Turn off your radio if you won't open your wallet

Millions of us who declare their absolute and undying love of music . After the declarations come still more hyperbole, which we can characterize as being , collectively, of the sort that music is what makes us human and that without the music and the people who create it, our lives would much worse , emotionally , morally, ethically. So music, along with arts in general, are regarded , en masse, as an essential for the life worth living, an element we cannot live without. I agree with the thinking,but find it ironic that increasing numbers of the consumers who are consuming what they cannot live without without paying for it. Streaming music, the death of record stores, music clubs closing, flat line CD sales, illegal downloading, popular radio narrow casting a slim variety of styles and approaches, nearly all of it market researched and created like the tasteless recipes that make up a Denny's menu, scores of us acquire music without paying a dime to the musicians and songwriters who create it and, even when albums do relatively well in terms of the number of units sold, contract schemes have made it tricky for emerging and even established artists to get the payment they're due. It's not a new story and I'm sure more than a few of us are aware that things are rotten in the distribution of wealth in the recording industry. The tragedy is that we love the music, but we evidently don't feel the musicians who create those soul stirring sounds deserve to be paid.

Whither film critics?

Where have all the film critics gone worries a Facebook buddy, citing the herd mentality that seems to come upon otherwise smart folks when they uniformly declare suspect films as "masterpieces". I see his point, that sometimes we who love the craft and honest appraisal of films-as-art as well as entertainment have reason to be dismayed when the judges seem to go from being a Greek chorus committed to telling the truth to a delusional protagonist to a peanut gallery. Time was when if you wanted to read film critics in different cities around the country, you went to the library and read the out of town papers they might be subscribing to. Now, of course, we have the internet, and each is available, every professional critic nearly, not to mention every blogger, content writer, and social media sycophant. It seems, indeed, that everyone who's review can be used in a promotion has read the same marching orders and commits to keeping the fix in place. Honestly, though, I am wondering how much of this is perception, as the sheer glut and easy access to endless reviews make it seem that that unseen hands are controlling the puppet strings. Really, was there ever a glory day when working critics, as a whole, had amazingly unique and significantly insightful thing s to say about Hollywood fare.

Yes, we had our Manny Farber, James Agee, Pauline Kael, and Andrew Sarris, but I'd wager the majority of the print media critics, the newspaper reviewers, that were very similar in style, argument, and range of views. While the cineastes paid attention to the true stylists and thinkers in the big city papers, the rest of the world remained middle brow and pretty much mundane in their judgments on films, yay or nay. You just didn't seem them altogether at the same time, gathered together around at an open bar. Now everything is online, at your fingertips, and the deluge of opinion, pouring on you like wet cement, can have the effect that the incidental sameness of views can seem the result of a sinister corporate force and a decline in critic intelligence. It's my guess that the ration of smart, interesting critics to the hoi polloi remains the same as it has ever been; I read whole reviews on Rotten Tomatoes more than I should,I suppose, but a fair number of the critics are literate and sharp and brandish a fine prose style, and are capable of making an interesting case for their view. And, to be sure, there's a surfeit of the mediocre opinion mongers with stale views and writing skills as rank as the very backwater that might claim them as local taxpayers.

Aerosmith are rich, clever bastards with their minds in the gutter

Truthfully, I used to like Aerosmith quite a bit and still get an adrenaline rush when I hear their best tunes. guitar-centric rock was my preference in the Sports Arena days, but where other bands of the era now bore me and dated themselves badly, AS were pretty much the best at catchy riffs, savage, terse guitar solos, and absurdly clever double -signifying lyrics. These fellas were sex-crazed old coots before they left their teens, and it’s an achievement, if a dubious one, that they managed to make their smutty wordplay the source for inappropriate snickers and wretchedly awful treatment of women for so many years.

The combination of riff -craft and professed cocksmanship was made to order for any frustrated 20-year-old genius yearning to abandon his book learnin' and take up the microphone, center stage, instead.  As you know, my tastes have gravitated, gratefully, towards mainstream jazz and blues over the last thirty-five years--classic Miles, Coltrane, Mel Lewis, Wayne Shorter, Joe Pass, lots of Blue Note, Atlantic, ECM, Pacific Jazz, Verve, Impulse, Fantasy record releases--and rock and roll no longer interests me in large measure. But I still get a charge when a good AS is played--I rather like Tyler's rusty- can- opener screaming, and I believe Joe Perry is one heck of a good chunk-chording guitarist. It helps, I guess, that these guys never got far from some rhythm and blues roots, even if those roots come from the Stones and not Motown or Stax. This may be damning with faint praise, but they were a brilliant expression of a young glandular confusion. 

What makes this art is this band's skill at sounding like they never learned anything fifty feet past the schoolyard and no much else beyond the age of 25. As we age and suffer the sprains, creaks and cancer symptoms, inherited and self-inflicted,  our past gets more gloriously delinquent more we talk about it, and we find ourselves gravitating to those acts of yore who seemed to maintain a genuine scowl and foul attitude.  Nearly any rock band based on rebellion and extreme bouts of immaturity just seems ridiculous after a while--Peter Townsend is lucky enough to have had more ambition in his songwriting with Tommy and Who's Next to have lived down the  dubious distinction of having written the lyric that exclaimed that he would rather die before he got old.  Aerosmith, in turn, still sounds good and rocking as often as not simply because they have mastered their formula. The sound a generation of us newly minted seniors occasionally pined for  remains the audio clue to an idea of integrity and idealism; what is disheartening, if only for a moment, is that this band's skill at sounding 21 and collectively wasted is a matter of professionalism and not an impulse to smash The State. Rock and roll is all about professionalism, which is to say that some  of the alienated and consequently alienating species trying to make their way in the world subsisting on the seeming authenticity of their anger, ire and anxiety has to make sure that they take care of their talent, respect  audiences expectations even as they try to make the curdled masses learn something new and make sure that what they are writing about /singing about/yammering about is framed in choice riffs and frenzied backbeat. 

It is always about professionalism. The MC5 used to have manager John Sinclair, the story goes, turn off the power in the middle of one of their teen club gigs in Detroit to make it seem that the Man was trying to shut down their revolutionary oooopha. The 5 would get the crowd into a frenzy, making noise on the dark stage until the crowd was in a sufficient ranting lather. Sinclair would switch the power back on at that point, and the band would continue, praising the crowd for sticking it to the Pigs. This was pure show business, not actual revolutionary fervor inspired by acne scars and blue balls; I would dare say that it had its own bizarre integrity and was legitimate on terms we are too embarrassed to discuss. In a way, one needs to admire bands like the Stones or Aerosmith for remembering what excited them when they were younger and what kept their fan base loyal.   it's not a matter of rock and roll ceasing to be an authentic trumpet of the troubled young soul once it became a brand; rather, rock and roll have always been a brand once white producers, record company owners, and music publishers got a hold of it early on and geared a greatly tamed version of it to a wide and profitable audience of white teenagers. In any event, whether most of the music being made by Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others was a weaker version of what was done originally by Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters et al. is beside the point. It coalesced, all the same, into a style that perfectly framed an attitude of restlessness among mostly middle-class white teenagers who were excited by the sheer exotica, daring, and the sense of the verboten the music radiated. 

It got named, it got classified, the conventions of its style were defined, and over time, through both record company hype and the endless stream of Consciousness that most white rock critics produced, rock and roll became a brand. It was always a brand once it was removed from the black communities and poor Southern white districts from which it originated. I have no doubt that the artist's intention, in the intervening years, was to produce a revolution in the consciousness of their time with the music, they wrote and performed, but the decision to be a musician was a career choice at the most rudimentary level, a means to make a living or, better yet, to get rich. It is that rare to a non-existent musician who prefers to remain true to whatever vaporous sense of integrity and poor. Even Chuck Berry, in my opinion, is the most important singer-songwriter musician to work in rock and roll--Berry, I believe, created the template with which all other rock and rollers made their careers in music--has described his songwriting style as geared for young white audiences. Berry was a man raised on the music of Ellington and Louie Jardin, strictly old school stuff, and who considered himself a contemporary of Muddy Waters, but he was also An entrepreneur as well, as an artist. He was a working artist who rethought his brand and created a new one; he created something wholly new, a combination of rhythm and blues, country guitar phrasing and narratives that wittily, cleverly, indelibly spoke to a collective experience that had not been previously served. Critics and historians have been correct in callings this music Revolutionary in that it changed the course of music, but it was also a Career change. 

All this, though, does not make what the power of Berry's music--or the music of Dylan, Beatles, Stones, MC5, Bruce or The High Fiving White Guys --false, dishonest, sans value altogether. What I concern myself with is how well the musicians are writing, playing, singing on their albums, with whether they are inspired, being fair to middling', or seem out of ideas, out of breath; it is a useless and vain activity to judge musicians or whole genres of music by how well they/it align themselves with a metaphysical standard of genuine, real, vital art-making. That standard is unknowable, and those pretending they know what it is are improvising at best. This is not a coherent way to enjoy music.      All entrepreneurs are risk-takers, for that matters, so that remains a distinction without a difference. What matters are the products--sorry, even art pieces, visual, musical, dramatic, poetic, are "product" in the strictest sense of the word--from the artists successful in what they set out to do. 

The results are subjective, of course, but art is nothing else than means to provoke a response, gentle or strongly, and all grades in between, and critics are useful in that they can make the discussion of artistic efforts interesting. The only criticism that interests are responses from reviewers who are more than consumer guides--criticism, on its own terms, within its limits, criticism can be as brilliant and enthralling as the art itself. And like the art itself, it can also be dull, boring, stupid, pedestrian. The quality of the critics vary; their function about art, however, is valid. It is a legitimate enterprise. Otherwise, we'd be treating artists like they were priests. 

God forbid.                    

TOM PETTY, free fallin'

Tom Petty made me think of the “emancipated minor,” an underage teen legally separated from his parents, becoming free to engage in adult activities that would otherwise require parental permission. The teen becomes a legal adult, free to sign contracts, enroll in trade school, rent an apartment, and is solely responsible for the future that awaits him. There were a few of these feral minors around when I worked the carnival circuit in the ’70s during the dread days of summer. I was a college student working midway games for a long shaggy dog story I’d narrate to the end of my days. Meanwhile, I had classes and my parents’ condo to go back to when it was my time to go. They, however, were suddenly adults responsible for their direction, solely at the mercy of their wits, the wisdom of their rash decisions, and the kindness of others who gave a good goddamn.

They liked hard guitar rock, good marijuana, and a job that paid them a living wage for a solid eight hours of work. And there was that wonderful sense that the world had a moral map, simply drawn, with little gray between the extremes of light and dark. There is the Right Thing, and then there is being a Total Dick. No compromise is the game: young hearts, not so much idealistic, as much as expecting everyone to be playing by the same rule book.There was no backing down from this—you followed your path; you moved toward your dreams; and you cut ties to the people, places, and things that fettered a young soul’s determination to create and live a life that made sense. Following suit, the emotional life was the sort that took a heartache and converted it into a worldview, a philosophy of hurt articulated in simple sentences and short, clipped rhymes.

A broken heart, being fired, a flat tire on the turnpike between Sandusky and Stockton, buying a used Van Halen CD and discovering it’s a Shaggs record instead—all these abutments and letdowns and sorry-ass slaps in the face were savored, inspected, kept fresh in memory while one fell into a hard reticence to speak of one’s pain. A code formed, the choruses were bellowed while pounding the dashboard between drags of Marlboro 100s, a car full of young men, and the occasional carnie chick circulating through the twist-and-shout knots and narrow passage of the Grapevine making their way to the last of the Still Spots before The Season was over, smoke, open beer cans, 8-track tapes, and scratched CDs: “Stop draggin’ my heart around,” “You don’t have to feel like a refugee…,” I am free fallin’, and I won’t back down, so fuck off and get  out of the way  because this life is too short to wait in line….

Tom Petty did not wait in line. He got it done. Grounded, responsive, principled from experience, always aware of who pays his bills. This man worked, he felt, he got it done, and then left us, headed into the great wide open. Perhaps we will see his likes again, but you know, the waiting is the hardest part. So get it done, pick up a guitar, play your harmonica, son. Tom Petty wrote songs about standing your ground, being true to the good things within yourself, of being helpful when help was needed, of admitting when he was wrong and taking responsibility for the results of his decisions, he was a man who refused to be a doormat and would tell you to your face, in terms plain-spoken and truthful. Petty was everything the essential spirit of rock ‘n’ roll should be and occasionally still is, a kind of realistic worldview that was neither abstract philosophy nor stale bromides reinforcing a crucifying relativism, but rather a way of seeing precisely what’s at stake, what’s involved in the dramas, transactions, and passions of our time on Earth, and intuitively knowing the best course to take. His were the songs of the trials, tribulations of a life he’s fully engaged in. 

His rock ‘n’ roll was simple, predicated on anthem-like choruses and simple, assertive, thrashing guitar riffs, and a honed backbeat. Tom Petty’s voice relayed his plain-spoken lyrics with a sound that was an emotional storm working itself out, the hurt, and anguish, the acceptance, and the courage and strength to continue to the next day—with the realization that life goes on and that he’s in it and that he has a life that is truly his own, beholden to no authority apart from his consul and the people and values he holds dear. Tom Petty was, I think, everything I had hoped Bob Seger would become: the working journeyman rocker with the common man’s experience expressed brilliantly, movingly, in the terse, unadorned cadence of the best rock ‘n’ roll. Seger, though, caught Springsteen fever and gravitated to bigger arrangements, strained melodrama, and grandiosity dressed in a work shirt. Petty never forgot he was a rocker, never forgot what made rock ‘n’ roll such a powerful medium of self-realization. He wrote about what he knew what he had done, and what he learned. It was a conversation with his fans he never stopped having.

Hefner: Goodbye and good riddance

So Hugh Hefner is dead and the thinking of many my age, sixty something lets say, is that we ought to praise the Pajama pornographer for defending civil rights, exposing readers of his magazine to many a Nobel-worthy authors and fighting against all manner of authoritarian censorship. As far  as that goes, sure, but  for decades Hefner seemed to be the slimy pipsqueak no one would sit with during lunch period who, in the cruelest irony to the self image of jocks and culture-vultures everywhere, became the standard by which be defined smart and sophisticated masculinity. Praise for his influence as a cultural revolutionary is undone once we realize that he's turned a generation or two of young men into a compulsive, masturbatory yahoos who, over time, hadn't a chance to escape the prison of their arrested development.  Results varied , of course, from the indoctrination into this greasy promoter's school of consumerist Hip, but the effect on our national manner and collective assumptions is that of find yourself at ground zero for the kind of self contentedness you go into doubt, psychic and financial, to get access to. Praising for bringing enlightenment to America only repeats the lie and hides the fact that Hefner's surrounding himself in beautiful and submissive women, great writers, important intellectuals and advancing variously defensible causes was actually subterfuge obscuring the man's  Inner Carnival barker and distracting us from the unvarnished turth that he made us coarser people in the long run. 

Hitler, Mussolini and the early iterations of the Soviet regimes gave untold numbers of artists jobs , but that does not mitigate the calamities those monsters foisted on the world. Hefner, I realize, is different,but the comparison holds to degree. His inclusion of writers, intellectuals and serious musicians into his world was middle brow culture at its worse, a means to lure large swaths of the public,mostly white males with privilege and power and influence, into a seductive consumerist thinking. Hefner may well have advocated for civil rights for blacks, but certainly not equal rights for women. What he actually did to the culture and its habit of mind undoes the good things he might have accomplished only incidental.This attitude is classic objectification, and it's the same deep and fatally seated cosmology that made slavery a morally defensible institution.  He was singularly responsible for instilling in American mainstream the greedy , sociopathic libertarianism of Ayn Rand-- generally anti-government, pro-wealth accumulation, pro subjugation of women as sexual objects. Hitler, Mussolini and the early iterations of the Soviet regimes gave untold numbers of artists jobs , but that does not mitigate the calamities those monsters foisted on the world. Hefner, I realize, is different,but the comparison holds to degree. 

The inclusion of writers, intellectuals and serious musicians into his world was middle brow culture at its worse, a means to lure large swaths of the public,mostly white males with privilege and power and influence, into a seductive consumerist thinking. Hefner may well have advocated for civil rights for black Hefner's influence made him a cultural force whatever his original intentions happen to be. Hedonism maybe as American as apple pie, but decency ,fairness, equal and uncompromised rights are as well,; much that most of the liberal and progressive movement, which evolved from the Civil Rights movement, turned against Hefner and his sensualist libertarian-ism because his over all presentation, his long standing and consistently articulated production of his ideal society, worked mightily against the aims of women achieving rights that are naturally and legally theirs in the first place, not favors awarded them by male masters. It's my thinking that the Playboy philosophy did more than build a media empire. It became an ideology of a kind, a rationale that rather conspicuously worked against the advancement of human and which resulted in a seemingly permanent strain of angry emotional dwarfism that has yet , if ever, to be removed .s, but certainly not equal rights for women. What he actually did to the culture and its habit of mind undoes the good things he might have accomplished only incidently. He was singularly responsible for instilling in American mainstream the greedy , sociopathic libertarianism of Ayn Rand-- generally anti-government, pro-wealth accumulation, pro subjugation of women as sexual objects and breeders of off spring. His Playboy philosophy, if fully implemented, would have been a cruel and narrow path to hoe.cts and breeders of off spring. His Playboy philosophy, if fully implemented, would have been a cruel and narrow path to hoe. Hefner's influence made him a cultural force whatever his original intentions happen to be. Hedonism maybe as American as apple pie, but decency ,fairness, equal and uncompromising rights are as well,; much that most of the liberal and progressive movement, which evolved from the Civil Rights movement, turned against Hefner and his sensualist libertarian-ism because his over all presentation, his long standing and consistently articulated production of his ideal society, worked mightily against the aims of women achieving rights that are naturally and legally theirs in the first place, not favors awarded them by male masters. 

It's my thinking that the Playboy philosophy did more than build a media empire. It became an ideology of a kind, a rationale that rather conspicuously worked against the advancement of human and which resulted in a seemingly permanent strain of angry emotional dwarfism that has yet , if ever, to be removed .Truth is is that Hefner was a relentless self promoter a mere step or two removed from being a pornographer. He essentially dressed up his magazine with classy writers and journalists and he promoted a good number of causes advancing the cause of civil rights and civil liberties, but that was a cynical move to purchase himself a veneer of legitimacy. He was sexist and, I suspect, a misogynist, dehumanizing not just his models but women in general. Men, as well, suffered wounds at the market and image manipulation of this salacious Svengali, instructing generations that one can be sophisticated and cerebral at the same time as they are emotionally stunted, locked into a narcissistic world view that regarded half of the world's population as property. Hefner dehumanized all of us . He was not a great man. He was very successful creep.

Shane Hall

Human Condition-Shane Hall

Songwriter and vocalist extraordinaire Shane Hall is an artist preferring to eschew hard labels as to his style of music and brings to one's players and streaming devices an alluring but slippery set of original songs with his new album Human Condition. Hall, highlighted in the August 2017 issue of the San Diego Troubadour, is often classified --hurriedly, it seems, as a blues artist, but that doesn't quite get at what this musician is up to. Human Condition, while having a conspicuous blues base in the songwriter, isn't a journey through yet another session of twelve and sixteen bar chord progressions with pallid rewrites of the expected blues tropes. Hall is from the tradition, we can say, but he does not restrict himself, instead bring something more inclusively American for the listener:  folk revival, traveling man tales, the swaying call and response  of gospel-inflected work hollers, music that recollects and reconditions the music of the American soul and the wide avenues of its collective heart.  

And pushing this “Americana” mélange forward is Hall’s voice, a versatile, resonating baritone, filtering the traces of Muddy Waters, Hank Williams and, it seems, Van Morrison, voices of individual distinction and grit of personality. Each had assimilated their influences, wedded them with their own experiences, in turn creating new legacies of sound and soul music. Hall does much the same, his voice a harried, gritty plea for relief and love in the opening track. A testimonial of a man’s willingness and patience to shoulder his burden and wait for either a lover or Salvation, this is a simple and simple and powerful paean.  The strumming, galloping guitar of “Shell Life”, stopping and starting with odd emphasis that makes you lean closer to the singer’s entreaties, is a clear tale of someone taking stock of his life; between the desire for the pleasure of the moment and the need to maintain one’s integrity, this is the sad tale of a situation where there is heartbreak and regret whatever the choice happens to be.  Human Condition benefits from the spare, uncluttered arrangements, by Hall, and the clear, gimmick-free production provided by Kris Towne; the varying moods the songs create, from hill music laments to the bittersweet country-blues cadences of “Rare Form”, the songwriting is plainly and effectively showcased. Hall does not undercut his best virtues with the extraneous gesture.

What I’ve found especially appealing is the song ‘Roll”. In an album full of nuanced tales of seeking love, losing faith, resilience, regret and moving on down the road, “Roll” is a straight-ahead celebration of a young man who takes a fancy to a young woman’s beauty and manner. We realize, of course, that this new attraction, this infatuation, may be as ephemeral and fated for the dustbin of memory, but this song is about being in the moment, giving oneself over to the authority of their senses and finding someone sublime and perhaps loving in turn to make the hard journeys worth the shoe leather and heartaches.  The bounces, the chorus grabs you and leads you in a dance of momentary transcendence, and Hall’s voice lightens in texture and hews, it rises to a tone that suggests eyes upraised, not downcast, looking at the stars, in awe of something wonderful, quite wonderful. Finishing the album is the bluesy, funked-up meditation “Lady Cobra”, sulky and slinky, a statement of powerlessness as a prelude to a one night stand; Hall’s protagonist seems aware that he’s getting in over his head, but it’s apparent this young man thinks love is worth the blues.

This the appeal of Human Condition, in the fact, is that Hall does not preach, both lecture nor offer bits of piecemeal philosophy as the experiences are recounted and the tales are told.  He keeps the details precise, the emotions raw yet restrained, the overall personality stoic, but not stiff. His musical variety, the resourcefulness of his voice and the simply and superbly tailored dynamics of his songwriting make Human Condition a refreshingly crisp and tuneful set from a singer-songwriter. Hall transcends the merely confessional and up his game to some artful storytelling.

 (originally appeared in the San Diego Troubadour.Used with kind permission).

Gritty, clammy, unresolved:Mailer vs Germaine Greer, Jill Johnson, Diana Trilling

Germaine Greer

There are perverse types who think that if one places a group of people in the same room who've sworn, metaphorically or literally, to destroy each other, the reflex to go for one's gun will subside and what will result is a frank exchange of opinion, insights and life stories. And after the participants have learned that they're not nearly as distant from each other as they had thought, they'll lock arms, brothers, and sisters all, and stroll down the beach into the fiery sun of a higher revolution. All eyes raised, shoulders broad, worker and intellectual, farmer, and chemist, all eyes upraised and looking to the top of the mountain we will climb, as one, united in cause and spirit. Anyone of us can, of course, say 'posh' to the .and know, ' smirking. that enemies remain antagonists to the bone despite the demands of decorum.  The results of these situations are inconclusive and crackling with uncertainty, a heap of hot laundry alive with static electricity,  neither side abjuring to the points made by an opponent. A lot of us like to watch a spat, a public argument of bright people trying to keep their personal views out of a heated grousing about matters that concern us all more so than the entertainment value of raised hackles and arched backs might otherwise indicate on first view. These are situations where otherwise reasonable people are reduced to the level of kids fighting over the use of a prized toy. As in hack-and-slash horror films, many of us get a cheap thrill over blood being drawn for no good purpose.  Or, one could postulate, no one looks good in a shouting match if that passes as a good purpose. That is a reminder to the rest of us to pick our battles and pick our venues in which to have them.

Norman Mailer

So was the case with the film Town Bloody Hall, a documentary in the cinema vertie mode by director D.A. Pennebaker,  a little view film I had the good luck to see at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art in the early 80s. Filmed in 1971, it is an account of a debate between writer Norman Mailer and an impressive panel of prominent feminist  polemicists  including Germaine Greer (author of The Female Eunuch), radical lesbian Jill Johnson, literary critic Diana Trilling and a representative from The National Organization of Women, whose name I am unable to recall. Pioneer 2nd Wave feminist writer and critic Kate Millet had viciously vilified Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence and Mailer himself in her tract Sexual Politics as outstanding representatives of an elitist male literary culture that has oppressed women by distorting their image so that the imaginations of male fictioneers might be better served. Mailer. whose pugnacious reputation has at times dwarfed his writings in the public mind, countered with The Prisoner 0f Sex, a scathing attack on Millet's lack of literary critical skills and her deliberate misreading~of the texts she was dealing with. It is also at turns a brilliant defense of Millet and Lawrence and a convoluted agonizing over the "existential" aesthetic in male/female relationships.

 Mailer's book sparked a fair amount of public debate, and some enterprising souls thought it would be a neat idea to have The Prisoner confront representatives from the opposition. To be expected, the event was hardly a shining example from a Kansas debate manual, but was rather a riot of rhetoric, name-calling, heckles from an unruly crowd and public spectacle. In other words, an intellectually worthless few hours, but, I'd say, a rousing good time. much like a TV wrestling match on a Saturday afternoon. With Mailer officiating, each speaker was to be given ten minutes to speak, after which Mailer would pose a question. Things got off to a proper start. First to talk was the NOW representative, who offered a list of moderate feminist proposals: housewives should draw a living wage, women should get equal pay for equal work and other less than incendiary ideas. Greer spoke next, eloquently attacking the premise of Mailer's literary heroisms and poetically called for an art of the collective, not of one voice but many. Then matters derailed and declined to the point where the night got permanently off-track. Reading from a text composed in the stream on conscious manner that has always sent me to pounding my head against the wall, Jill Johnson rhapsodized that all women are able to love all other women and until men are able to love all other men, the hopes of an all-embracing social revolution will be scuttled like pipe dreams. Mailer, poking a pencil through a cardboard coffee cup, his face a mass o( downturned lines, cut Johnson off at this point, saying that she'd done five minutes over the time limit. Johnson stands motionless while the audience heckles Mailer, demanding that he let her conclude. After an exchange of curses, he initiates an audience vote and concludes that the 'nays' have it. Someone heckles Mailer again. and Mailer, agitated. points to the crowd and says "If you think you can do a better job than me, then come up here (the stage) and take this microphone from me."Johnson effectively undercuts Mailer's angry-dad tantrum as she begins to make-out and grab as with a woman-friend on stage while Mailer demands that she "act like a lady." When the audience cheers the pair on, Mailer says "You people paid twenty-five dollars to see two pairs of dirty jeans wrestle on stage, which seems odd to me because you can ee all the cock and cunt you want down the street for four bucks." Johnson and friend leave the hall, not to return.

Picking up the pieces after Johnson's psycho-theatrics was hard, and for the rest of the debate the panel split hairs on Mailer's "poeticized" understanding of biology, whether vaginal orgasms were possible, Mailer's warnings that Women's Lib has the potential of becoming a leftwing totalitarianism, why the women's movement must concern themselves with their own lot over all other causes and a host of other feelings, all accompanied by the interjections of an audience. With that, the night was ended, with no one's mind changed and few friends gained. What fascinates me about Town Bloody Hall isn't how concisely it's members articulated their views - in the long run, everyone loses their cogency as tangent pin out faster than a car on a greased blacktop- but just how the women's movement will have to shore up their own politic. In 1971, when this film was made, the movement was just beginning to develop a coherent analysis of the society that was oppressing women. At this time of theoretical splendor,  a clumsy and clammy argument over vaginal orgasm, a pertinent citing of a housewife' right to draw a wage and a far-reaching critique of the culture and politics of art and literature were the order of the day. In the ten years since the debate, the right wing in the country has managed to shore up its own resources and have shown themselves to be astonishingly effective. The fact that Ronald Reagan won the presidency on a platform that opposes abortion and the ERA and holds a grab-bag of other. " Conservative sentiments means that the women's movement is faced with a crisis, a crisis that means that the advancements women have managed over the years could be handily wiped out, setting them back to square one. Town Bloody Hall quite unintentionally reveals what the women's movement must do: hipster bohemianism must be doffed and women must more than ever enter the gritty, un-scrubbed ruthlessness of mainstream electoral politics. And that will be the next test on the movement. If it's to have a lasting effect on the culture in which all of us live, it must be affirmed at the voting booth. A sudden, un-decorated realism is cast upon all of us.

Chick Corea and Friends pay tribute to Bud Powell

I've been a avid Chick Corea fan since meeting him (as a listener) on the M. Davis Bitches Brew, where he tag-teamed with fellow keyboardist Joe Zawinul to give that masterpiece its funky, layered, modal fever dream grounding. Corea since revealed in his solo and collaborative efforts to be a peerless pianist, fluent, fast, inventive, unflagging, and one of his generation's protean composers. It wasn't that,as a composer, he could merely switch styles with acceptable aptitude; his excursions into rock, classical, pop, and Avant Gard were full throttle, probing, finding more similarities than one might expect, and when there weren't elements so similar, relishing in the contractions and producing intriguing music all the same. 

I am not one to say, perhaps, but I would say that Corea's body of work as a jazz composer match up against the greatest the Canon has awarded us with. That said, it's a pleasure to listen to Corea's tribute to one of his central influences, both as composer and improviser, Bud Powell, with his "Remembering Bud Powell" release from 1997. As a pianist, Powell's fingers knew precisely how to be dynamic when and where it counted; as his tunes were melodic but hooky, full of sudden but smooth shifts in tempo and direction, BP seemed to extemporize the composition at will. Matters beheld are unfailingly evident by the energy and the inventive required by Powell's nicely involved songs. Corea, in tribute, positively swings on this session; lithe, percussive, bright. His band--Wallace Roney on trumpet, Ray Haynes on drums, Kenny Garrett, Christian McBride on bass, Joshua Redman on sax--take the opportunity to swing this batch of progressions and augmentations for all the marvelously flowing improvisations they can collectively muster.

This Corea Bud Powell collection is notable for, besides dense and cutting improvisations, is the quality of Powell’s' compositions. Corea resists the temptation to Latinize or fusio-nize the material and instead plays the charts straight--Powell’s' sense of harmonic build-up and resolution is loopy, easing from sweetness to tart dissonance. All of which is the canvas for some good blowing. Corea reins in his extravaganzas and weaves around with a now untypical sense of swing. The efforts of Garrett and Redman are a reed lover’s idea of heaven. Roney has a cool, crystalline tone, and his phrasing is meditative, reserved, nicely so, though one desires a Hubbardesque scorch at odd times. Haynes and McBride are champs. Straight ahead jazz fans need to purchase this fine album, and then treat themselves further by acquiring recordings of the florid and exhilarating Mr. Powell himself.

Swing for the fence

T.S.Eliot wrote in a time when the Universe seemed to be rent, with heaven and hell bleeding into one another. His was  a career on the heels of two world wars that shattered optimism one may have had for the promise of technology to replace a silent god, is hardly different that the dread that lurks under the covers of the post modern debate over language's ability to address anything material, or have it convey ideas with any certainty. There is simply the fear that the names we give to things we think are important and worth preserving are, after ball, based on nothing. Grim prospects, that, but Eliot, I think, seeks to provoke a reader's investigation into the source of the malaise, the bankruptcy of useful meaning, with a hope that the language is reinvigorated with a power to transform and change the world.

Eliot's response was real art though, and if it did turn into resignation and nostalgia for more-meaningful past times, his articulation at least provokes a response in the reader, and operates as a challenge for them to make sense of his language, and understand the complexity of their own response. This adheres to Pound's modernist ideal that art ought to not just be about the times in which it's made, but that it needs to provoke a response that changes the times: transformation remains the submerged notion.

There is beauty because there is power in the imagery and the emotion behind it and it's powerful because it rings true; a reader recognizes the state of affairs Eliot discusses with his shimmering allusions, and responds to it. The material does not lie, and he certainly isn't being false by saying "this is my response to our time and our deeds". Rather, it's more that one disagrees with Eliot's conclusion, that all is naught, useless, gone to ashes. Better that one inspects the power of the truth that is in the work and develops their own response to their moment. It's less useful to try and argue with someone's real despair. A depressed expression does not constitute lying.

Eliot was not lying in any sense of the word--lying is a willful act, done so with the intent of trying to make someone believe something that is demonstrably untrue. As the point of The Quartets and his plays have to do with an artful outlaying of Eliot's seasoned ambivalence to his time, the suggestion that "beauty lies" is specious. One has license to argue with the conclusions, or to critique the skill of the writer, but the vision here is not faked dystopia Eliot contrived to a good amount of trendy despair--that comes later, with artless confessional poets who lost any sense of beauty to their own addiction to their ultimately trivial self-esteem issues. Eliot, however one views him, sought transcendence of what he regarded as an inanely short-sighted world, and sought to address the human condition in a lyric language that has, indeed, found an audience that continues to argue with his work: the work contains a truth the readership recognizes. Eliot was following suit on the only prerogative an artist, really, has open to them: to be an honest witness to the evidence of their senses, and to marshal every resource in their grasps to articulate the fleeting sensations, the ideas within the experience.

This is the highest standard you can hold an artist to; any other criteria, any other discursive filter one wants to run the work through is secondary, truth be told, because the truth within the work is the source of that work's power. One need to recognize what it is in the lines, in the assemblage and drift of the lyric, in the contrasted tones and delicate construction of vernaculars, what is that one recognizes and responds to in the work, and then mount their response.

There is more to the Four Quartets or the plays than what assume is an admission of defeat in the hard glare of uncompromising , godless materialism--there is hope that his work inspires future imagining greater than even his own-- but I cannot regard the poems as failures in any sense, even with the admission that there is great beauty in them. Eliot renders his consciousness, his contradictory and ambivalent response to the world he's grown old in with perfect pitch, and it's my sense that his intention to provoke the imagination is a sublime accomplishment. As craft and agenda, the later pieces work.

What does Eliot's despair have to do with postmodern writers and writing? It's less about what one can call his "despair" than what his operating premise has in common with the post modern aesthetic: Eliot, the Modernist poet extraordinaire, perceives the world the universe has having any sort of definable center, any unifying moral force formally knowable by faith and good works. There is despair in the works, behind the lines--one responds to them emotionally and intellectually--and the power behind the images, the shimmering surfaces the diminished, de-concretized narrator feels estranged from, comes from a felt presence, a real personality. Eliot, though, turns the despair into a series of ideas, and makes the poetry an argument with the presence day. There is pervasive sense of everything being utterly strange in the streets, bridges over rivers, strangeness at the beach, and we, it sounds, a heightened sense of voices, media, bombs, headlines competing for the attention of someone who realizes that they're no longer a citizen in a culture where connection to a core set of meanings, codes and authority offers them a security, but are instead consumers, buyers, economic in a corrupt system that only exploits and denudes nature, culture, god.

Eliot conveys the sense of disconnection rather brilliantly, reflecting the influence of an early cinematic editing styles: Eliot is a modernist by his association with the period, though at heart he was very much a Christian romantic seeking to find again some of the scripture’s surety to ease his passage through the world of man and his material things. There has always been this yearning for a redemption of purpose in the vaporous sphere, and much of his work, especially in criticism, argued that the metaphysical aspect could be re-established, recreated, re-imagined (the operative word) through the discipline of artistic craft. Modernists, ultimately, shared many of the same views of postmodernism with regards of the world being a clashing, noisy mess of competing, unlinked signifiers, but post modernism has given up the fight of trying to place meaning in the world, and also the idea that the world can be changed for the better. Modernists, as I take them in their shared practice and aesthetic proclamations, are all romantics, though their angle and color of their stripes may vary. Romanticism, in fact, is an early kind of modernism: the short of it is that there is a final faith in the individual to design of the world, and in turn change its shape by use of his imagination

Eliot's turn to religious quietism isn't so surprising, given the lack of self-effacing wit in his writing that might have lessened the burden of his self-created dread of the modern world: a tenet of modernism, shared by any writer worthy of being called so, is that their work was to help the readers, the viewers, the audience, perceive the world afresh, from new perspectives, in new arrangements, to somehow help get to the "real" order of things behind their appearances, and, understanding, change the world again. Temperaments among poets varied as to how they personally responded to their need to live aesthetically--and in all cases, living aesthetically was a viable substitute for a religious rigor--Stevens chose his Supreme Fiction while being an insurance executive, Pond toyed with fascism and economics, Joyce opted for a life in the eroticized parlors of France and Britain, Williams found connection through his medical practice and biology, related, absolutely with his poetry. Over all, what keenly separates the modernist engagement with meaning creation was that it was the things of this world, this plain, this material reality, that were the things that would help us transform individual perception; the thing itself is its own adequate symbol. A nod to Husserl and phenomenology, the meaning of things in the world, as things, was mysterious indeed, but their form didn't come from the mind of a God who, at best, was an absent landlord. Eliot, though, sought religion, and I don't see that as a failure at all: the work is too powerful to be regarded as either a personal failure, if that's a claim one might, nor as a poet. Eliot, as you say, is a poet of ideas, among other things, but ideas are useless in a poem unless they're seamlessly linked with an emotion, an impulse, and it's possible, I think, to see where the work was going: the kind of world Eliot described, with the kind of intelligence and personality that described it, was a bleak and unlivable sphere, requiring a decision, to commit to something that supplies meaning, fits the personality that needs direction. I don't regard Eliot as artifact at all: I've commented previously on how the work still inspires readers to engage the world in new ways: he is a permanent influence on my work as a poet.

The early modernists rejected the romantic label--for a variety of reasons. I'm sure they had good reasons, but Modernism, in many respects, is an old project with a new label. Can we really place Joyce and the Futurists and Eliot and Pound and Yeats and Gertrude Stein, Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the same box? Yes, but it is less of a box and more of a tent; there is a lot more room to around and get your teeth knocked out.

The failure of most 9/11 literature

Artist: Patrick Nevins

Are disasters, natural or man made, ever the thing for satire? Is it appropiate that the creative and satiric spirit find humor in revealing humans at their most self-conceptually  eviscerated, when their individual and collective sense of pride, competence and confidence in a world that works sanely is torn from them suddenly, no warning, leaving them to scramble and behave by instinct, not philosophy? A better question would be whether the comedy was funny and, of course, whether it created a distance , of a kind, through   which we can learn more about this problematic  quality informally termed "being human". In White Noise, the effect was comic, funny, and all ironies laid in the day were comedies of the clueless trying to make peace with the nagging changes that cause everyone to avoid the void as they try to retool old habits with new explanations, theories, contrived proofs that the world will return to normal. Now it's tragedy, and the quality of irony finds itself made ironic. The attack on the World Trade Center puts us beyond abstractions like comedy or tragedy, on which one can grasp onto something fixed in their minds as a normality they can get back to. All is muted, rendered mute. Rationalization is deferred. And our expectations of what DeLillo would make of the penultimate attack on America's symbolic sense of being the world's best asset mounted to levels that were nearly toxic with glee.

DeLillo, however, is a writer who might have played out his themes and investigations of a hyper-technological democracy whose inhabitants are searching for a useful past as a way to make the fractured, reshuffled and de-centered present to at least seem to have thematic continuity. "Falling Man", the 9/11 novel, strikes me as a book of riffs from a musician who can barely muster the energy to run through his songbook one more time. In the odd sense, in the cruelly ironic sense, it's a tragedy that the attack on the World Trade Center attack happened after DeLillo hit his peak with "Underworld", as masterful of novel of America our propensity for distracting ourselves in ritual, obsessions, insane hobbies and esoteric systems of knowledge--performance art, baseball history, high finances, unrepentant consumerism, ceaseless works of charity--to keep the suspicion that all our material gains and assumptions are based on no fixed moral platform.

There are some fine sentences here, some splendid descriptions, but there is listlessness as well. "Falling Man" is finally dull, and even DeLillo's prose mastery can't make this alternating saga of survivor despair and terrorist preparation rise above the merely serviceable. DeLillo is overwhelmed by the topic, not so much for the impossibility of writing a brilliant novel in the post-attack atmosphere, but because all the themes he has relevant to the present condition are expressed more powerfully, poetically, with larger and surer measures of canon-making genius than the comparatively provincial exercise the author has issued here. It’s also a matter of whether beautiful writing is appropriate for a novel specifically concerning itself with the physical and psychic costs of 9-11; folks like Laura Miller, Meghan O’Rourke and Frank Rich have wrestled with the issue of whether drawing metaphors and similes for larger contemplation is somehow immoral when addressing the events so catastrophic and fatal. Art, in the uppercase, means framing the materials and objectifying them, taking them from their contexts and positioning them in ways that will force a deliberation over their existence; this is the aesthetic distance, beauty removed from our hands and set aside so we can contemplate some feelings in absence of real world distraction. 9-11, though, is thought by many to be above such contemplation, that this date cannot be abstracted as material for art making, literary reflection.

Brat Pack novelist  Jay McInerney  got urge to step up to the plate and write a Great American Novel, a work that would raise him finally from the middle rungs of the literary ladder and allow him to reach the top shelf where only the best scribes--Hemingway! Fitzgerald! Thomas Wolfe!-- sit and cast their long collective shadow over the fields of aspiring geniuses, furious scribblers all. McInerney has selected a large subject with which to make his reputation, the catastrophe that was and remains 9/11. Acutely aware that the minor league satires and soft coming of age stories that made his name were less commanding than they had been because "9/11 changed everything" (a phrase destined to be the characterizing cliché of this age) he offers us The Good Life, a mixed bag of satiric thrusts, acute social observation, two dimensional characterizations and wooden generalizations about the sagging state of society, of culture, of our ability to understand one another, locally and globally.

I agree that Jay McInerney is a better writer than he's been credit, but history will judge his novels as minor efforts at best. Witty and observant, yes he is, but the manner in which he conveys his best lines, his choicest bon mots have the thumbed-through feeling of a style borrowed. Fitzgerald, Capote and John Cheever are his heroes, true, but there's nothing in McInerney's writing that honors his influences with the achievement of a tone and personality that is entirely his own, an original knack of phrase making that makes a reader wonder aloud how such wonderful combinations of words are possible. His influences, alas, are visible and seem to be peering over his shoulder. Even what one would praise as sharp and elegant observations from his keyboard creaks not a little. The style sounds borrowed, and our author sounds much, much too dainty to make it really cling to the memory:"The hairstylist was aiming a huge blow-dryer at his wife's skull, which was somewhat disconcertingly exposed and pink--memento more--in the jet of hot air ... "

McInerney is compared to Fitzgerald relentlessly since his career as a professional writer began, in so much he, like Fitzgerald, was bearing witness to a generation of conspicuous consumption and waste, but one notices that any random paragraph from The Great Gatsby contains more melody by far. The writing genius of Fitzgerald, when he was writing at his absolute best, was his ability to make you forget the fact that you're reading elegant prose and have you become entranced by it. It was a means to put you in a different world altogether. It's this simple, really; you didn't see him writing, and you didn't see him sweat. Able craftsman as well as peerless stylist when he was performing best, Fitzgerald's prose seemed natural, buoyant, unstrained. McInerney's writing reveals that strain, that slaving over phrase and clever remark, and often times the effect seems calculated. In his best moments, he rarely sheds the sophomore flash; after all these years our Manhattan golden boy still writes like the most gifted student in a Kansas City composition class. After all these years he is still trying to outrace the long shadows of those who brought him reading pleasure.

This is a wandering and traipsing along the subject matter like a drunken tourist gawking at the bizarre ways of the big city, a laughable and loathsome tour of Corn's intellectual baggage.   "Windows on the World", a poem written by Alfred Corn and published in Slate on September 11, 2003,is an ill conceived poem commemorating the attack on the World Trade Center that would seem to confirm the skeptic's view that poets are willfully suffering narcissists who think everything in the world is in play in order to disturb their peace. In other words, to fuck with them. It's strange, odd, perverse, and somewhat immoral to write a poem using the 9/11 attack as a pretext to write another self-infatuated poem that really is more about how much the writer thinks about himself and his assignation as a "poet"; whatever the god damned what Corn puts on his tax return as "occupation" has to do with the still barely speakable horror this day has come to mean is beyond any sense I can find, and worse, it is beyond anything useful to others.

Connecting the attack with the crashing of Windows operating system is a ploy him to remain a thousand miles from any connection with real emotion; it is relentlessly ironic and snobby in its form as a poem. The subject matter, the real horror is aestheticized out of mind the way a narcotic lulls one into a stupor and then a nod against a world that still must be faced and made sense of. Corn does none of that at all, but what he does do is give us a long, wavering and arrogantly ambivalent stretch of muddled semiotics where everything is a straining reach, a forced association, a willful perversion of real imagist reach. Had the subject not been so grim and disheartening, this would seem more parody than anything else. This poem angers me to no end. If Corn was paid for this piece, he should feel honor bound to donate the sum to a cause that actually gives hope to others in the human community. Following that, he might quit whatever teaching job he as in the instruction of writing and get a job in the receiving area of a Salvation Army Thrift store.

Astore.

Blade Runner

Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick's novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," stands out as a visually stunning and thought-provoking work. The film successfully captures the essence of a future Los Angeles, employing a stylish film noir aesthetic. It skillfully plays with light and dark contrasts, utilizing a subdued color palette that evokes a sense of decay and pollution, which suits the futuristic thriller genre. However, Blade Runner's significance extends beyond its visual appeal.

The film tackles a range of compelling issues, encompassing spiritual, sociological, and philosophical themes. From the androids' quest to meet their creator and extend their lives to the exploration of immigration, urban congestion, cultural blending, and the unscrupulous introduction of dubious technologies into the consumer market, Blade Runner delves into thought-provoking subject. While Ridley Scott has directed other notable films such as The Duelist, Black Hawk Down, Gladiator, Matchstick Men, and The Martian, none of them possess the combination of ideas, tone, and visual allure that made Blade Runner a truly unique masterpiece.

It is intriguing how Blade Runner, with its elegant design, encapsulates a wealth of substantial ideas, capable of sparking numerous discussions and generating an abundance of scholarly writings. This resonates with Philip K. Dick's fascination with how societies willingly surrender their humanity, the innate qualities of curiosity, adventure, and industriousness that drive humans to explore and push boundaries. In Dick's novels, technology often represents a force that diminishes human essence by gradually eroding their free will. As machines assume tasks previously exclusive to humans, those who prioritize convenience and leisure over a more gritty existence may not appear tragic. It becomes challenging to empathize with individuals who exist solely for sensory pleasure, devoid of genuine concerns.

In summary, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner remains a cinematic gem that surpasses his subsequent works in terms of its captivating visuals, profound ideas, and engaging atmosphere. It aligns with Philip K. Dick's exploration of humanity's surrender to technology, portraying a future where the loss of genuine human experiences is a tangible consequence.