MC5

I lived in Detroit during the MC5's heyday, and I am grateful in that we had many teen clubs that had no age limits; this allowed me to witness local bands like the 5, Bob Seger The Rationals and the Stooges perform their brand of major chord guitar insanity against a complacent culture of hippiedom. Detroit was an uptight, racially tense factory town that had little truck with those either coastline who wanted to ease through the 60s and beyond in a stoned either. The MC5 were, as John Sinclair wrote, a "whole thing", and their task, for art, for music, for the Revolution everyone with sideburns and wire frame glasses claimed to support, was to drive people out of their homes, out of their workplaces, out of their clothes and into each other's arms. There was love in Detroit rock and roll, but it was hard, brutal, arrogant in a fashion that mirrored the worst undertakings of The Man. It was a kick in the nuts to a privileged  Bohemia.

This was the Politics of Ecstasy with a tangible, violent edge, and the 5 wanted to put us in touch with the most primal and alive parts of our animal selves There is nothing particularly revolutionary about this thinking, as there of been an endless line of bright thinkers and florid writers , from Rousseau, DH Lawrence to Norman Mailer who've foretold, in varying degrees and levels of conviction and practice, that if we embraced our instinctual side and did away with the intellectual superstructure that has cauterized our lives and potential, all falseness would cease and only then can we realize joy, creativity, the results of a good toss in the hay. To many, the 5 seemed an antidote to the groovy and lazy vibe that had robbed rock and roll of vitality,  but it bears saying that many considered their cure to be nearly as awful as the malaise it was meant to cure.

The 5, though, were punks, unhampered by book learning; their counter culture was composed of absolutes, black and white extremes, and almost comically effective resistance to new ideas.  They were opportunists under it all, like the punks who harassed us during lunch period, and they embraced this extreme ideology chiefly as a means of getting their drugs, their money, their groupies. As punks who basically became the standard from which punk bands that emerged in the late 70s were judged, the MC5 dumped John Sinclair and his White Panthers when they had the chance. Sinclair wanted them to be bigger than Chairman Mao. The MC5 wanted to be bigger than the Beatles.

the other Motown

Somewhere I have the original 45 released on A Square records (if I remember). That was made available on the Babes in Arms compilation. Either way, it is a killer jam, a guitar assault on a young man's power of speech as he tries to get across something primal, sexual,something beyond all that book learning. This version is bitchen because the guitars are shaved back to a growling raunch, with the solos being the distillation of piercing precision. The earlier version , though, is Motor City all the way: one imagines this young man, so stumped by his swelling desires, standing in the middle of a demolition derby or a police raid professing his same said desires to a reluctant Juliet who is hesitant to step from the cratered depths of a broken city.

Ted Nugent is a conservative asshole who's politics are more head line hungry than thought provoking; he's been emphasizing his gun toting , quasi-libertarian survivalist side for so long that virtually everyone has forgotten what a good and unique rock and roll guitarist he is. This video, from an Ambouy Dukes reunion of a kind, demonstrates that he can still play that angular, pointilistic style of his with the same back stabbing swagger that he had in the Sixties and the 70s, when he shut his mouth long enough to remind people that he used to be taken seriously as a musician. Here, the hatted one, still smirking like someone who just came back to the party after boinking your girl friend behind the garage in the dank tool shed, next to the rusted lawnmower, unleashes some major E chord damage and continues with a ridiculous flurry and fury of notes that it is like nothing else other than a busy intersection when the traffic lights fail and every piece of metal gets twisted and every driver gets a headache, if they're lucky.

It's amazing that some of the stuff that I used to call lame, ie Grand Funk, starts to sound good to me now that I am a mere year from turning seventy. They were a tedious grind in large part when they first started, and they were no great shakes when I saw their world debut at the Detroit Rock and Roll Revival at the State Fair Grounds in either 67 or 68, but they had that working class grit and conviction going for them, kids from the factory culture who liked their rock and roll hard, distorted, and sincere. All things being what they are, they share a lot in temperament with one of my heroes, Bob Seger. Grand Funk, though, were on the Right Side of Stupid, not an autodidact among the the three of them, cranking out steady neo-metal guitar riffs that , at their best, had the lumbering grace of a giant robot who just took a nuke in the scrotum and was short circuiting hard sparks and gargantuan gears as the collapsed through several empty skyscrapers . In slow, fuzz-tony motion , of course.

David Foster Wallace

It was only a matter of time, I guess, before a trend emerged  critiquing the  late  David  Foster Wallace's prose style as wanting . Maud Newton takes him apart in a recent New York Times  dis-assembly,  stating that Wallace's  diffuse approach to the paragraph was  "...  mannered and limited in its own way, as manipulative in its recursive self-second-guessing as any more straightforward effort to persuade." Newton goes to lengths to connect Wallace to the decline in properly arranged prose on the internet, quite an accomplishment anyway you look at it.     Matt Kiebus in Death and Taxes comes to DFW's defense with equal force, opining that "Wallace’s slangy style somehow made cluttered passages filled with a rather pedestrian amount of “likes,” “ums,” “sort ofs,” “reallys” and “pretty muches” look beautiful. The sprinkling of such ordinary words by an extraordinary writer was extremely uncommon at the time. His style reflected his personality and humanized a man whose mind didn’t operate on our playing field. Wallace’s colloquialisms made him likeable. His talent made him revered."


Wallace's worst sin as a writer wasn't the slangy quality of his style or even the I-might-be-wrong qualifiers that dot his long paragraphs, but that his sentences lacked emphasis. Where other great writers specializing in long sentences achieve their ends with having a point they are unambiguously headed for, which is to say that they have direction and and drive, Wallace has only spread much of the time. In his shorter efforts, like his non fiction collection "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", the approach works best ; his thinking and digressions are limited to what is actually in front of him . 


The fact that he cannot   transform something materially objective from his imagination is motivation for him, perhaps, to keep matters moving along. It works as well in his book of short fictions, "Oblivion". where is a bit more off-the-leash in his musing. But overall, you weary of his tone, his ambivalence, his diversions from a subject and realize that reading both his fiction and essays leaves the effect of trying to read a book while the pages are being flipped rapidly. Wallace has the dual characteristics of having a short attention span and being perpetually chatty.  What fans might think to be a masterful unraveling of the invisible links between unrelated subjects I find to be a rudderless drift. 

Ape shit

I just took an extended gander at "The Rise of the Planet of the Apes" and this reaffirms that 2011 has been the tamest and lamest of Summers for action, science fiction and fantasy films. It's not that there was anything wrong with this newest version of the Apes franchise--a prequel that goes to lengths to furnish background drama on how those Damn Dirty Apes got so smart and how they could speak in stilted, theatrical English-- but just how bloodless this enterprise is. I would assign the blame to length, as this film tends to linger on the admittedly wonderful special effects to make the ur-Simian, Caesar, into a convincingly expressive animation.

 All told, though, there is not much room for the non-disguised actors to do here, given the kind of Exit Stage Left dialogue that is sounds like hurried rewrites of various signifying cliches.The cast never really  commit themselves to the eviscerated exchanges provided them , a shame, since there have been a number of action films  with  rickety chit chat that still managed to give a number of quality thrills, accomplished , I think, with a one two punch of a cast going for the gold as they mine whatever worthwhile emotion they can from the silliness of their set speeches, and direction, where a good director with an instinct for set ups, surprises, pacing and editing can create a verve the script doesn't  originally contain.

Pacing goes a long way, and this film drags fatally in the middle ; it makes you long for the days of leaner action movies, like Die Hard  or Alien.  An action movie cannot decide to take a rest in the center of it's unfolding. The actors, as a result, appear to have nothing else to do except trudge from one scene the next. The shoes and their boots  appear uncommonly heavy.James Franco in the lead has fewer expressions than headless mannikin; worry, concern, inner turmoil, anxiety, dread, dread, dread, the man appears to be nursing an ulcer rather than overseeing a scientific breakthrough.

Let the magic happen

After lunch I turned off the computer and noticed that there was a tickle in the back of my throat, the sort of irritation that makes you think of wet sandpaper being the universal standard for raw flesh and blues hysteria. My throat felt the way Tom Waits sounds, amplified aggravation in the center of the soft tissue, red and familiar like a bully's smirk before he knees in the nuts and bitch slaps you more time when you try to sneak out of school via the custodian's entrance. There was nothing I could do about the damn condition at the moment, but I did have a half bottle of Tussin , some generic syrup for the alleviation of sore throat, cough and yet manly enough to expel the grubbily greased mucus from the deepest of chest resonating chambers. I drank it one gulp, a semi sweetened version of the cruel cures your grandmother used to force down your throat with a funnel and the business end of a high heel shoe. It was awful, and all at once the store room started doing jumping jacks, my stomach declared itself a sovereign nation, my eyes saw through the thickest walls of the building and could the lips of cops writing crime novels behind billboards when they weren't getting hummers from bums who need one more dime for some Blue Nun. I was stoned on something, and suddenly the phone rang, or I thought I did. All I remember, really, was that I answered something.

"Gewekeekek" I said into the receiver.
"Hi, I need a  red rubber octopus..."
I paused.
"Don't we all" I answered.
And then the sun exploded.

Recollection at lunch time

I was reading an  piece by Peter Whitmer about Norman Mailer's essay "The White Negro"  while on the bus coming to work this morning and noticed that the day so far had the hue of a dingy wash rag. I lifted my eyes from the twitching pages I was trying to read to see someone standing at the bus stop where the bus had paused to pick up new passengers, spying a guy in a grey hoodie standing on the side walk  looking into the bus, straight at me where I was seated.


Alien twelve tone gangster movie theme songs emerged from my pocket just then, my cell phone was ringing. I answered, staring into nothing but an interface crowded with blurred icons. "This is me" I answered, "Who are  you?"

The voice didn't bother with an explanation  or an introduction or a confession of any kind, Rather , he issued a command,

"Let me talk to the other guy" he said. There was a burst of static, a high whistling shriek. And then the phone became very hot in my hand.

Later this morning

Later this morning there is a mood of subdued insanity as each of  us smile tightly, the corners of our mouths jagged like upended hangers, boomer rang creases pushing the eyes and eyebrows into the leering slant of a deranged carnival clown. Everything is fine and all of are going to heaven in a white boat with Black sails, that seems to be what we are dreaming while awake, a promise of deliverance tempered with an omen for perpetual disaster. Free floating anxiety that wakes up ten minutes before you do and starts pressing the proverbial buttons on the control center that constitutes your dreaming self. Oh dear, oh my, the worst has already happened, although neither the West nor the East coasts have slithered into an angry, boiling ocean. That boiling sound is more of a gurgle, the coffee maker that has stopped working, producing scratchy gurgling noises ; it gave me half a cup this morning and did nothing else other than engage that death rattle. Another fine day to begin the day, especially on a Sunday. And now here I am , wondering,

what? What am I wondering?