Saturday, April 14, 2012

GUT PUNCH


KILL YOUR IDOLS: Anti-Rock Revisionism





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Kill Your Idols: 
A New Generation of Rock Writers Reconsiders the Classics 
Edited by Jim Derogatis and Carmel Carillo
(Barricade)

The problem with the generation of rock critics who followed the late Lester Bangs was that too many of them were attempting to duplicate Bangs' signature and singular ability to write movingly about why rock and roll stars make terrible heroes. Like many of us, Bangs became disillusioned with rock and roll when he discovered that those he admired and was obsessed by--Lou Reed, Miles Davis, Black Sabbath--were not saints. The discovery of their clay feet, their egos, and the realization that rock and roll culture was a thick cluster of bullshit and pretentiousness didn't stimy Bangs' writing. It, in fact, was the basis of Bangs transcending his limits and finding something new to consider in this. Sadly, he died before he could enter another great period of prose writing. "Kill Your Idols", edited by Jim DeRogatis, is an anthology that is intended, I suspect to be the  antithesis to another inconsistent anthology of thematic rock commentary, "Stranded", the Greil Marcus edited collection where he commissioned a number of leading pop music writers and asked them to write at length about what one rock and roll album they would want to be left on a desert island with; it's not a perfect record--then New York Times rock critic John Rockwell chose "Back in the USA" by Linda Ronstadt and couldn't mount a persuasive defense of the disc--but it did contain a masterpiece by Bangs, his write-up of Van Morrison's album "Astral Weeks". 

His reading of the tune "Madame George" is a staggering example of lyric empathy, a truly heroic form of criticism. "Kill Your Idols", in reverse emulation, assigns a group of younger reviewers who are tasked with debunking the sacred cows of the rock and roll generation before them; we have, in effect, pages full of deadening sarcasm from a crew who show none of the humor or sympathy that were Bangs best qualities. Bangs, of course, was smart enough not to take himself too seriously; he knew he was as absurd as the musicians he scrutinized.

"Kill Your Idols" seemed like a good idea when I bought the book, offering up the chance for a younger set of rock critics to give a counterargument to the well-made assertions of the essayists from the early Rolling Stone/Crawdaddy/Village Voice days who are finely tuned critiques gave us what we consider now to be the Rock Canon. The problem, though, is that editor Jim Derogatis didn't have that in mind when he gathered this assortment of Angry Young Critics and changed them with disassembling the likes of Pink Floyd, The Beatles, the MC5; countering a well phrased and keenly argued position requires an equally well phrased alternative view and one may go so far as to suggest the fresher viewpoint needs to be keener, finer, sharper. DeRogatis, pop and rock music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, author of the estimable Lester Bangs biography Let It Blurt, had worked years ago as record review editor of Rolling Stone and found himself getting fired when he couldn't abide by publisher Jan Wenner's policy of not giving unfavorable reviews to his favorite musicians.

His resentment toward Wenner and Rolling Stone's institutional claims of being a power broker as far as rock band reputations were concerned is understandable, but his motivation is more payback than a substantial refutation of conventional wisdom. The Angry Young Critics were too fast out of the starting gate and in a collective haste to bring down the walls of the Rock Establishment wind up being less the Buckley or the Vidal piercing pomposity and pretension than, say, a pack of small yapping dogs barking at anything passing by the backyard fence. The likes of Christgau, Marcus, and Marsh provoke you easily enough to formulate responses of your own, but none of the reviews have the makings of being set aside as a classic or a landmark debunking; there is not a choice paragraph or phrase one comes away with.

Even on albums that, I think, are over-rated, such as John Lennon's Double Fantasy, you think they're hedging their bets; a writer wanting to bring Lennon's post-Beatles reputation down a notch would have selected the iconic primal scream album Plastic Ono Band (to slice and dice. But the writers here never bite off more than they can chew; sarcasm, confessions of boredom and flagging attempts at devil's advocacy make this a noisy, nitpicky book whose conceit at offering another view of Rock and Roll legacy contains the sort of hubris these guys and gals claim sickens them. This is a collection of useless nastiness, a knee-jerk contrarianism of the sort that one overhears in bookstores between knuckle dragging dilettantes who cannot stand being alive if they can't hear themselves bray. Yes, "Kill Your Idols" is that annoying, an irritation worsened but what could have been a fine project.

The collection would have benefited nicely if they had the budget to afford writers not so much identified as rock critics but rather as critics in general, beholden to no particular canon in any medium, knowledgeable enough to understand what's in front of them and honest enough to cry not just tripe when tripe was served, but to demonstrate, by example and judicious mockery, the pretensions of the artists under scrutiny. I am thinking of Martin Amis or James Walcott, two able and incisive critics who's collected essays respectively rise far above the sludgy monotony that too soon overtakes the assortment DeRogatis and co-editor Carmel Camillo offer the public for a price.

A moment and then another moment


She crosses the street after standing at the corner for minutes that seemed nothing less than hours. He watched ,thinking of lyrics to write. She stood at the corner, jabbing the button of the pedestrian signal box, looking across the street as if to see if perhaps a store she wanted to get to before they closed might have flipped the sign over in the door, from "open" to "closed". 

As if she could see through all that traffic.
I know, he thought, a song about a guy watching a woman trying to cross the street while he tries to imagine a lyric he might or might not write. The irony, he thought, or was it just laziness? All these bagels are cold and hard as tile. He lights a cigarette, dumps the match in his ash tray. The woman is across the street, and vanished into a parking structure.
"May I have another Latte?" he asks a passing woman carrying a tray to the cafe service station.
"I don't work here" she says without breaking her stride. 

Thursday, April 12, 2012

“Aardvarks” by Philip Schultz


“Aardvarks” a poem by Philip Schultz
It’s summer and the Jitney is packed,
every seat taken, except for the one
across the aisle, in which a man
has barricaded his window seat with
a briefcase and jacket, an act meant
to confront others with his superiority.
Munching chips and guffawing at
a YouTube video of an obese woman
riding a scooter down a country road,
towing a younger obese woman
in a wheelchair, he reminds me
of a neighbor’s dog that would steal
and bury our dog’s bones, then growl
defiantly on his side of our fence.
Pythagoras believed our souls ended up
inside the bodies of animals selected
as rewards and punishments.
The three giggling girls behind me,
stretching their legs into the aisle
every time the shy attendant passes,
forcing him to stutter apologies
in a Slavic accent—poodles, probably.
Pythagoras also believed the shapes
of numbers symbolize our significance.
Well, sequestered here between work
and family, thought and dreaming,
I’m probably some kind of numinous digit
slowly evolving into, say, an aardvark
hurling down the highway inside a bus
camouflaged as a vodka bottle, on its way
to a barricaded future on the far side
of a fence where all our significance is buried.
These lines seem to exist only to deliver the image, an interesting image, that of being an aardvark in the guise of a name brand vodka secreted in a suitcase or carry on bag while on a bus barrels down the highway into the vanishing perspective of lost America. It is, I suppose, a tasty line, full of added detail and nicely fitted in the typical   murmuring cadences that typify Philip Schultz's inconsistent output, but what the poem tries to be, observational, quick witted, free associative in the effort to connect classical learning with otherwise banal detail, lacks the feeling of effortlessness. 

A poet like Billy Collins, whom I have a grudging respect for--although his work remains within boundaries that keep out the dark and allow the clarity of vision to fairly burst wide as would sunlight into a dark room from an opened door--has the discipline to chip away at the  construction and the comatose syntax and offer a poem that is clean and as close to the perception as possible: his twists and his turns sound to have been genuinely arrived at, in the moment. 

Thomas Lux, who I believe is likely the best lyric poet writing in America, has a similar compactness of expression, not chintzy and crabby, but musical, deft, melodies of lilt and carriage that  evolve strangely into darker moods, deadlier perceptions. His material is often the grim and ironic string of unintended results his subject's best ideas, plans, emotional outlooks bring them.  The point, to be sure, is that these two poets have works that actually do something--they have an effect that turns the beautiful and the tragic and even the banal goings on in daily life a matter of surprise, perception, the realization that personal narrative is a consoling myth that , while comforting and enabling of the creative artist to produce compelling  literature that resonates subtly with a readership, what happens in Life-As-Is will not obey a wholly owned plot outline. 

Schultz's poem commits no great sin and is not offensive in any sense; it just seems as if it's composed of a string of false starts that don't add up to anything powerful . It's not even interesting, in total, as minor and fleeting riff with language's ongoing struggle to capture the moment, free of cant and well worn stylistics. It reminds me of someone who talks at length, impromptu, producing a stream of words until an idea, a point actually emerges. I would be interested to read what Philip Schultz might do with that last few lines, that image, and apply it to a less gabby framework.


Monday, April 9, 2012

“Insomnia Etiquette” by Rita Dove. - Slate Magazine

“Insomnia Etiquette" by Rita Dove


 I know a little something about watching silly old movies late at night while making my through a half dozen sloppily made drinks; there is that smug satisfaction, that blurry clinging to a vague present tense that informs you that only this minute matters, that this giving into cravings, impulses and desires matters that the ridiculous black and white dramas on the television actually account for something you must pay attention to blasted though you may be.

 I am not saying that Rita Dove's protagonist in her poem "Insomnia Etiquette" has a drinking problem like the one that nearly put me under. Still, the good poet does get that feeling of what it's like to be in the middle of a numbed out mood, dealing with a series of bad days or years or taking the pause before coming to terms with some life complications that will be there in the morning when the fog has lifted, and the headache begins. I am saying that Rita Dove knows something about how  I've felt and at times recall too vividly when the memory works overtime.

Dove has a wonderful way of chipping away at the verbal excess that other poets might be tempted to smother a theme with and thereby kill the idea with a chronic reworking of cliches and tropes about drinking and heroic isolation; rather her language is spare, but not spinal, such as Charles Bukowski's tends to be. She lets the mood thrive, as it were, to define the character's fluid movement, enjoying the very fact that they are in a liquid orbit, temporarily liberated from gravity and regret. Everything else in her life is a series of emotions, confrontations, and decisions that Come Later.


 And I am thrilled that the poem is brief, with this lyric of half-verbalized contemplation refusing to devolve into a wallow or try to make something more of itself by transforming into an absurdly overwrought rant against unfair chances and bad choices. Our hero is behind enemy lines, inside the experience, aware of what comes after the escape into numbness. It is mock-heroic. One raises a glass to their waning awareness of their own absurdity and then returns to the mood's muddled center.

Sunday, April 1, 2012

No more National Poetry Month


Well, yeah, I'm grumpy some of the time, and I've been accused of being a curmudgeon in regards to National Poetry Month, the annual  dedication to an elusive art with a small audience that itself is divided among several hundred-seeming schools of thought as to what is genuinely worth reading or promoting. The reservations come chiefly from the attitude that poetry is something pathetic in itself, with Special Needs, and that there is a collective delusion in the publishing world that poetry can be made more popular by hyping the form with the cliched hokum that sounds culled from New Age screeds. It's a little infuriating to witness an art that you believe, at its best, sparks the unusual idea or the unforeseen connection within a reader be reduced as something that marketers promise to deliver a consumer to an even deeper vat of circumscribed thinking.

I wouldn't say my remarks about National Poetry Month are grumpy, just realistic. On the face of it I welcome a month dedicated to the art , craft and diversity of poets and their work , and even think that the month might well bring new readers to poetry as something they'd read in their leisure time. The problem is that once we give someone or some  thing a special day, week, or month for the nominal purpose of increasing awareness, most of the population bothering to observe what the calendar day commemorates will nod their head, bow their head, read a few poems, maybe buy a single volume that will likely wind up half way finished and atop a coffee table, a page bent down to mark a page,not be picked up again, and then be done with it for the year. It certainly gives major publishers significant favorable publicity so they can present themselves as more than bottom-line obsessed subsidiaries of malignant media corporations: look at what we're doing to support the arts, look at our love of poetry!!

There are poets who benefit, many of them I count my favorites, but the fact that poetry in general has a month dedicated to it's supposed welfare seems more to me that the rest of the literary world considers the form a poor, sickly relative; April as poetry month is the metaphorical gulag, a ghetto, a hospice, that space where this art, which no publisher seems to know how to market so it contributes usefully to their bottom line, is allowed to make it's noise, indulge their rhetoric for a short period in the spot light before being ushered from the stage and back to the margins.

Poets, the work they do, the theories they develop regarding their art has been the most rarefied and most diffuse of the arts as it developed since the encroachment of Modernism over turned the conventional thinking about poetry's form and purpose. It's been to poetry's advantage, I think, that the audience has been small, very small, compared to the other genres that help publishers make their payrolls and their dividends, since the relative obscurity has allowed poets of many different styles and concerns, politics and agendas to advance their art and arguments , both Quietest and Post-Avant Gard, unconcerned with a commercial aspect that wasn't theirs to begin with. National Poetry Month is something like a zoo the city folk may visit on their days off , and the poets are the exotic creatures who will perform their tricks, do their dances, take their bows for the smattering of applause and loose coin that might come their way. Generally speaking, poets and their work would be better off, and saner as well, if the illusion that a dedicated month will increase the readership and increase book sales as well.

It would be better for poets to stop behaving like their in need of rehabilitation and went about their business, doing what we're supposed to do to the best our individual and collective abilities. If the work is good, interesting, of quality on it's own terms, the audience , whatever the size, will come.
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Saturday, March 31, 2012

Harry Crews, Writer of Dark Fiction, Is Dead at 76 - NYTimes.com

Novelist Harry Crews has died. As a bookseller, Crews was among the hardest of authors to recommend to readers looking for a new author, as his themes were steeped, drenched, saturated in the tradition of Southern grotesquery that made Flannery O'Conner and Carson McCullers notable. Crews, though, went deeper, got dirtier, got sicker that all the others and created a surreal, obscene and supremely satiric body of work that featured resilient heroes who were less heroic than they were stubborn, stupid or blessed with the last trace of good luck a cruel God would allow the world. Booze, sex, misfits,random perversion, he was the writer you read after you finished reading Willliam Burroughs  with the conclusion that you have read through the darkest corridors of America's sick sense of itself. Crews is just the writer to give someone a vivid idea that the depths of our rooted irrationality have only been lightly mined. The pure creations of America go insane. So said William Carlos Williams.