascos. Letters from Iwo Jima is very , very fine.

Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Say it, don't splay it


Talking to people about their problems makes for frequent miscues of speech and grammar, a habit stemming from something no more profound than that most of us don't know how to talk about ourselves and our personal problems to another human being. Hence, we come to the habit of trying to sound clinical, distanced, as if we have some clear grasp on what's the matter with our inner lives or internal organs. Either way, it makes for low grade comedy, and it is struggle not to laugh out loud or lecture someone on sloppy usage. I want to keep the friends and acquaintances I have.

One of the most egregious uses I can think is the promiscuous use of "potentiality" when the simpler, punchier, less ambiguous "potential" would do a better job. There's a confusion of the number of syllables in a word with the precision of expression; the more trills the tongue has to
glide over, the clearer the communication.

Another coinage that sends static crackling through my ear is the frequent use of the bizarre formation "uncomfortability". Again, there's that self-concious nervousness that mistakes terms with centipede rhythms to be superior to more succinct words, but this instance is further problematized,(that is to say made more confusing) by an unintended, unEmpsonesque ambiguity. Are we to think the speaker is in a state of "discomfort", which is what one arrives at through context, or is he addressing his ability to be uncomfortability at will?

The literary possibilities are rich, but this is of no aid to someone who needs to make it clear that he needs an aspirin, a therapist, or a
licensed saw bones to alleviate the particular disorder, physical or psychic.

It's not that I object to multisyllabic words in everyday use, since one needs certain words to convey more elaborate ideas, but I do require that
the words exist, in the dictionary if not in nature.

Notes on Hemingway, Kerouac, Melville,



Living in a studio apartment where three of the four walls you have are dominated with bookshelves with nary a spare inch of space will sometimes find you staring extravagant lengths of time at the spines, arranged in neat rows and horizontally atop other volumes, reading the titles, sounding out the exotica of author names and pronunciations, driving through the roads of recalls of the villages, taverns and
great wars that have swept across the bound pages. Sometimes the only thing you can do with to make all this time spent regarding your taste in literary property is to jot down, or type out, some random thoughts, hoping some sentences lead to an essay, or merely work as complete thoughts. The following paragraphs are those kinds of sentences, hoping to make sense and be worth a reader's effort. -tb

______________________

Now and then, in passing, not intended to start a war of any dimensions, someone remarks about how Ernest Hemingway is overrated, his books kept in print and his reputation buoyed by conspiracies of tired white academics that yearn, in secret, for another “good war” for America to again assert its virtue. I get irked, bothered, pissed off royal when someone baselessly derides Hemingway’s accomplishment as a storyteller and stylist (but none as a thinker), but I do see the point about the cult of Ernest who’ve come to regard him as a stalwart of honor and reserve forged by the sacrifices of having lived through a World War when the enemy and the Evil they presented to America wasn’t the least ambiguous or murky with runny metaphorical drift.

Now and again I recall essays and lectures about bad wars and bad faith and bad character for the citizenry as a result, and even sighing in exasperation as otherwise intelligent people suggested that America could use a good war, a “just” war in moments of low national mood so that we might collectively have something to rally around, some shared values to swear to protect, some duty to perform. This is a slippery slope to fascism, yes?

I say leave Hemingway out of the war drum circle and concentrate instead on how well his stories convey the experience of a generation of Americans suddenly thrust into and upon the world, pulled from Wisconsin farms, Bronx tenements or California movie lot, and marvel as well at the economy with which he did it. As the moral authority of governments gave way to chaos and slaughters that only burned the earth, ideas of what were of value were internalized, personalized, nearly becoming part of the nervous system.

Hemingway is, in fact, grossly under-appreciated for his best work, specifically "In Our Time", "The Sun Also Rises", "To Have and Have Not". So much gets accomplished in such a stingy choice of words! His was a different world than the one we live in now, and his accounts of the world, is, at its highest, sublime. At his worst, he wrote sentimental gruel whose bathos so thick you could use it for mortar. A string of post-humous novels hasn't helped the reputation, and have served to obscure the real accomplishment. His writing is about trying to learn to be a man when even the teaching father is a madman sacrificing family for blind patriotism.It 's precisely because that he had issues with his masculinity that he tried to work out in his fiction , is a large part of what makes him great. The point of literary study is empathy as well as analytical comprehension. Hemingway may have fallen short of the self-actualization, but his fictive attempts, at best, resonate and move, and achieve transcendence even when he did not.

Perhaps it is a male thing, that these are matters that a reader might have to be intimate with in order to enlarge their appreciation of the work, but I think not. More, I think, it comes to personal taste, as in, if one does not care for the way Hemingway described his universe, fine.

But I don't believe the ability to relate emotionally to a text need be restricted to gender, nor should it be limited to any other smoking gun criteria. The college professors who instructed me through his work were men and women, and the women, I have to say, win for inspired lectures, wedding appreciation with critique, understanding the poetry of the struggle, and why the struggle was futile.
____________________________
Prospecting for insight through Jack Kerouac’s' journals will be give scholars reason to devastate another section of prime forest, but his novels remain , inspite of it all, maddeningly inconsistent in their best forms, and progressively unreadable in later writing years. Kerouac had his moments of divine lyricism, I admit, but the cult around his grey, sotten visage is nearly as objectionable as the devotion many give to Ayn Rand: the matter is not how good the writing was, but what the author stood for. Once the chatter about writers drifts, or jumps desperately, from concerns with style in the service of great storytelling and lands in the odious camp that insists that a writers' primary task is only to reaffirm a readers' shaky self image of being a rugged and forward thinking individualist, I reach for a good book, or ponder taking a nap. Either option is more fruitful, or both are more interesting endeavors. It galls me that comparatively little attention was given to the passing of William Burroughs, the one true genius of the Beat group, while the easily assimilated rebellion of Ginsberg and Kerouac claims the top half of the literary pages.

__________________________________

It's not a matter of us finding our "Moby Dick" for this century, because that places a false premise from which we expect writers to operate from. Yes, there is the anxiety of influence and the desperate writing younger scribes do to escape from under the long, inky shadow of the geniuses of the recent and less recent past, but I think each period is unique, and that great work is produced in some concentration of creative frenzy that dissolves the anxiety.

Readers looking for another "Moby Dick" for this century are better served to consider their period unique and regard the tradition as a lineage that is not a straight, paved highway that vanishes into a classically defined set of particulars every would be master adheres to, but is rather a broken, dotted line that threads and weaves through a loose cluster of tendencies in the culture, filled with writers who redefine themselves and their art each time out. Melville himself had to break with his own habits, transcending his discipline as a clever crafter of sea stories, a venerable genre he arrived at, to write the masterpiece called "Moby Dick".

The best writers today do no different, living up to the nothing else other than the authenticity of their process. Faulkner and Joyce have comparable greatness, I feel, but I cannot escape the feeling that Joyce was the brainier of the two. Joyce’s' infinite layering of literature, history, theology and myth in to the molecular structures of Ulysses and Finnegan’s' Wake demonstrates someone with a sensibility that subtly wishes to have Art supplant the Church as the institution men may comprehend a Higher Truth( what ever it turns out to be). His own dialectic method, perhaps. I tend to agree with the remark of Faulkner being much blunter, though he is scarcely a brute: the sensationalism Faulkner could give into was also linked to a patch of swamp that released his language, and allowed him to master the interior monologue. This gave us novels like "Light In August" and "Absalom, Absalom" that had with diverse psychological density.

The human heart at war with itself.