The Unfortunates by Cates Marvin

"The Unfortunates" by poet Cates Marvin, is a sad tale of sensitive people who are overwhelmed by life's cruel tricks to make them feel bad and keep them awake at nights contemplating what is horrible, ugly and unfortunate in the cities they live in. It is not to my liking , mostly because the poet, Cates Marvin, tries to find some equal ground between herself (and those she presumes to speak for) and the homeless she espies who's misery gives her the jitters and attending guilt feelings, to which I say no dice. These steamy, cold streets are the mean ones better writers than Marvin, or myself have walked down before, and they've managed to absorb the seaminess and squalor of their life and, depressed or no, didn't obsess on their frayed nerves. Their anxiety wasn't the subject matter, but an entree to another topic. Marvin sticks with the frayed nerves, and that makes the poem a chore to read even once.It's a straining, over stocked equation; after spending the first stanza presenting the pathetic detailing the doings of the sad creatures he pities in ways that make them sound exotic, alien and strange, the second stanza smacks us across the face with slippery buckets of self-reflection in which Marvin, or the poet's stand in, waxes and whines on how this saps the vitality, makes the soul sink, and essentially turns sleep into a rehearsal for death:


Those hours we haggle,
wondering when the sincerity of sky's blue
will arrive, how come nobody's bothered to
repair the loose latch on the front gate, and
what kinds of eyes melancholy lovers have.

There is enough baloney here to make a hundred Salvation Army sandwiches. And for his sleep, one wonders why she doesn't buy ear plugs and a new mattress.Fragile poets are nothing new to verse and one ought not condemn them outright for their confessions of bad serves and upset equilibriums, but Marvin is neither Eliot nor Plath nor John Berryman , all three of whom could do more with their depressed witness to harsh facts and resulting sets of despair with remarkable self-reflection; the result was an honest poetry of personal exploration, and none of them, I recall, used the facts of poverty or squalor as a pretext to wallow in the kind of makeshift misery Marvin has concocted. It helps us to remember that Samuel Beckett's plays, novels and poems were about those situations that have sapped us of our will to live creatively and makes a continued life of drudgery unthinkable to bear and yet we do, getting up each day to face the same repetitious humiliations not from any courage to stay the course but because, more plainly, less gloriously, much more banally we cannot think of anything more interesting to do with our days. From this Beckett gives us great comedy and creates a language of men that is more animal instinct than discourse; he digs within the sour mood of dread and drudgery and reveals sentences as loud and fragmented and repeated at odd intervals to kill what small spark of truth still rests in us, dormant. Beckett , unlike Marvin, reveals nothing other than antics and absurdity, the rituals and recititations of
characters keeping themselves distracted against a yawning chasm. Marvin can't stop talking about it and her feelings, and this quality, this yakkity yak she provides us does nothing to make you care or make you stay interested in the struggle.

The heavy intent of subject matter makes her lines lead-footed, with some comically awful alliteration.",,malice moves like mice.." is noteworthy not for evoking states of depression and ennui, but rather of old cartoons where the mice come out their hiding places after the lights are out and throw one hell of a party). It's not a good fit at all, and somehow I'm dubious to Marvin's intent with the poem. The message is less about economic injustice than it is Marvin's feelings of powerlessness, which is fine in itself, but powerlessness per se should not result in this kind of static, powerless writing.

Philip Levine's Free Radicals

It would be one thing for Philip Levine to write a comic narrative about his college days and his hanging with nominally radical friends and eccentric cohorts, but you think the novel or the short story is the superior form for what he's trying to do here. His poem,"Our Reds", gets nothing is done that is worth mulling over longer than it takes to send email. This reads like notes and character sketches for longer work where the real writing takes place.

Let us bless the three wild Reds
of our school days. Bless how easily
Gaunt Vallejo would lose control,
the blood rushing to his depleted face
while his mistress in a torn trench coat
stroked his padded shoulders to calm him.
We'll call him Vallejo after the poet
only because he vaulted into speech
in such a headlong rush. (In truth
his name was Slovakian.) We'll call
her Lupino after the film star
because she was more beautiful
in memory than in fact, her cheeks
drawn over fine bones, her hair
tumbling down from under the beret,
hair we loved and called "dirty blond."

This is a not a poem, but a pitch for a movie script that hasn't been written yet; you can nearly hear the index cards sliding one over the other.   

Levine should have rethought his premise--a group of friends bored to death during a college lecture--and may be conceived this as a dialog piece, the sort that William Gaddis would have done in his novel JR, or Elmore Leonard in any one of his choice Detroit crime novels. Fellow Detroiter Levine has the material here, and I could imagine the absurdist four-way dialog between the exasperated professor and precocious radical undergraduates in a cavernous lecture hall on the Wayne State Campus; it needn't be along piece, requiring an ear tuned for human speech, and an eye for the spare, telling detail.

The poem fails because it strives to be a condensed and potent summary, fast and punch like vivid recollection itself, but it winds up being merely crammed. This is too many items for a suitcase this size, an imbalance that negates the intended pleasure this reading was meant to induce. Rushed is the word I would use where others might say "breathless"; Levine's writing here sounds like he's rattling off a schedule of things he wants a receptionist to get done while he's hurrying out of his office, one arm in a coat sleeve. It would seem he was trying his hand at an Albert Goldbarth ramble and rant, without the crucial talent to keep the string interesting to the reader; in Goldbarth's poetry, it is the process and commentary that is the point, not the final argument. Many poets try their hand at this style, and very few are anywhere as interesting as he is. Levine isn't one of them, not in this instance.

It's a sure bet that Levine meant the lecture sequence to be comic, bad as it came off, and the sudden sentimentality in the last stanza is abrupt and unprovoked. The mock-blessing of the names, their deeds, and their personalities as they separated and cast their fates to the wind seems nothing more than a disguised exit sign over a door leading you out of a poem that doesn't work from the first sentence. Ken Kesey has a great short story called "The Day Superman Died", a fictional recreation of his friendship with Jack Cassidy. It's an incredible story, funny, sharp, bouncing with lively writing, spirited conversation and engaging weirdness when, at the end of the story, Kesey goes soft and drifts into a long coda that invokes the names of fifties writers and artists and comes as nothing more than a sorry, nostalgic cry for a return to innocence. Innocence cannot be regained, of course, and is a permanently rich subject for writers to wrestle with, but not at the expense of crucifying their good art for the sake of cheap sob over a brooding beer.

Would that Levine brought Aristotle into play in the poem. Hard to do, yes, but not impossible. Levine's problem is that he tells more than he shows, and the telling isn't that interesting. It has the vague nagging of a droning voice at the end of phone conversation you don't want to have. Mention of philosophical forbearers here--Aristotle, Hegel, et al--are window dressing. Subtle manipulation of their ideas through movement might have made this compelling, but the references just sit there. Like unread books, or unused barbells. The comic element is here, and of course one can make a case that the poem lampoons, or tries to lampoon each generation of would-be radicals and avant-gardists, but the success for this kind of work is in the delivery. Timing is everything, and timing acknowledges and makes use the skewed rhythms of human speech, especially speech that's improvised when there is a disruption the normal give- and- take of comfortable, banal banter. It's Levine's voice that does this piece in for me; his narrator is mirthless and does not seem to understand pacing or a punch line's religious reward if done right. He's not Woody Allen.

V for Vacant

V for Vendetta is being touted as a radical vision of not-inconceivable future, but what we get is an admittedly handsome mixture of 1984 and Zorro, where we witness a caped revolutionary in a steel Guy Fawkes mask slice, dice, pummel and commit demolition crimes against a fascistic British government. The problem is that V has characteristics of both and none of the virtues. The principal problem is the expressionless mask that V (Hugo Weaving) wears throughout the film; better if the character hung back in the shadows in the otherwise agreeable comic noir atmosphere, where the darkness might have lent him some mystery and a suggestion of character. In the plain light, he is impossible to relate to, and you just wish he would be quiet with his nattering puns, vacant alliteration and arch speeches.We are given some hints that V is a survivor of government viral warfare experiments gone horribly wrong, but so much of that is tossed off as back story premise setting constructed ham handily , from a obligation rather than sheer narrative zeal. You don't feel V's searing rage, and for all the speeches made back and forth about security, terrorism and revolutionary impulse, you cannot escape the desire for everyone to get on with it; blow something up, please. Natalie Portman is amazing in this otherwise talky, inconsistently motivated adventure--she manages to read the prolix Wachowski Brothers script (adapted from Alan Moore's graphic novel) with impressive conviction; you await her to do great things with great scripts that have yet to come her way.

Match Point , directed by Woody Allen

I happened to get a look at Woody Allen's recent and much praised film Match Point and thought it quite a bit a less than what it was supposed to be. It's at tale of conniving treachery and bad faith, along the lines of Allen's masterfully layered Crimes and Misdemeanors, although this new one is sparser, less resonant. Without giving out too much information, it deals with the doings of an emerging British tennis super star(Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who quits the game in order to become a tennis pro at a London health spa; with his good looks and surface charm, he soons finds his way into the good graces of a rich industrialist's family and becomes engaged to his daughter while nearly simultaneously having an affair with a brash American actress(Scralett Johannson). A note here, shorter than it ought to be, is that the actors and their performances are generally superb, but this is more a tribute to their professionalism than any great dialogue or gestural moments provdided by Allen's script. Always a determinist more interested in revealing the baser instincts that continually triumpth over protests of virtues, Allen's world view sometimes hits dead spots, and depth of character here isn't
this film's strongest asset. They are clusters of tics and twitches and flat affect,
and when emotions do come to a pitch, it sounds more like whining, Woody Allen kvetching with upperclass London accents.

The convolutions our tennis playing protagonist goes through in order to preserve both his houses gets mildly comic, and leads to an unavoidable tragic complication by the film's end, and it plays well once the final nuances are served, but I never got beyond the filling that I was waiting through a shaggy dog story waiting for the punchline to arrive, with or without laughs.

Here, you mutter "oh wow", admire director and writer Allen for the efficiency of his work and marvel at the care with which he shot London, after which the film leaves you with virtually no memorable scenes. It is dry as kindling, and very much a formal excercise. It has the efficiency of a well run bus line, but you wonder if this kind of movie Woody Allen is destined to make from this day forward.

Read "Ask The Dust"

The film version of John Fante's classic Los Angeles novel Ask the Dust is due to be released in the next week, and my advice for anyone interested in the story line is to buy the novel and read the book prior to seeing the film. The film version bodes well, despite the presence of the egregious rude boy Colin Farrell in the role of Arturo Bandini, the young , self-absorbed writer who is appealingly complex in his crazed vacillations between global egomania and desperate self-loathing. Robert Towne, the writer behind Roman Polanski's glorious Chinatown, writes and directs this effort, and has demonstrated an ability to convey LA in the thirties. But in the event that the movie is a stinker, you should arm yourself by reading Fante's novel; hard boiled, lyric, skewed and comic, this is a coming of age story that takes believable twists and turns. The story is of a very human scale, and the seeming bipolar rages of young Arturo are moving and nuanced. He is a very flawed and complex character, and he stands as a significant creation the canon of American literature. Everyone who cares about a good story and great writing should experience Bandini on the page, lest the film version arrive flat line and motionless.

Kerouac is a Dead Beat

It was during a bloody argument about merits of Jack Kerouac's writing when the woman I was arguing with,a twentyfive year old who planned to be a penniless , winedrinking mooch like her hero Jack told me
You know Ted, your very extreme opinion of him stinks of jealousy.


I have no reason to be jealous of a man who drank himself to death before the age of fifty while living with his mother. It is impossible to be jealous of a man who wrote so poorly. The truth is that after spending nearly
twenty years trying to accommodate Kerouac's work with by reading many of his books and a good many biographies and secondary sources about he and his fellow beats, I admitted to my innermost self that my gut instinct was right, Jack wasn't a good writer and that his continued popularity has more to do with a cultist hype that surrounds the work and persona of Ayn Rand; there's an invested interest in making sure that the author is always spoken of in the most regaling terms.

Others like me, cursed with literature degrees, broad readings and an appreciation of craft in the service of real inspiration, regale him far less, finding his writings charmless, undercooked, ill-prepared, all sizzle and no steak. Those willing to say that Kerouac's oeuvre was wholesale bullshit are in the minority,
as the Jack Kerouac Industry shows no sign of slowing down. Every smoke stack is fired up, and what might have been clear skies are blackened
all the more with his loopy circumlocutions.

Crouch Mummifies Coltrane and Davis

I came across Stanley Crouch's ten or so years ago when his collection of essays "Notes of a Hanging Judge" came out, and thought he had a wonderful fluidity as a writer. It was something else to see him link a number of subjects together and to extol the virtues of sustaining a black intellectual class, but what I enjoyed was his bomb throwing. He wasn't shy at attacking thug-rap, and certainly not reticent to announce that he thought the caliber of work being done by Cornell West or Henry Louis Gates was the least amount of scholarship for the highest paycheck. Crouch, though, is not Adorno, and soon enough his outrage becomes boilerplate nay saying. You know his remarks on a given subject before he even opens his mouth, and this article on Coltrane is typical of his column work; advance praise for early work, decry the waste, and grumble in depressed terms that the race is going to hell in a handbag because it walks away from its best cultural habits and traditions. Lately, America’s favorite conservative black bomb-thrower has been writing about jazz for Slate, most recently tucking John Coltrane and Miles Davis under his values-pronged umbrella. The problem with assessing Coltrane's career is the fact of his early death; pressed for time, he experimented relentlessly and furiously with his material, attacking it in performance from differing angles. The amount of studio work his band released during his brief life is astounding, and daunting to the novitiate. All told, the saxophonist's headlong dive into freer structures, more open-ended improvisations, more atonal and intense harmonics, would seem natural, and inevitable investigation for a man he was likely aware that he was playing music on borrowed time. It's a mistake to consider this late experimentation as a jump into the "abyss" since Crouch uses it as a way to close his discussion and wax poetic on the days when JC could swing like the rest of them.

I like a good amount of the late work and regard something like A Love Supreme to be on the greatest jazz pieces ever set to tape; it's an emotional blow out that no one has equaled since, and I've no problem placing this with other 20th century music, from Ives through Berg through Zappa and Cage, where stridency was a virtue and another kind of pleasure. So now we ask ourselves the questions we pose as well when considering Parker or Hendrix; what would the musicians have come up with if they'd lived ten or twenty years longer? There's never a satisfying answer, although it would seem to me that Coltrane would have reined in the screams and the skronk and concentrated on composition, finding still newer ways to expand beyond bebop's formalist rigour. My last guess would be that one would have to consider him, had he lived, to have grown beyond the comfortable limits of jazz as a definition and blazed a trail that would lead to a different kind of international music. My principle beef with Crouch is that he speaks of Coltrane's experimentation with free jazz structures and atonality as a total tragedy, and puts the period right there as if his "outside" work were a final, irreversible ruination and doom. I don't suppose I should be surprised at such a confidently Spenglarian view from the Bill Bennett of jazz, but it is goading that he sees the final work as an end, not wondering at all what might have evolved from all this restless experimentation. I think Coltrane would have merged with other musical cultures and gone on to create a new, international musical language. As such, I cherish all of 'Trane's phases and wonder how he might have added to an already crowded legacy of genius.

Crouch's approach to black history and culture has been to invest much of the same narrow argument in the way he talks about black artists--writers, musicians, composers, actors, educators. Like Wynton Marsalis, he will insist that the best of the culture contains the living example of virtues younger generations of blacks can learn from and are at risk of losing sight of. Needless to say, he is not a fan of hip-hop culture nor much else that post-50’s black musicians have done. He and Bennett are monotonous explicators on art and culture; neither seem as though they derive much pleasure from the things they write about, though one may observe that Crouch enjoys eating and Bennett is not above a gentlemanly bet, or many of them, as the moment moves him, Crouch obviously prefers music from an older, done daily, and that's fine, but that is a matter of taste, which he will bring forth as moral righteousness. He will tailor his discussions of Coltrane, Ellington, and Billie Holiday with generous hypotheses as to how the spirit of their work is a high essence of human virtue from which audiences and generations to come can learn civics lessons from. Crouch hangs back on the religiosity, but his agenda is clearly to form an African American canon that adheres to a culturally and politically conservative line, just as Bennett seeks to counteract and remedy, as he sees it, the preponderance of left-tilted discourses that view literature as a form of progressive social criticism. Lost on both of them is the beauty of art; they do not address the core issue as to why we make or are attracted to art; it makes us feel good. 

It's more a matter of a tendency that Crouch shares with Bennett, attempting to demonstrate what is creative, brilliant and influential in black American culture (in itself a worthwhile mission) and using this as evidence of morally conservative, "values-based" tradition that has always been there. It is, of course, foolish to hypothesize that there's a monolithic political consensus among black Americans and that they are no less diverse in views and experience than any other population group, but Crouch's agenda insists that who he writes about be treated as moral philosophers, and not artists, a habit that overlooks far too much. This is the reductionist tendency Crouch shares with Bennett.

I'm less inclined to expect a commentator to be expert in both older and newer forms, only that they are genuinely interested in developments, find something interesting to talk about, and find a convincing, hopefully, compelling way to link past and present trends. Crouch does not do this, by Eric Michael Dyson does rather brilliantly, even though he does tend to accelerate his way through his reference points--bebop, postmodern indeterminacy, hip-hip self-definition, outsider traditions--at speeds that hinder ready comprehension. Robert Christgau finds something to talk about with each new form that comes at him. The task of the critic is one that requires a personality that refuses to stay stuck in a particular area of expertise and regards their knowledge and assertions as views under constant construction. I could do without Christgau's star system and would prefer if he wrote more extended essays, but at least it is an attempt to keep abreast of the bands and artist that come his way. I even borrowed (read stole) the method when I had a record review column in my college paper; it was an efficient way of disposing of ten albums in a single piece, sending off tear-sheets to record promoters so they'd have something to show their higher-ups, and so continue my flow of albums. 

Of course, I sold the albums for beer and burger money, and there's not a record reviewer who was working then or now that doesn't do something similar with their excess swag. What I like about him is that he's been writing reviews since the late sixties for this magazine or that, and wasn't afraid to poke around, investigate and examine the margins of pop and rock music. As is, his discussions are more cogent and, dare I say, perceptive than those of his fellow Pantheon critic Greil Marcus, who approaches music not as humanly formed aesthetic expressions that any number of interested listeners may approach and discuss in useful ways, but rather as sacred texts, scrolls written in a dead language that only he can extract articulate wisdom from. For all his hermeneutic maneuvering, however, Marcus is himself barely coherent, and one is left with such books as "Lipstick Traces", a purported secret history of the 20th century where the efforts of Elvis Presley, Guy Debord, The Sex Pistols, Walter Benjamin and Cabaret Voltaire are all discussed in long born pauses and rolling cadences. Some of the writing Marcus does is beautiful as prose, but the point one awaits is not delivered. Christgau at least makes good on any thesis he advances by at least coming to a point, which makes his kind of wide referenced tastes an interesting methodology. 

I can't fault Stanley Crouch for his assessment of Miles Davis's style and accomplishments during the fifties and early sixties, but this critic rather conveniently avoids the reason for the trumpeter's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which was the generation-spanning innovation, experimentation and refusal to look back, all of which influenced music outside and beyond the tidy definitions of jazz Crouch prefers. It's ironic that Crouch continues to write eulogies for great jazz musicians, giving eloquent voice to what he finds beautiful, holding in reserve the boilerplate regret that his artist of the week didn't remain faithful to a perceived moment of true voice. Crouch likes to write as if these artists have personally betrayed him, by either taking on new avenues or dying too young, and this allows him to live in a long-ago country of old men.

Obviously, he sees history as a series of self-contained compartments, each separate from one another with no fluidity between eras, no cross-fertilization of ideas between generations. While Crouch is obsessed with the days when black artists were emerging from the margins and appearing as matinee idols as well as dignified artists, what Miles Davis continued and improved on wasn't the legacy of Charlie Parker nor Clifford Brown, but rather of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, mixing and matching differing cultural approaches to electronics and coming up with sounds that hadn't yet graced the bandstand. Stance and persona matter less than Crouch gives it credit for; music accomplishment is everything, and the directions Davis made music at large, and not just jazz, turn to is a greater legacy than the nostalgically waxed moments Crouch will put forth.