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. 

“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.

“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.

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.

_____________________________

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.

Keith Current TV Dismisses Olbermann

For all his strengths, Olbermann's real Super Power is that of Getting In His Own Way. It is one thing to rightly admire the courage of Edward R.Murrow , who fought with CBS in getting his coverage of the Red baiting senator on the air, but it's another to mimic the events in Murrow's life. Olbermann seems to thrive on conflicts with management. Neither MSNBC nor CurrentTV, from what I gather, interfered with what Olbermann wanted to cover or discuss on Countdown. From appearances, both channels allowed the host a wide, wide berth. Olbermann, though, turns minor dispute into an excuse for scorched earth reaction; no one, absolutely no one , neither management nor coworkers nor immediate, can remain around an ego this large and this fragile. I admire Olbermann tremendously and credit him with being the first on Cable TV to return fire on the Right Wing Noise Machine, but his usefulness in that forum, it seems, is over with.

Asbhery settles in for the long haul

Whether It Exists
 by John Ashbery
All through the fifties and sixties the land tilted
Toward the bowl of life. Now life
Has moved in that direction.We taste the conviction Minus the rind, the pulp and the seeds.

It Goes down smoothly.

And the field became a shed in ways I no longer remember. Familiarly, but without tenderness, the sunset pours its Dance music on the (again) slanting barrens.The problems we were speaking of move up toward them.

This may be the closet thing to straight-talk your likely to come across from a John Ashbery poem, a brief meditation on how emotional attachment to otherwise vivid memories wanes as you age. Yet even in it's brief two stanzas and spare outline, this poem manages to bring two signature Ashbery traits to its center, elusive but not aloof.It suggests that just as the planet is formed by forces of weather and natural occurrence, forces that exist precisely because the earth exists at all with innumerable ecosystems shaping its profile over a great many eons, we also come to be formed by the cumulative logic of our choices over time.

Where once youthful ego and naive philosophy gave us the surety that we were the captains of our own fate and were superbly equipped to navigate by invisible stars, we find ourselves with the slipping of years in cities, occupations and with hobbies formed by the life we thought we created from whole cloth. Man makes his tools, and then the tools make man. In Ashbery's poem, our enthusiasms have ceased to be passions, an animating force of character, and are now, wizened with years, tested by experiences great, tragic and mundane, a cluster of traits, inconsistent habits of mind that haven't a coherent center but rather a shambling direction; inclinations rather than agendas. The glory of planting one's flag on a patch of earth with it mind to transform that acre and the acres around into a kingdom that will bear your name on signs and in memory becomes a hallowed shape.

Not that we are required to remain hard wired in stubborn habits and soured romanticism in our old age; Ashbery is a poet who cannot help but remain engaged with the world that has usurped his youthful mandate. Even as days , weeks and months go by faster in old age, the poet views what was the soil which was his metaphor for self creation and brings something from decades of life; what was formerly merely raw material waiting to be formed by an aesthete is now filled with nuanced shades, tones, subtle rhythms in the closely details   of trees and their leaves, tall grass. The world again provides you with something to consider and absorb whenever you're finished tending the wounds of the ego that is recovering from a protracted disappointment.

At a later date I added color  And the field became a shed in ways I no longer remember. Familiarly, but without tenderness, the sunset pours its Dance music on the (again) slanting barrens. The problems we were speaking of move up toward them.  

A debriefing against death

Paul Breslin is a superb lyric poet, that blessed species possessing the skill to convey complex perceptions and emotional breakthroughs in clean, uncluttered language that brings clarity to what might have otherwise gone unsaid. But not at the sacrifice of the music; there are chimes in the wind in Breslin's best work, grace notes that form the spare but richly evocative melody that might, at times, to underscore and even enhance our shared emotional underground. 

Joy, melancholy, despair, exhilaration, serenity; Breslin is a master craftsman who creates a tangible sense of the ambiguity between the images as they parade by. What intrigues me about his work is the way he is able to write as if he were still inside the experience, not apart from it; there is, almost always, the feeling that the situation is current, ongoing, in-progress. Paul Breslin is not so much reflective in his work as he is intensely aware of the forces that play upon him and the environment, material and emotional, that contextualize them.

"Inquest", a poem that takes the form, I assume, of police or therapist interview of a subject who has is still processing the loss of a mother or wife or lover, distills his virtues to the cadence favored by a bureaucratic psychology that insists on yes-or-no answers. The questions are direct, blunt, implicit in their expectation of equally terse answers; Breslin's replies are, in fact, brief and concise, but it is a concision that creates even more ambiguity and clarifies the mystery how one responds to life-changing events. These are the replies of a man who had for so long attached his own sense of identity to the personality, pulse, and quirks of another that his responses have the stark clarity that only a good stunning gives you. Suddenly, brutally, life does not make the sense it used to and there is the dread of having to create a meaning existence The images, stark and unadorned, reveal the ground-zero aspect; none of the old comparisons, the easy metaphors and similes that order and index the daily events, are of any use. This is a poem of someone digging climbing from the crater :
 

Why point to the mirror 
Where no one lives 
And the stars, which see no one? 

I longed to be no one, 
Like her ashes scattered 
Across the parkBetween where our brick 
Apartment had stood 
And the white museum 
That survived it:  
Free to fly 
Where the wind drives, 
Or, mingled with rain, 
Seep under the roots. 

There is no final say to the query, there is not a simple nor tidy rationale. The answer instead instead comes at the point when one considers their loss, ponders their purpose and desires that it all be over in some beautiful way,that the pain be dissolved and his essence be added to the soil, water and rocks that make up the earth from which all of us metaphorical arose from, to not be in the world and experience further pain and loss but rather merely reflect the doings of others, their aches, and joys. This poem presents us continuously with a rich stream of contradictory impulses and desires. I read the nervous, suddenly intense desire for release from the hurtful conditions of being alive and engaged with the world, but Breslin is not without a reality principle that reminds him that we go on, we go on, as Beckett would remind us, no matter the pain nor the drudgery of just waking up and scraping our feet to the shower in the darkest of mornings. He finally asks his interrogator questions and receives an answer in turn:
 

Am I free to go now? 
What do you think? 

The last question that keeps one awake to late in the night, filters into your dreams, makes your feet drag across the floor. We go on despite our loss because that is what we do.  The last part of growing up is the growing apart from the other and realizing that one will die alone and the purpose of life becomes the effort to not live the same way.

TUBES OF THE INTERNET

There is little else but ill will circulating through the tubes of the internet this morning, general grousing, gripes and jeremiads about little of consequence, although I would have to lend credence to the notion that a lot of anger is generated by site specific fears of losing one's financial security. This means that a good number of us in the work force, from upper management, mid management and the guys who wash out the trash dumpsters in the back of the stores we can't afford to walk into are worried that they might be invited into the boss's office and asked to close the door behind them. Not a fun way to start the morning, so I force myself to think only happy thoughts.  La la la la la la is what I sing to myself, and I imagine pink ponies with ribbons and rainbows and smiley faces all over the landscape. Next I turn to my Facebook page where one of my friends posted a video of Brit punk band The Exploited doing the least ambiguous song I will hear all month: FUCK THE USA.

The rainbows evaporate, the pink ponies eat some toxic ragweed and fall over and die. Red robins drop from the sky. The smiley faces are now flipping me off.

Great.

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?

I was reading a 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.

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 Tustin, 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.