Thursday, July 29, 2010

The James Brown Revolution


James Brown released an album decades ago who's title announced the 70's ethos in screaming , feel good disco beats:


"IT'S A BRAND NEW DAY, SO LET A MAN COME IN AND DO THE POP CORN!"
Man oh man, I thought when I first came across that disc, flipping through albums at a Wherehouse Records somewhere in the San Diego beach area, this brother was about to implore us all to forget the past and to live for the moment and and create a path to a rosy picture but was overwhelmed, shoe-tips to  fingered pinky, but a core primal nature the refused to let himself get preachy beyond a few monosyllables. Forget everything else, forget the revolution, the high interest on easy credit loans, the lack of money when the bills are paid, the unjust wars,the lack of gasoline, the ugliness of buildings staring down on your gaping mouth as you look up toward the cloud with the wondering of when will it rain money, it was time to dance, to frolic, to make the groove paramount in how one conducted themselves.

Dancing trumped every concern, and one didn't conduct themselves in any fashion, as that implies a measured, contrived and controlling manner of being in the world our spirits were forced to endure--it was a script, false, predictable, tested in the laboratories of predictability. James Brown always of using that microphone as a weapon when he was self-inducing one of his performance nervous breakdowns--right at the point when he was on his knees and his valet put the retirement cape over his shoulder--I'd seen this act a few times on television shows during the mid to late sixties--one wished he'd break the habit of the scripted break down and seize the moment with some genuine, crazed, hyena-eyed storm-bringing: GRAB THAT MICROPHONE AND SLAM THE BASE INTO THE VALET'S GUT! UTTER SOMETHING PROFOUND AND BASIC AND FREE OF VALUE TO AN AUDIENCE THAT EXPECTED TO BE ENTERTAINED IN ALL THE CONVENTIONAL DISGUISES FOR DISGUST.

"
Brothus and sistahs, wonez upon atime in a cassle so fine erwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwHHHHHHHHHHHgggggggggggggggggggggdigittty DooooRannnnnnygumption, yeahhhhhhhh, heh, hit me, hit me gain, up onna bridge, bidge, yassuh, a manz gotta slop sum stumbling facehangdown groanfactgor yassuh! Hitme again, yeabh ,babbybabybaby, eewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh, heh!"
We might assume that there are cameras at this mythical point in JB's career, this point where his harnessed intensity broke beyond the conceretized limits of language and propriety and made him into a garroting example of what happens when the last brick finally falls from the last wall between chaos and organized ennui. The cameras would follow the crazed soul singer to the parking lot , where he screamed about magpies under a yellow, sodium street lamps. He would get into a car and then drive off , at once, at eighty, ninety, a hundred miles an hour, careening for a hundred miles, blasting the classical station and screaming the words of "It's a Man's World" while the static-prone station filtered a guitar quartet plucking out Bach organ solos while every abandoned furniture factory and machine shop in the Midwest sped by. State and local police, of course, were in close pursuit, and the result of all this confusion was a big dance party at the end of the highway, in the empty lot by the Piggly Wiggly and the TuVu Drive in, where Farrah Fawcett was on the screen in the film "Sunburn". The commotion, caused by car engines, car radios and James Brown screaming, yet again, into a bull horn about Teddy Kennedy and the Boat, caused the movie to burn and melt as it shown on the giant screen. Car horns galore blasted as drink cups and boxes of pop corn dotted the night sky.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

THE AQUARIUM by Jeffrey Yang: Wet lyricism


The Aquarium
poems by Jeffrey Yang

The book's conceit, an appealing one, is to write a series of poems on the fish and other ocean creatures one would come across in an aquarium, in alphabetical order. It's a sort of involute indexing of whims and amusements that would soon get ragged with repetition in heavier hands, but Yang's touch is light and varies his approach, creature to creature, and what his musings land on, of course, are continued inquiry into how we know the world.

We mirror, we model, we mimic, we claim credit for all the nobility that happens in domains that are, in fact, alien to our cities, countries and cultural ambiguities that Yang has the pleasure of gentle yanking our chain. As usual, the real issue isn't so much the wonders of sea life as exhibited--and the phrase ''exhibited underscores the problematic nature with which human languages address the external world as if it depended on our giving it narration--as it is something else altogether.
There is great appeal in the work of poets who can artfully contain a series of ideas in a brief piece of verse, the goal is to turn philosophical precepts into the glittering surface of a poem’s allure and still address an issue quite beyond the more comfortable subjects of beauty or an aesthetically constrained idea of Truth, capital “T”. Jeffrey Yang’s first collection, An Aquarium (Graywolf Press) is a series of poems that at first seem like they concern themselves exclusively with ocean life; indeed they do, but the author is shrewd in seeing what other areas, outside the aquarium tank, these creatures touch upon. Yang offers up a view on how we think about things. Here, in the poem" Parrotfish", the creature is nearly lost as the poems start like the first sentence of an encyclopedia entry and quickly turns into a bit of cocktail chatter seeming between artists, secret agents, and critics, all of whom sacrifice the subject in favor of extending their rhetorical devices.

Parrotfish
The life phases of a parrotfish
are expressed in colors.By day,
the parrotfish replenishes coral reef
sands, and by night spins
its mucous cocooned-
room. Is this art's archetype
abstracted from politics?
Picasso thought abstraction a cul-de-
sac. The CIA loved Abstract
Expressionism. Hockney: "I
don't think that there is really such a thing
as abstraction." Langer:"All genuine art
is abstract."
What do you think parrot-
fish?

I think the aim is to undermine the insidious intent of rhetorical questions that frame ready-made political assumptions. The question in "Is this art's archetype abstracted from politics" forces agreement from the reader through it's disingenuous appeal to a person's vanity, from which an argument may be made for agendas that have little to with art, parrot fish, or life in general. This is the use of language that treats the things in nature as if they were symbols, real or potential, for great oppositions at war in an unseen metaphysical realm.

Yang seems aware that there is a very human tendency to regard the world outside our senses as though it were a linear narrative being played out, with virtues reducible to good v evil, beauty v vulgarity, honesty v criminal intent being the principle extremes in play. The narrative form, the storyline, is a convenient way of making the raw experience comprehensible, but taking a cue from Heidegger's work in phenomenology, Yang would have us be aware that the parrot fish and its environmental niche are not abstractions of anything but rather expressions of their own life. "Back to the data", as the man said and, in the choice phrase of the confounding Ezra Pound ," the natural object is already the adequate symbol".


He follows the erring assumptions to an unusual but logical conclusion: the symbol of beauty and abstraction must surely be brilliant intellectually, and so must, by default, have an opinion of the matter. He places us in witness to an absurdity: intelligent men, seduced by their nuanced sophistry, asking a fish for an informed opinion. Yang seems to me to be making fun of the way we call things either "beautiful" or "abstract"; for all the sophisticated and nuanced reasons critics, theologians and agents of intrigue approach the subject, the competing philosophies all fall short, far short of articulating something truly tangible. The irony is that the embodiment of all this speculation, the lexicon-heavy guesswork to a thing's essence, is not aware that it is beautiful, abstract, or is somehow an embodiment of a set of ideas that are meant to change the world. The parrot fish isn't even aware that it's a parrot fish, which is entirely the point--it is too busy being part of the rest of the underworld. Unlike human beings, who are continually trying to separate themselves from nature so that they may subjugate it a little more


Thrive as we might, we are lost in our self-consciousness and cherish the sort of autonomy one might perceive in the creatures swimming their currents, inhabiting their niches, living survival and death in the same fluttering of a gill. But beyond this, Yang streamlines his erudition--these aren't lectures, these are lyrics that are broadened or collapsed as the idea determines. An admirable effort by a writer with a composer's ability to embrace the ambiguity of form with a coherence of flow.

Monday, July 26, 2010

Sometimes two is better

Another controversy involving Vladimir Nabokov is about to ensue, Slate magazine's Ron Rosenbaum informs is, when his publisher issues a stand alone publication of the titular poem from the novel Pale Fire. More than a few tempers will flair, more than a few words will be shot over the figurative bow.The controversy from a few years ago, involving the publication of the index cards comprising the first draft of the unfinished The Original of Laura, is different than the impending ado over releasing the poem from the novel Pale Fire by itself. One wasn't even a finished piece of writing, something that had existed as reed thin sketches that might later be fleshed into a work worthy of Nabokov's esteemed reputation.

I was among those argued for the destruction of the "manuscript", such as it was; I suspected that the endeavor was to compel us to further stress our credit limits and credibility in the same instance, to make money on slim offerings and, indeed, to see the Nabokov faithful fawn and fall over themselves raising the skeletal notes to absurd levels of desperate praise. The issue was that I am generally against the posthumous publication of rough drafts by famous writers; I generally assume that there is a good reason why the works weren't published in the author's life time. A good writer would know when they 're writing with less than a full tank of gas. An interest in an unpublished manucript is warrented, I think, provided that the tome is, more or less, a complete work , or in a state of near-completion; though lacking the fnal grace notes a note late writer might have provided, the finessing that creates the signature tone, it remains a fairer idea in comparing the posthumous publication with the ouvre that came was produced during an author's productive years. The Original of Laura, though, is rather too skeletal an artifact . Considering a finished work, as a few critics have done, borders on literary necrophilia.

The new issue is something different, as the poem in Pale Fire, titled "Pale Fire", is a strong work on it's own terms, separate from the meta-narrative that surrounds it. It highlights the writer's brilliance with English--the flowing musicality, the lyric wordplay, the seduction of the senses that gives lust and obsession a rationale, a heartbeat. No one, I suspect , would be embarrassed by reading the poem as a stand alone object. I think this could the start of a interest exercise in meta-texting; Kinbote's annotations to the fictional Shade's epic are themselves a poetics based on the assumptions of a inquisitor who's credentials , it turns out, are fictional, and that the whole novel turns out to be a a tightly knot of considerations premised, it seems, on what the commentator needed to exorcise. The poem published by itself could be reinterpreted by a generation of new critics intrigued with the prospect of reviving a form of Freudian criticism, investigating ideas on the supposition that Nabokov was engaging issues he wasn't aware of on the waking level. And it's not as if the original novel is being replaced by the unchained poem--it will be available as long as readers care about how beautiful, sly, musical, sexy, and hilarious prose can be .

Sunday, July 25, 2010

LOUD

I like loud and distorted guitar the old school way,in the form of jamming power trios, those guitar-bass-drums shoot outs where the downbeats started at debated counts and the length of improvised middle section was undetermined and unpredictable. Improvisation, riffing, vamping, monochromatic chord mongering, the center portions of this species of spontaneous noise took it's stylistic cue from several generations of black American blues geniuses and took their clear, elegantly expressed formulations of anger, pain , dread and joy and tweaked the pentatonic elements to a narrowed strain of white male rage, performed at volume levels beyond endurance levels , with the nimble, simple, eloquent rhythms and solo configurations of guitar , harmonica, banjo being replaced with a waves of distorted notes bent to their furthermost pitch of emotional credibility.

It was perfect for the smoky ballrooms I went to in the late 60's, where the likes of Cream, Blue Cheer, Sir Lord Baltimore and Mountain belched, groaned and assaulted a beleaguered audience of addled brains with their instrumental abuse; on some nights the commotion and clamor reminded you more of a demolition derby instead of a unique engagement with a fleeting muse. Impact was more important than configuration.




There was joy when , in Detroit where I lived, I came upon the MC5 and the Stooges. The 5 were every car Detroit had manufactured being tossed off the top of the Penobscot, the tallest building in down; they had a speed and power only the fury of a accumulating gravity could provide, and half the fun of watching these guys batter, abuse and flail their instruments while the wiggled and wrenched themselves in hip-thrusting deliriums was the expectation of their metaphorical car crashing, smashing into the hard, metal strewn concrete below.

The Stooges were, on the other hand, the guitar that was tossed off with a violent fling at a bad rehearsal and left on, still plugged into the amp, humming and crackling the whole night; Ron Ashton's guitar work was perfect, imperfect, with a wood-chipper rhythm, a perfect three and two chord background for Iggy Pop, who's psycho-sexual explorations into the outer areas of teenage impatience would make you think of a zombies severed arm. It still twitches across the blood, the hand is still making grasping motions for your neck, you realize that even death cannot stop this force that requires your attention.





Nothing doing in anyhow town


Perhaps we should use our Internet like it were a telephone; use as needed, but only in helping us navigate the community we live in or the communities we might visit. Hard to do, though, as in the death of book stores and record stores displays; a good many of us prefer spending our money from our desktops rather than go to town. Going into a shopping center used to be a useful time killer, an activity that had attractions other than the assortment of utility -based commerce,like drug stores, hardware stores, supermarkets; one could browse a bookstore shelves and decide what to take home after inspecting the completeness of scattered topic territories, you could listen to and buy music at a record store and perhaps experience new ways of making melody and improvising on a theme that hadn't yet been in your experience, you could see a movie at a theatre and maybe, just maybe be privy to a foreign release on the aggressive cognoscenti are aware of.

Movie theatres are hanging onto their turf in the public sphere, of course, but there is less reason to dwell , walk around, to visit the town center further. It was recently like this, when I worked as an agent at a call center for an Internet company, who had their headquarters in a new industrial park on the far fringe of the developed land in North San Diego County. I would take the bus to the mall nearest the complex and would then walk for fifteen minutes to take my seat in front of phone console, waiting for the first irate client to call in. It used to be that every mall I went into had a Wherehouse or a Tower Records, a Walden or a Doubleday Bookstore; now it's empty windows covered in long , brown sheets of butcher paper, kiosks selling sunglasses and cell phones, clothing , bath, and electronic stores with one, maybe two browsers per store, if they were lucky, with no sales being closed by hapless sales clerks. There was nothing , nothing at all I wanted to buy, nothing I wanted to see, nothing in the name of anything interesting I wanted to inspect, pick up, make mine, even if I had the time.

Walking to the office building where I worked, down those long, wide avenues with cars by the hundreds heading for the freeway, away from the city, was more inviting than killing time where the spirit of life had been murdered.  In short order, I would have my headset on, talking to people who listened to Rush Limbaugh responding to an ad he'd just read on the air, an offer they couldn't refuse. Credit card in hand, they wanted to make an order with me, or complain in technicolor language about an order they placed with someone else wearing a head set like mine. Life had gotten smaller, lazier, and  small wonder that it seems everything we thought was certain is now a pile of platitudes and the recrimination of morons; we can't get in our cars, get on our bikes, get on a bus and spend our dwindling resources in the town we live in; mean people are too lazy to harass the hired help in person.

It's pathetic.

Friday, July 23, 2010

God is an argument waiting to happen


In a poem that dealt , somewhat, with God and theology, I made reference to God's best ideas being "cloud bound"; a conservative on the board where I posted the verse took exception and proceeded to say all sorts of nasty things. This is a little bit of that  exchange.

Wherever did you read about God being "cloud-bound"? Name one book stating this.

One cannot believe that you’re this much of a pop-culture illiterate. The popularized conception of in mass-culture is that God is in Heaven, and Heaven is in the sky, i.e., the clouds. It’s an image and an idea that is inseparable from the way we think, in the short form, of He who we call Lord. It’s in our literature, our poems, paintings, cartoons, and our movies. Ever see “The Horn Blows at Midnight” starring Jack Benny as an earth-locked angel? Rent it, since it is an amusing comedy utilizing the popular notion that Heaven, with God in it, is in the clouds. Really, Cal, are you actually this obtuse?

God commands us to "love one another" and obey the Golden Rule," and you adduce to Him bulliness?

. The God of the Old Testament was a bitter, cranky, vengeful deity, a bully in other words, and the message of the God we discover in the New Testament essentially demands that we serve his purpose and plans for Humankind lest we be judged and condemned to horrible, eternal punishment. He makes threats , in other words, and this is bullying behavior however you dress it up with transparent words like “love” and “sacrifice”.

Are you a Christian, and are these YOUR PERSONAL points of view?

Christian by birth and culture, but not a doctrinaire worshipper. God gave us minds to use, and it’s my guess that He , being God, isn’t in need of his self-esteem reinforced with coerced praise, and isn’t the sort of deity to threaten us with eternal damnation unless we play His grubby game of Theological Monopoly. My guess would further to say that this God of my understanding is likely bored with that whole business and thinks there more useful, creative ways to fill eternity . These are my views, but the ideas aren’t new. Inspiration comes by way of Soren Kierkegaard , Paul Tillich, Thomas Merton, Bill Wilson and Norman Mailer. The way the ideas are expressed are my words, though, based on my experience.



period

a glass of water

a pretense of rain

several men in a public bathroom stall

women named Jessee naming animals

toast, hot, buttered

no fuzzy dice

television with no sound

a handsome face moving its lips

no indirect route

a passenger seat

a broken window

the rock that broke the window.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

INCEPTION: sleep aid


Inception was a colossal strain on my attention span , as was director Chris Nolan's previous film The Dark Knight. Both the films were well mounted and the available budgets were well used--as they say, you could "see the money on the screen"--but Nolan mistakes plot confusion and ambiguity for some variant of poetic ellipsis; some issues are unresolved, or forgotten about, it seems, as the crowded confines of I and DK pile on the dialogue, the mid-chase explanations, the chaotic , jagged cuts between parallel scenes. The plot concerns of Inception are the stuff that made Phillip K.Dick such a brilliant, if harried science fiction writer; Leonardo DiCaprio as a high tech industrial spy who has the skill and technology to enter a subject's mind during sleep and extract professional secrets for business rivals. The problematic point , though, is that he's haunted by the death of his wife, who's image keeps appearing in the dreamscape he and his team construct to fool the sleeping subject. She is the ghost that follows the team leader in whatever scenario he concocts-- her appearences no good.

Nor do they bode well for cohesive story telling; after a splendid first thirty minutes in which the viewer is landed in the middle of the action--a tasty variation of the James Bond tuxedo-ed assassin ploy--the film chokes on back stories, flashbacks, and stretches of dialogue that seek to contextualize the hurried scenes.

Had the film been a leaner, less cluttered tale, attempting, as it does, the sort of convoluted layering a competent commercial novel might have, Inception might have been an intelligent adventure film: issues of love, morality, political economy, redemption could have been discussed in conjunction with concurrent action. The abstract (a conventional set of ethical challenges , really) would have been realized cogently in the narrative flow. The movie, though, stops again and again and yet again with a flashback, an extended pause in the momentum, so DiCaprio can discuss his feelings, make a another emotional breakthrough.

Confusion and ambiguity were the working idea behind Momento, and to the degree that Nolan conceived his idea and worked through the variations of a memory-impaired man attempting to advance a plan of vengence in a present he couldn't keep in mind, it worked splendidly, wonderfully. The film had an ironic twist--a real one, not one of those cookie cutter conclusions that wallow in the irresolution of a conflict--which made the fractured plot coherent, finally,and illustrated consequences beyond what the hero or the villians could imagine.The various scenarios at play in Inception, though were, of themselves , simple enough, but Nolan's problem was pacing and, sorry to say, the inability to make the characters connect with a believable emotion. The film was rather frantically edited , and the cutting between the three dreamscapes in the last third of the film were long in duration. The effect on this viewer was a loss of interest in a mission who's impetus was more hysterical than urgent. 

All this makes Christopher Nolan a lead-footed action director who is intent on turning the pleasures of pulp genres into think pieces and talky existential dioramas. Economy is the key, of course, and decisiveness is the quality needed the most; conviction about the genre your using to get your narrative ideas across. A fresh idea would have helped , though, or at least a fresh approach on using old ones; Inception has deep echos of The Matrix, Heat and Solaris during it's length, the result being an interesting, if tedious distortion of what seems to have started out as an interesting idea.










Sunday, July 18, 2010

poets reviewing poets!

We now have a new form, circle--modernism. It's been bad enough that we've had to suffer a generation of dull poets writing poems about poetry (PAP) where the subject seems to be either the poet as sensitive being channeling the variety of vibes that the rest of us cannot discern, or the inability of poetry to "get" at the exactness of the moment. Now we have writing in praise of writing about poetry. 


There is a good amount of log rolling here, with more than a clutch of poets intent on not giving away the game on which careers and reputations are built on, but one does admire the adroit skill that gets applied to the least interesting of the least tangible poems. What is even more interesting is that a good amount of the essays exclaiming the value of these poets under nominal review don't actually explain how the poets are successful at their tasks; more often we get an examination as to the poet's intention, and then a long run in eloquence describing results that I , for one, rarely witness.


 I ought not generalize too much poets remarking on the work of other poets, since there is a difference between actual criticism-- evaluation based on close inspection--and the sort of careerist suck-upping one finds on the back of new books. There is the idea that some wag had put forwarded about poets who put forth their own theories about they and their associates do; the theory is more interesting than the poetry it discusses. It is, often enough, more poetic.

Friday, July 16, 2010

Hamlet's Ghost Catches the Late Train

Alan Shapiro tries to drop us in some one's thoughts midstream in Wherever My Dead Go When I'm Not Remembering Them , an attempt, I gather , to show us what a mind doing casual housekeeping when the ruling personality isn't focused observing himself being poetic. There is impatience here, the anxiety of the wait : the narrator cannot be engage the world as he would wish, to exert a measure of will on to his stage. The imperatives of free will, imagination, self-definition , following of one's bliss are for a time suspended, or at least irrelevant because our figure is here waiting for a train that will take him some other place he needs to be; this is a schedule not his own and this leaves him virtually nothing to engage but his own thoughts , inspired by the scene of the wait, the grind and mechanized stutter of the city the whirrs determindedly past him. The idea is an attractive one, I guess, the conceit of what a personality, normally fitted for turning their life's experience into miniaturized melodramas, would do in the off hours, when the mind is "off duty".

Impatience , though, implies something  like  film maker jump cuts, the jagged, abrupt , yammerng intrusion of one thought upon another, the overlay of images and opinions, the irrational mixing of personal history and visual detail from the present moment: the effect should be one similar to walking into a room where radio, CD players, televisions, internet and cell phones are all blaring at once, at full volume, with the same shrill , monotonous insistence. Shapiro's poem sags under the weight of a conventional narrative construction, weighed down with a string of specifics that kill the sensation:


Not gone, not here, a fern trace in the stone
of living tissue it can quicken from;
or the dried–up channel and the absent current;
or maybe it's like a subway passenger
on a platform in a dim lit station late
at night between trains, after the trains have stopped—
ahead only the faintest rumbling of
the last one disappearing, and behind
the dark you're looking down for any hint
of light—where is it? why won't it come? You
wandering now along the yellow line,
restless, not knowing who you are, or where,
until you see it; there it is, at last
approaching, and you hurry to the spot
you don't know how you know is marked
for you, and you alone, as the door slides open
into your being once again my father,
my sister or brother, as if nothing's changed,
as if to be known were the destination.
Where are we going? What are we doing here?
You don't ask, you don't notice the blur of stations
we're racing past, the others out there watching
in the dim light, baffled,
who for a moment thought the train was theirs.



This is more an impatient explanation by the poet of what he was trying to do with the poem than it is an a particular set of impressions of standing alone on a train station platform as thoughts invade awareness and then recede. The not so faint shadow of Hamlet attempting to speak to the ghost of his slain father isn't far off, and the poem suggests that a good many of us have incomplete conversations with our dead parents or spouses that we find ourselves conducting when the real world obligations are, for the moment, done with. But for all the emphasis on what rattles in the brain when it's tired and feeling rushed, the poem doesn't convince me. The writing sounds rushed, though, and in fact feels more like a convenient and easy to contrive self-dramatization than anything composed with assurance.


Where is the feeling of the world falling in? The nausea of the ground giving way under your feet? The lightheadedness when , in public, a host of repressed emotion and unresolved issues press upon you suddenly, severely, mercilessly? What's missing is the alienation effect, the familiar "made strange", in Bakhtin's phrase; the trains, the buildings, the cars passing by should be bereft of their normal assurances, including the easily conveyed sense of melancholy; this is a world that should seem, at least for the moment, possessed and defined by the dead. Shapiro, however, uses them as props instead to reinforce a conventional poetic sensibility, and misses a chance to write something genuinely strange and memorable.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Birthday Note

Today marks my 58th year on the planet, another way of saying that it's my birthday, and there is less reflection on how I've spent my years than before, replaced, I suppose, but a low-murmuring astonishment that I'm still here, breathing, writing, whining, celebrating, arguing , laughing along with the rest of the community. It's not that I'm about to go soft in the head and the heart and profess reams of  steamy, flatulent prose about being grateful and such--even when I understand the awesomeness of an occasion, confessions of unending thanks make me instinctively--but I would like to briefly remark that at one point in my life I didn't expect to live this long. Good fortune intervened in my travels, however, and one might say that I am over two decades past what I expected to live until; that fact still astonishes me , the profundity of the fact has never escaped my thinking. It's in view of this fact that I go forward with what little real humility I have , secure in the knowledge that the miracle that I might have been waiting for in the past has already happened, and ,indeed, continues to unfold.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

School of Defeatitude

"Wissahickon Schist" by Karl Kirchwey is a poem that practically brags about it's failure as a poem. The brutal upshot is that the poet is not able to complete his self assigned task of bearing unaffected witness to a natural situation.The poet ponders the nature of nature and starts to write a line to crystallize his emerging perception and then stops, catching himself in the act of attempted epiphany, realizing at some point that for all the skills with words he's attained in many years of reading , they alone cannot avail him the unattainable essence of things before.So he stops writing, stares at the formations around him, the birds in their habitats, the plants and their reactions to the changing weather and realizes what it is he is missing. And later, turning himself into a second person "you", writes a poem about being overwhelmed by the sheer awesomeness of the nature he was trying to make even more extraordinary.

Ergo, another poem about poetry, or worse, a poem about being not being able to write a poem; this is a poem about the writer's impotence to get to the heart of the things that make up his world, those things no human , motivated by imagination and the imperatives of free will, had a hand in designing, constructing, arranging in situ. The imagination is reserved, finally, for creating a mythology for how all these things arrived in the states and ethereal essences that are their allure--the narratives of what is already visible, complete, and unto themselves. Myths, poems, epic dramas used to be the way we explained to ourselves the formations, disruptions, and inevitable continuity of the world, that a creation of metaphorical structures could link us to a grand design greater than ourselves; our task was to abide by the revealed law of the poetically evoked and make our place within the narration.

Science , though, has hollowed out the myth, made the metaphors mechanical, reduced mystery to the level of the lost cell phone we will eventually find if we look hard enough. We know the connections between natural phenomenon, we realize the power of metaphor exists only in the arenas where the concrete facts and their theories are unknown, unimagined. So the metaphors are empty and the poet realizes he has no power to contain even the contents of his perception, and he stops writing and seeks rather to vanish back into the library to lick his wounds with another poem that confirms the sheer futility of being a poet in the first place. This poem is a stinker, a dishonest, whining stinker.

Sunday, July 4, 2010

Pulp Fiction yellows

Tarantino fatigue has set in ; what made him hip now makes him seem like a gimmick prone stylist living up to fan expectations; I think of good amount of Fellini when the subject of Quentin arises. Is destined to make a million motion pictures  the contents are familiar to the point of contempt?  There is a strong chance, unless Hollywood runs out of money first. Even Pulp Fiction, his best effort, seems dog eared  just as Citizen Kane seems over stuffed.  PB movie will hang around Tarantino's head for as long as he lives because it will be regarded, always, as the best thing he's ever done. It remains a powerful film for the most part, full of wicked laughs and and re-convolutions of seamy paperback action novels, but it does shows it's age. The dialogue is something... else altogether, but does anyone really think he's done better than the Master, Elmore Leonard?The dialogue ,as such, are extended riffs divorced from the violence and action, a sort of virtuosity that is more obtrusive than revealing; the beauty of pulp fiction was that its minimalist discussions, compact, jargon filled, quirky and redolent in references that suggested a sub culture beyond the melodrama of ...the basic plot, were models of sledge hammer concision. The dialogue here merely stalls, stops, occupies time like it were a waiting room. Seeing these characters again go on about the differences in burger joints between Amsterdam and America, the finer points of foot massage and revenge, on changing one's way of life due to a revealed miracle, makes you wish something would happen that was gratuitous and without justification. Anything to get on with it.

Saturday, July 3, 2010

Coen entropy

As usual with Coen Brothers films, The Man Who Wasn't There is visually stunning, and has its share of odd touches and sublime moments that set the film makers from the rest of the herd . I think it's the least interesting of their movies, though. The varying elements of a James Cain flavored noir thriller filtered through Camus-toned existentialism and the zany insertion of UFOs makes me think of bright guys brain storming against deadline; much of the meaning of Coen Brothers movies is open ended and deferred, but this film just couldn't merge the oddities. Billy Bob Thorton, though, needs special credit for maintaining his granite faced deadpan in a film full of eagerly demonstrative actors. And his flat effect is so consistent and untouched by a hint of actorly style that you would swear that his chain smoking is a real life death wish.

Gallagher , foamy and bitter

Gallagher is that sledgehammer wielding comedian who smashed watermelons between dry-heaving rants and bad jokes . Not a few of us considered him the rankest of all the post-George Carlin comedians, an energetic yet grating presence who's demented insistence that you pay attention to him was never mitigated with a real laugh. It was nervousness, actually, an anxiety -induced set of giggles disguising  the obvious desire to have him return to the clinic he has a day pass from.

Now we find out from Salon that the comedian has turned into a right wing hate monger. He has found new things to smash with that sledge, ie, Obama, lesbians, Muslims, illegal immigrants, the unemployed.  Who would have thought the Tea Baggers would need yet another comedian to mouth their confused crib sheet of screaming points?

Gallagher always seemed like he had a lifetime supply of bus tokens to Crazy Town even when he was  in the mainstream of American comedy. Now that he's a foaming hate monger only makes him a more grotesque version of what's always been, an odd, strident, unfunny attention seeker. He is the guy we all know who wants to be famous no matter what it takes; smashing watermelons used to do it, and now he thinks he's upped his game by bringing talk radio into his repertoire. I suppose he's maneuvering to replace Dennis Miller on Fox News as their resident hack comedian yock monger, or perhaps a position on Andrew Breitbart's board of policy advisors. Should he get a job with Breitbart, I hope he can adapt to the company uniform, clown shows and a big red nose.

Friday, July 2, 2010

"Going to Zero" by Peter Balakian

Going to Zero is a poem that contains a familiar echo, a trace of another poet.My guess is that author Peter Balakian takes his cue from Frank O'Hara's poem "The Day Lady Died", another narrative about a man making his way through New York City:




The Day Lady Died
by Frank O'Hara


It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.
This is New York City from the eyes, ears and walking feet of a man who knows the city and loves the many distractions and cluttered blocks of relentless activity, the commotion and hustle to get from one place to another. It is, of course, a poem of some knowledge and emotional response being contained under the surface, but when he arrives at the 5 Spot and listens to Mal Waldron open up on the piano, all the facts hit him in a hard rush. Billie Holiday, the singer who's experience-cracked voice could unlock the buried emotions of listeners all over the world, has died sadly, and O'Hara's response, deferred in the noise and hustle of city life, comes at him at last, as Mal Waldron plays, the truth comes out; he cannot listen to his beloved jazz quite the same as he had . (I; had the pleasure of listening to Mal Waldron perform live--he is an outstanding musician).

Balakian's narrative is longer, the effect is more accumulative than O'Hara's grief epiphany. There is the same set of distractions and sights the poet travels through to his destination, but while O'Hara seemed to be trying to sustaining a buoyant optimism, the events in Balakian's line are shaded with hints of a gathering melancholy, a sad state of affairs about to be revealed:

wanted to buy the Frankenthaler, a modest, early print,
minimal, monochromatic; surface and perspective in dialogue;
on 24th off 10th –the gallery still smelled like wood and plaster—

but I didn't stop, and when the train reached the Stock Exchange
the Yom Kippur streets were quiet, and the bronze statue of Washington
was camouflaged by national guard. I was walking my old mail route now
like a drunk knocking into people, almost hit by a cab
until the roped-off streets cut me at the arm.


It's hard to take in the sites and attractions of a city when you happen upon the site of the worst domestic terrorist attack in American history. There is numbness, a nagging sense that all the galleries, restaurants and marvels of classical architecture that New York City is famous for are no longer significant in dimensions that make our humanity seem insignificant, a lust shared by Ayn Rand and Albert Speers
At Broadway and Liberty

the fences wound around the bursts of dust rising
over the cranes and bulldozers, over the punched-out windows—
I stared through a piece of rusted grid that stood like a gate to the crystal river.
I was sweating in my sweatshirt now, the hood filling with soot,

as I watched with others drinking Cokes and eating their pizza of disbelief.
Zero began with the Sumerians who made circles with hollow reeds
in wet clay and baked them for posterity.

At Broadway and Liberty. At 20 floors charred and standing.
At miasma people weeping. Anna's Nail Salon, Diakichi Sushi,
the vacant shops, stripped clean in the graffiti of dust-coated windows.

Something blasted from a boom box in a music store,
something, in the ineffable clips of light,
disappeared over the river.

In another context "pizzas of disbelief" would be a perfect phrase to use when ironic whimsy is the mood, but it fits here beautifully, a skillful detail illustrating the silent, choking grief as the process of cleaning up the carnage of ground zero proceeds; the chaotic clamour and ecstatic in-your-face atmospherics that make O'Hara's New York so appealing from the outset of his poem, until the brilliant timed emotional collapse of the last line, becomes, in Balakian's poem, the groan, crash and hammering of a city laboring to bring itself together after an unimaginable calamity; the life of the city goes on after the loss of thousands of lives because it has to, and amid the cramped genius that is New York City a collective despair falls on those day timers who watch in various states of lingering shock. The mania of "The Day Lady Died", but without the ecstatic propulsion brings to his mean streets; O'Hara gives a picture of himself when he isn't poised or positioned to the talkative life of the party continually ranting about the genius that live in Manhattan. His shell has cracked, and even the sweetness of city life cannot keep him aloft. Balakian's narrator, I think, isn't trying to sustain any illusion of being up or feeling honored to be in a world class city--all else is scenery and distraction that must fade from concern until one contemplates the very air that incredibly, brutally changed around them.


Yes, one might say, we are clawing our way from under this rubble, but where are we going?

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

An under appreciated Vietnam movie

Casualties of War
starring Sean Penn and Michael J.Fox
Directed by Brian De Palma

This is one of DePalma's best films, a straight forward and powerfully told morality tale , highlighted with notable performances from Michael J.Fox and Sean Penn. De Palma has always been a master of moving the camera in virtuoso turns (or rather, someone who has mastered the virtuoso camera turns of others, ie Hitchcock, Eisenstein, et al), but he is too often a lousy story teller, replacing a tricky sensationalism for plausibility. Here, he gets the combination right, a crucial issue at hand--at what point do liberators fighting for an Essential Good become worse than the evil they think they're fighting?-- the right script , the right actors, a balanced trifecta that compels the would be maestro to keep his film making in balance as well.

There is not a wasted scene, not a gratuitous cut or splice to hijack this movie's power. Michael J.Fox does a credible job as a soldier with religious convictions that are in conflict with his Mission, who's perimeters, he finds, are being improvised and diminished, and Sean Penn is stunning as hyper-macho team leader whose loyalty for the good of the men under his command changes from Good Soldier to Concentrated Evil; his sense of morality is shattered and ground to dust and there is a gleaming insanity just behind those radiating blue eyes. What additionally comes into an articulate focus are De Palma's views on violence towards women at the hands of warped men.

Rather too often in films, women seemed little more than witless innocents or scheming, sulking whores who were engineering their violent ends due to a variety of self-scheming schemes; leeches, blood suckers, vampires, debilitating things to be poked, shot, prodded with blunt instruments, drills, knives. The director, a competent technician with a conspicuous  desire to sit among the greats in the Auteur Pantheon , seemed to have issues with women, issues that seemed to find only extreme resolutions. The ambivalent treatment of the misogyny made you wonder whether DePalma was an inept moralist who couldn't make his movies perform both as entertainments and moral inquiries, or if he was merely interested in the thrill of seeing women abused by disgruntled men.

With Casualties of War, the focus turns  the churning culture of men  in war time, on a band of soldiers who recreate and embrace their loyalty only to one another in the field to the tragic exclusion of all else. DePalma lines up the scenes of escalating violence and decreasing reason, until Penn's character offers up a lone Vietnamese women for his men to rape, offered up like a cash reward for a job well done; this is more than a melodramatic turn according to a prefigured script, but an effective, disturbingly presented result of group thinking. The issue aren't nuanced considerations of good versus evil and what appropriate and punishments should be meted out--it is a  blunt, plain truth, the inflicting of pain by the powerful against the weak. This problematic director for once gets that across forcefully, artfully, unambiguously.

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Caught in the loop

Erica Wagner does a serviceable job of summarizing the new Bret Easton Ellis novel Imperial Bedrooms in the New York Times, in which he brings us to speed on the whereabouts and doings of the characters in in his first book, 1985's "Less than Zero". She does a creditable job as well at highlighting his novelist skills --a talent as a surreal quick sketch artist is duly noted--and furnishes a longer list of matters that have made him , in large part, the most tedious of contemporary novelists. It would suffice to say that Ellis has a love of characters who are impossibly, ruthlessly detached from the violence and decadence they observe or create, and that the trick of having a creation observe himself being observe is a dated use of a loosely construed idea of phenomenology. Comparisons to another novelist who harps on repeated themes, Joyce Carol Oates, are obvious enough --his fascination with the bombed out souls of post-eighties consumers, she on the trials and traumas of women who cannot seem to avoid violence coming upon them--but the qualitative differences are striking. Ellis never really seems to leave the parking lot of his plot lines; his scenes and locations are alarmingly the same, whatever names or coats of paint and layers of wallpaper he applies to them. Oates has, at least, energy and speed of production on her side--while a good many of her books, one after another, seemed composed from compulsion than inspiration, she does connect with novels of real power and psychological complexity, as seen in The Falls and The Tattooed Girl: the idea that victim-hood is something one attracts is a subtle idea on many fronts, and Oates, as subtle intelligence despite her fascination with brutal narrative developments, explores the issues . At her best she is as unnerving as Flannery O'Connor could be in her novel Wise Blood

Ellis prefers flat-affect in his presentations: the detail of a photograph or a bit of video tape, unconsidered, unfiltered, tersely revealed. He has the hope that somethig of Hemingway emerges from his writing and that a greater effect takes hold ; he wants the zeitgeist of his decade, the 80s, to sweep over us. He invites us to weep over the loss innocence.

His obsession with the self-referential was once effective,but the value as irony as been exhausted, what had been taken as an implicit critique of 80's drug-infused egomania seems now like nothing else other than a repeating tape loop of rearranging old ideas. There is little to suggest in the body of work he's published at this late date that he's capable of doing anything other than performing face lifts , elaborate productions and smaller bits of of nip-and-tuck--on the short story that furnished the sketchy basis for his first novel. Ironically, an epitaph for this new book is a line from a song by Elvis Costello, "Beyond Belief", from his album Imperial Bedroom.  The quote itself is less important than the fact that Ellis borrowed his novel's title from an album by a musician who has convincingly gotten over the issues of his twenties and hasn't spent the remainder of his career retro-fitting his old conceits.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Al Gore


I could care less if Al Gore had tried to convince a late middle aged masseuse to entertain his Happy Wand; what matters to me is the work he's done and continues to do in campaign for policies to counter act the effects of climate change. As tired as many of us are of the subject, the severity of not doing anything about it remains fatal, and Gore's arguments in favor of a major change in our our political and economic methods haven't lost their urgency. I suspect the population would rather not contemplate the permanent ruination of a everything that matters in this life and would prefer to reduce the issue to another run of the mill celebrity sex scandal. The thinking seems to be that the diminution of Al Gore's reputation will likewise diminish the importance of literally saving the planet from our worst, accumulating habits; this is not far removed from witnessing a cancer patient trying to wish away their disease by ignoring it or playing loud music.

Friday, June 25, 2010

Myth and Use

Myths, as well anyone can describe them, are working elements of our personal and social psychology, and whose elements are "modernized"-- better to say updated -- as a matter of course. Declaring a goal to make them relevant to the slippery degree of modernist convention sounds is an insight best suited for a Sunday book review.


Jung and Campbell are ahead on that score, and Eliade certainly stresses the relevance of mythic iconography strongly enough: current gasbag extraordinaire Harold Bloom advances the case for mythic narrative ,-- borrowed in part from Northrop Frye (my guess anyway) -- in the guise of literature, constructs the psychic architecture that composes our interior life, individually and as member of a greater set of links: the stuff helps us think ourselves, personalities with an unsettled and unfastened need for a center aware of its adventures in a what comes to be , finally, an unpredictable universe.


Bloom somberly asserts in  Shakespeare:The Invention of the Human that the Bard is the fount from which mythic forms find a contemporary set of metaphors that in turn became the basis for our modern notion of dramatic conflict, and argues that Freud's genius lies not in his scientific discoveries, but for the creation of another complex of metaphors that rival Shakespeare's for dealing with the mind's nuanced and curious assimilation of experience, the anxiety of influence in action, as process, and not an intellectually determined goal to navigate toward. The point is that modernization of myth is something that is that is already being done, a continuous activity as long as there are people on this planet...

------------------

An associate was recently doing his best to demean and diminish the status of literary critics at recent pot lock I happened upon. He pointed me towards a computer monitor and told me the address of his book blog. His most recent post was basically the same rant he was delivering at the party I quote him thus:




Academics determine what is taught, but they do not determine what is "literary". Literary, like language, is determined by use.

Use by critics among others, I think, not the general readership alone. Books can have an extraordinary appeal to a vast public, and it is among the critics tasks to study what the basis of the appeal might be, and then to make distinctions among the elements, to give or detract value to specific works, their genre, and techniques. A concept of "literature", a kind of writing that does the reader a tangible good with a malleable knowledge that can be applied to one's life with good effect, is a creation of a university system where critics had to justify the systematic study of poetry, fiction and drama. The literary criteria has since trickled down to the larger, popular discussions among the public, not the other way around.

Academics hardly try to eliminate works from the ranks of literature: more often than not, the aim is to bring works into the fold, though no one, whatever degrees they do or do not hold, will ever be convinced that the mass and popular use of Danielle Steele will confer upon her literary qualities that will have her stock rise amongst academics, critics, what have you. This is an activity that comes from a critical discourse that makes such a conversation possible beyond a popularity contest.It's not that the best criticism claims to create the things that makes writing ascend to greatness, but only that it gives those things names that make them comprehensible to a larger, curious audience. But the terms are not locked, not fixed: literature changes given the changes in the world its writers confront, and so the terms of discussion change to, lagging, perhaps, a bit behind the curve. It's less that descriptions of literature fail, but instead are forever incomplete.

Literature, by whatever definition we use, is a body of writing intended to deal with more complex story telling in order to produce a response that can be articulated in a way that's as nuanced as the primary work, the factors that make for the "literary" we expect cannot be reducible to a single , intangible supposition. Use is a valuable defining factor, but the use of literature varies wildly reader-to-reader, group-to-group, culture-to-culture, and what it is within the work that is resonates loudly as the extraordinary center that furnishes ulitimate worth, varies wildly too; there are things that instigate this use, and they aren't one determinant, but several, I suspect. A goal of criticism, ultimately, is not to create the terms that define greatness, but to examine and understand what's already there, and to devise a useful, flexible framework for discussion. Ultimately, the interest in useful criticism is in how and why a body of work succeed or fail in their operation, not establishing conditions that would exist before a book is written.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Something my Dad told me

My father worked as room clerk in a Detroit hotel during WW2, where rooms were scarce and the racial divide was still strongly enforced. He told one night that there was a clutch of nervous looking white men who wanted to check in a guest--there was a small mob, and the intended guest was still waiting in a car outside. My dad was about to hand over the room key when a manager tapped him on the shoulder and eased him to the side. The manager explained to the man who was signing the hotel register that the hotel was full-up, and politely offered to call the nearby Wolverine Hotel to see if they had a room. The intended guest in the car was Lena Horne, it turned out; the hotel my dad worked at had a policy of not allowing blacks stay at their Inn, regardless of any other considerations.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Rock and Roll: pass on or pass it on?

If you insist on hanging with this tenuous thesis, what really killed rock music weren’t rock critics but rather fans that bought the records and went to the shows. And I noticed in my time that the fans who buy the newer, grainier, more strident, and dissonant stuff are younger than I am--gadzooks! The Avant gard I matured with was now a younger listener’s retro-indulgence. Simply, styles change, and much of what is new at first, seemingly to an audience whose tastes are entrenched and internalized.
 
Like in any other criticism, rock criticism makes the unknown comprehensible or at least momentarily comprehensible for the moment. That stinks, it seems, is the obnoxious certainty in the use of the word "dead": rock and roll are as its always been in my experience, mostly "trendy assholes" and an intriguing swath of credible acts, bands, and solo, who keep the edgy rigor of the music intact, and vital. Blaming writers, though, for the murder of music gives them too much power--it's doubtful that the history of long, abstract, numb skull dissertations in the Village Voice, let alone Rolling Stone, ever convinced a tenth of their readership to make the album go double platinum. The dustbin of history is always full; what survives the clean sweep anyone's guess. In the meantime, I reserve the right to be excited, engaged, but what is honest and, to whatever extent, original.
 
If I'm tired of dead things, I should leave the graveyard.
 
I think it's criticism that's ailing, if not already deceased, as a useful activity. Rolling Stone abandoned itself to becoming a gossip magazine, Spin gives itself over to trendy photo captions. For the scads of "serious" commentary, much of it has vanished behind faux post- structuralist uncertainty for the scads of " serious " commentary: criticism as a guide to larger issues at hand within an artist's work is not being made. Rock criticism, taking its lead, again, from the worn trails of Lit/Crit, has abandoned the idea that words and lyrics can be about anything.
 
But rock and roll, good and ill, cranks on. The spirit that moves the kid to bash that guitar chord still pulses. To say that bad, abstruse writing can kill that awards too much power to what has become an insane, trivial exercise.
My frames of reference are less broad musically--I'm a harmonica player of thirty-five years gasping experience in sometimes bands--but it seems to me that the difference falls between techniques versus talent. I'd say the technique is sheer know-how, agility, and finesse to get your fingers to execute the simplest or most difficult musical ideas. Talent, though, resides somewhere in the grey mists of the soul, where there is an instinct that, or, say, an intelligence that knows how to make the best use out the sheer bulk of technical knowledge: making it all into music that expressive and new.
 
Rock, like the blues, the closest elder relative, is principally about feel, and citing Dylan, Young, The Beatles, and others as great musicians is to address the feel, the subtle combination of musical elements and lyrical blasts that result, at best, in the sheer joy drums, bass and guitars can provide. Rock criticism, when it's performed as a practice that seeks comprehension and hearkening back to its early days as an outgrowth of Literary Criticism, probes these elements and addresses why a blues guitar lick, roller rink organ, nasal vocals, over-miked drums, and abstruse lyrics convey meanings and provoke responses whose origins are mysterious. It is felt, or Spirit, that connects Coltrane, Hendrix, Dylan, Little Feat, Hip-hop, a sense of where to put the line, when to take it away, when to attack, when to withhold. Feel.
 
Rock, perhaps, is about trying to address the inexpressible in terms of the unforgettable. That is what I think writers like Christgau, Marcus, and even (sigh) Dave Marsh aspire to do. Christgau and Marcus, at least, are inspired most of the time. Marsh remains a muddle, but then again, so are most attempts to talk about the extreme subjectivism of art-making, be it music or otherwise. One sometimes assumes the Garden of Eden was so much nicer before the corporate snakes moved in and loused it up for everyone, and that, regardless of musical terminology tossed about like throw rugs over a lumpy assertion, is the kind of junior-college cafeteria table-thumping that is demonstrably empty of content.
 
Reading any good history of rock and roll music will have the music develop alongside the growth of an industry that started recording and distributing increasingly diverse kinds of music to widen market share. The hand of the businessman, the soul of the capitalist machine, has always been in and around the heart of rock and roll: every great rock and roll genius, every jazz master, each blues innovator has the basic human desire to get paid. Suffice to say that some we see as suffering poets whose travails avail them of images that deepen our sense of shared humanity see themselves still as human beings who require the means to pay for their needs and finance their wants, like the rest of us.
 
There has always been a marketplace where the music is played, heard, bought, and sold--and like everything in these last months, the marketplace has changed, become bigger, more diffuse with new music and new technologies.  Something inside me pines for that innocence as well, but innocence is the same currency as naïveté, and consciously arguing that the way I formerly perceived the world was the way it actually worked would be an exercise in ignorance, as in the willful choice to ignore available facts that are contrary to a paradigm that's sinking into its loosely packed foundation.
Influence is an inevitable and inseparable part of being an artist, and a rock and roll musician is no less subject to the act of borrowing from something they like. Without it, going through the eras, right up and including the debate about hip-hop and its artists' proclivities forBorg- style assimilation of others music onto their likeness, we would have no music to speak of. Or so it would seem to me. Our respective selves may be locked behind cultural identities that make it hard for us to interact, but our cultural forms mix together freely and easily.
 
I'm sympathetic to the crowd that prefers the soul of an instrumentalist to a soundboard jockeys' manipulating of buttons and loops, but I think this is the advent of a new kind of canvas. Most new art seems profoundly ugly when first perceived, at least until the broader media brings itself up to speed. I think that hip-hop, rap, what have you, is an entrenched form and is not going away. It will co-exist with rock and roll and mix its particulars with it and generate a newer, fiercer noise. As music and musicians have always done.
 
 
Anyone who argues that rock musicians are somehow responsible for the tragedy in Colorado is themselves a rock critic in the narrowest sense. There we have an impassable irony, and more ironic, where some leftist brethren meet the Christian Right square on in what they gather is the source of all our social eruptions: popular culture in general. Neither the quacking vulgarisms of the left nor the quaking apostles of the right like it very much, and both in their separate ways and contrarily reasoned agendas, have attacked it, the source of whatever grace there was to fall from. The left will emit a squalling bleat about an "artist's responsibility" for the de-familiarizing "aestheticization" of real social problems, thus robbing working people of real political consciousness and maintaining the force of the Dominant Culture and Capitalist Imperative.
 
Such is the kind of no-neck culture-vulture as I listened to a Marxist lit professor critique "Guernica" or Frieda Kahlo’s'portraiture as though the modernist formalities Picasso and Kahlo put upon their canvases were the reason, and only reasons, that bombs go off, that babies die, and why woman get raped by art-sickened men. The Right, in turn, finds evidence of decay and decline in everything not sanctified in the Bible or in limitless free-market terms, and everything that occurs in a society that involves a tragedy on a spectacular scale is reducible, in their view, to the errant need for self-expression.
 
Much of this is old hat--it has been going on for years. Again, it's the job of thoughtful critics, critics, or genuinely provocative to bring a larger analysis to bear on complex matters, to strive for a truth that stirs us away from the intellectual panic that some of our pundits seem to want to fire up. We have another case of left and right agreeing on the basic tenet that artistic freedom is wrong-headed. It must be hemmed in by so many conditions and restrictions that its practice would be practically pointless. We have a pining for a world of Norman Rockwell small towns and church bake sales. 
How pathetic. As it is with any artist, the rock and roller's duty is to seek and express the truth they perceive in the comprehensible in terms that extend our notions of what the human experience is.  Parenting is part of that profound experience. Might some people still be alive today if parents paid attention to what their sons were up to? Marylyn Manson is only the messenger of what's already in place: to shut up artists because the message is sometimes vile and ugly is, at best, cutting off our antennae to what the rest of the world is feeling.
 

Sunday, June 20, 2010

for Father's Day

EDWARD NAVIN BURKE
(1923 -1995)

Never blind to their light
but always reaching for it,
the way garden flowers
lean to the sun to issue forth
pro genies of design,
distinct chips of an
ironwood block shaping themselves
in the rooms you imagined.

Shaving in the bathroom
with the door open,
and singing
that you love Paris
in the winter
when it's snowing
although we lived
along Detroit freeways
thinking Westward and onward
until California was the place
where The Motor City drove us.

The lives you gave us
with the breaths you took,
our faces having divided
the b est of your features
in the children
that follows the best we've
been doing.
Somewhere in history
someone will always look like you.
Light comes into all the rooms
from all the sunshine
that covers the green mountains
like glowing shawls of rapture
that are the beaded notes
of the Paris you loved
and imagined,
you eyes blue as burnt ash
arranging the forms of the world
in new configurations
always, surprising as trick knees
and the lurch of love
that is bottomless
and full of a world.

I have your hair
but none of your combs,
I have your eyes
but none of your vision,
I am myself all of you in the making,
grey hair and trick knees.

We stand here where you brought us
in rooms that
are signed with your name,
you've done all the work
you had to.

Our shoulders are broad and we stand erect,
somewhere in history,
someone will
always look like you.



--9-23-95

Thursday, June 17, 2010

LangPo for the Long Haul


I wouldn't disagree with the assertion that Language Poetry distinguishes itself from the dry confines of Marxist formalism by allowing the author the room to upturn, uproot and upset the conventionalized narrative strategies several generations of writers and readers have absorbed; it is a refreshing notion that the author needn't be taken to task or potentially punished for not following a political script. Language , though, is that thing that we cannot step out of it and take a hard look at, as if through a microscope, and this is an idea that has been with writers for like generations, those poets and writers at the further edges of their period's cultural lines. The  inspiration to  engage in free-play with the usual phrases with all sorts of convention -shattering constructions didn't begin with the Language Poets. Few of the like-minded iconoclasts coming before them, however, were as much fun. It was double- barreled combination: the theories were exciting and persuasive, and the poems challenged, provoked, irritated, and entertained, and after all the controversy and reasoned dismissals and lines in the sand, the books were still read, still on the shelves , moved from apartment to apartment, still capable of making you want to yell "eureka" when the right deconstruction came along.
 
What I'd say is that writings of LangPo's central writers--Ron Silliman, Rae Armantrout, the late Leslie Scalapino, Barrett Watten, Fanny Howe, Bob Perelman--read amazingly well after the decades have passed. It is a poetry that foregrounds language and it's seductive verbal templates as the subject, but this is not a poetry to stall itself on the trite assertion that the subjects and meaning of writing are undecidable, or that the writer and his or audience are seduced by multiple hegemonies intended to keep populations complacent . These are not dry politicos--within their shared interests in how ingrained rhetorical approaches create the coherent narrative line that amounts our existence, each poet is distinct in their thinking , in their writing.
 
Rae Armantrout's inward, delicately arranged lyrics project a personality assuming itself through a continued assault of formula poses, Ron Silliman assembles the details of the overheard and the closely observed for something coming close to the jazz visuals painter Stuart Davis awarded his art patrons, Bob Perelman directs a circus with a dozen center rings where the tropes of advertising,the Academy, Literature, television and popular culture transgress over each others' obtuse  readings  of simple phrases,  and Leslie Scalapino insisted on recalling and imagining a hard perception from all the angles,like a cubist painting, luring a reader to look at a skeletal phrasing about a tangible event, and then making them look at it again, from a different vantage, in a different voice, in different clothes, until one is frightfully aware of how vulnerable one is when they are shaped in the word choices of another agent. This is the trusty sidekick horse in Ed Dorn's Gunslinger cautioning all he came upon to make take care as to not find themselves "described", as it is the equivalent of being eaten alive.  These descriptions of their poems, of course, are too general to be of any critical help, but they do  show, I think, that Language Poets were not an ossified political movement with members co-signing each other's over recited talking points; these good people are a diverse group.
 
One might name their own choice example of destroyers and creators who've livened up the verbal assaults prior to the avant gard, but my favorite of the moment is Mikail Bakhtin, who wrote of the writer charged with the task of "making strange" the language of their tales, and of the ploy of "defamiliarizing" the narrative in ways that force to reader to grasp the linguistic tricks and twists that are at play. Bakhtin, I suppose, had a socialist utopia in mind as the ideal situation at the end of his philosophical rigor, but his assumption seemed to be, along with most Modernist ideas of icon smashing, that a collective Awakening would assert itself once the audience was exposed to the figurative props were exposed and from there be empowered to make real decisions about how to maintain social change. The real result, of course, is legacy of experimental writing informed by provocative, if occasionally opaque theories. The work itself is judged , in retrospect, on aesthetic value rather than political virtues, which is another way of saying that entertainment value has usurped transformative promise as the thing we look for. Language poets haven't forgotten their progressive desires , it seems to me, but they seem unburdened by the notion that one must consider their work as a continuous critique of what capitalism has done with our language. Theirs is a poetics of pursuing an approach that honestly interests them.