Thursday, January 28, 2010

J.D.SALINGER IS DEAD



Not many authors have one or two of their books become a voluntary right of passage among the moody and quixotic generations of teens and young adults, but J.D.Salinger was such a writer, the author of  Catcher in the Rye, the singular book about growing up while dissatisfied. Holden Caufield, the book's narrator protagonist , is a moody youth , prematurely cynical, impatient with the ways of adults and their habits and institutions . The book has been discussed, analysed , inspected and interpreted over the decades that one wonders whether it can still be read as a fresh experience, and I would say yes, yes. Caufield is cynical with a acute bullshit detector, but he is not wise beyond his years; Salinger's particular gift was for to inhabit the skin of a young man masking his confusion with a collection of fiercely protected mannerisms and borrowed attitudes. He was, though, coming to the moment when more was revealed and his life was transformed, and his perspective altered far beyond his tight little world made visible. Attitude, awkwardness, good humor laced with a handily sense of melancholy, it was the work of a master regarding the slogging progress toward an adult sensibility.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Michelangelo's complaint

My brush,
above me all the time, dribbles paint
so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!


Michelangelo was a sculptor and a poet, and Robert Pinsky has posted a poem of his regarding the aches and pains he experienced as he undertook the challenge of painting the Sistine Chapel.The sonnet is less interesting as poetry than it is a document of how Michelangelo felt about his labor over the commission he didn't want, the painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. No offense to Gail Mazur's translations, but the fleshy descriptions that inform us of what appendages and what internal organs ache likely read better in the Master's original Italian, the advantage of the original tongue being that one could better ear the innate musicality of the nouns and their near rhymes. This seems just a tad strained, and reads as though Mazur had to create phrases of her own when some word clusters couldn't be clearly conveyed into English. This raises the question as to how much of Michelangelo we were actually reading. Or perhaps I'm just tone deaf to the whole matter. What do believe, though, is that we are getting an accurate reading of the great artist's pains and frustrations; what is flat as poetry is fascinating as document. This is a another cranky, self-lampooning poem from a genius who finds that possessing over-sized talent can be a large cross to bear, being, in this case, a great physical pain. I did enjoy the way in which Michelangelo described the way his body has been twisted and reconfigured in the pursuit of filling up an unlikely surface ; the canvas, as it were, and the artist's body , were in the least likely of locations. The poem is the venting of a man who angry with the moral and social authority of the Pope who is preventing him from working in what he feels is his true medium, sculpture; painting is a curse that visits a stream of punishments upon. It's as if an interloper is being punished :

My haunches are grinding into my guts,
my poor ass strains to work as a counterweight,
every gesture I make is blind and aimless.
My skin hangs loose below me, my spine's
all knotted from folding over itself.
I'm bent taut as a Syrian bow.


There's not the remotest suggestion of joy in this passage. Rather than being in the moment with the object he's fashioning, gather inspiration as he goes along and reaching a point where mere technical mastery comes to the service of actual genius, what is described here is someone trying to remember formalities of something he wasn't comfortable doing, guessing around the edges of the tableau as to where colors and their textures out to go. He is "blind and aimless" , unable to see the work in whole, unable to envision it as finished, save for scaled down drawings outlining the work in progress. Interestingly, this isn't the voice of the supremely confident artist we read about, but rather the self-denigrating venting of a trainee in a new job. The feeling of doing this job wrong comes across as a palpable fatalism.The poem that surpasses mere complaint, it reveals the acute pain that accompanies the unwanted commission. But for all the discomfort and twisting and bending and otherwise unnatural distensions and compressions his body must absorb during the work, a clenched teeth determination comes across; as much as I feel pain and degradation, as great as this ceiling will be. We've come to admire the spectacle of the ceiling, the detail, the ingenious solutions to problems that arose, but for the artist it seems merely something to be endured, gotten over with. The ceiling appeared masterful as if composed from a resentment; Michelangelo sounds as if he regards this as mere professionalism.


My painting is dead.
Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honor.
I am not in the right place—I am not a painter.
The sculptor feels abused, made to perform an unnatural function for a client whom he couldn't refuse. His body and his art were prostituted in the service of another man's egomania, and so he calls for his honor to be defended. He is not a painter, he assures us, and the irony of it all is that it is the painting on the Sistine Chapel for which he best known. Likely he would've loathed the recognition and seethe mightily that the masses who adore the painting are fools and simpletons.He was not a painter. Frank O'Hara wasn't a painter either. But he was an excellent poet.
***
A discussion at Slate's Poems Fray forum, where this post originally appeared.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

The Faith of Graffiti: a brief exchange


I've been re-reading Norman Mailer's "The Faith of Graffiti" , and it seems astounding Mailer grasped a street aesthetic born of marginalized , nonwhite urban youth. This is an important essay I suspect Eric Michael Dyson or Cornell West would come to admire. Mailer is susceptible to the charges of depicting these artists as noble savages, but he does make the connections between the impulse to transform the environment by adding a bit of one's personality upon it with the shattered reconstructions of Picasso's vision. Nice polemic, this. What impresses me is that he refined the existential-criminal-at-the-margins tact he controversially asserted in his essay "The White Negro", backing away from the idea that violence could direct one to knew kinds of perception and knowledge, and emphasized an aesthetic response to a crushing , systematized oppression. Living long enough ,I suppose, made Mailer aware of strong trend in urban style that added value to circumstances and individual growth that didn't involve a fist, a gun or a knife.


BARRY ALFONSO:Some would argue, of course, that graffiti IS a form of violence against society: specifically, the aggressive territorial pissing of one segment of the population upon the sense of order of another segment. This is less an act of sticking it to The Man than dominating the sensibilities of the meeker, more sedate urban population, a transgressive act akin to screaming into the face of someone who will not (or cannot) raise their voice. It’s hard to see this as heroic, and I suspect that the artistic component – especially when we are talking about that lovely habit called “tagging” – is of less importance here than the sheer thrill of breaking the rules. I think even Mailer would agree that the upholding of SOME kind of rules is the only way to improve American society, particularly in the face of the corporate lawbreaking and governmental malfeasance he so often condemned. It may not be Mailer’s job to iron out the contradiction in this thought. But suppose a team of grafittitistas broke into his home and spray painted their art all over his face? This might prove instructive to his family and friends to see. It might even be a blow against some sort of oppression. But I don’t think Norman would’ve liked it very much.



Mailer would argue that modern architecture and the corporate power it represent is violence againsts them and their right to exist, and that graffiti is an aesthetic response to an economic reality that wants nothing to with individuals or their dreams or their latent talents. It creates an intimate relationship with the surroundings that other wise seem designed to urge one to end their lives anonymously. Mailer, though, was talking about a particular quality of prolific taggers , "writers" as they called themselves, and rather rightly discussed them that they were artists no less than the gallery variety. Without patrons, easels, formal training, their walls of the city became their canvas--in those canyons, in those tunnels, on those billboards, all things that hover over them and diminish them in stature, there is an opportunity to declare "I Exist".
-----------------
(Barry Alfonso, writer, critic, and storyteller and long time friend, weighs in):


BARRY ALFONSO:If this was indeed Mailer’s position, then it is the sort of elitist pseudo-primitivism that win followers for George Wallace, Glenn Beck and other champions of populist fascism. To say it plain, ordinary working folks think that scribbling your name all over the city they have to live and work in is just a form of childish eye pollution committed by bums who have nothing better to do. Apparently, Mailer would have us think that the proper way to protest urban ugliness is to make things MORE ugly, which is akin to making satirizing executions by chopping people’s heads off. (Any allusions made to Picasso is a red herring, with two eyes on the same side of the fish head.) It further appears that for all his later maturity of outlook Mailer never dropped his sweaty-palmed worship of anarchy that he glorified in “The White Negro.” Mailer the Liberal would cringe at the thought, but the tagger is just an Ayn Rand hero with a spray can and without the discipline, a rampant ego who celebrates nothing more his need to be noticed. Such activities give birth to firing squads.


The irony of it all, I guess, is that Mailer can be said to tread on the Noble Savage sentiment, but what he asserts in both "White Negro" and "The Faith of Graffiti" is there is a need, nay, a requirement for self-definition among those who are denied the means to do so for reasons of race, gender, economics, and that the form these taggers have taken is a way of making something that resonates. What he argues , essentially, is that the impulse, inspiration and discipline of committing yourself to unsullied artistic expression is the same , whether it happens to be in European salons, SoHo Art Galleries, Museum Walls, or on the side of a Brooklyn water tower; he rejects art as the domain of the white culture the final aim of which is a fat commission and corporate sponsorship and college courses and brings it again to something that is human in it's dimension. As it regards black American culture, the likes of Amiri Baraka, Cornell West and Eric Michael Dyson would find quite a bit to agree with about Mailer's treatise. Urban culture is now the stuff of dissertations, has been codified as an aesthetic with it's own critical parlance, and is now a legitimate part of the larger cultural landscape of America, and Graffiti, like it or not, is an essential element of this mid 20th century development. Mailer was the first one to write seriously , on his own terms , about this. One can argue with Mailer's tone, his arch style and his interest in neo-primitivism, but I think his interest in the young men he interviewed and spent weeks with as a writer was honest and his ideas about their work were sincere. In a forward to the book, he reveals that the title was given to him by an artist who was seriously injured from a steep fall that happened when he was tagging a structure from on high. He was talking about having faith in something, an ideal, that motivated you beyond your limits. I can only paraphrase, but it came down to him telling Mailer that the name of the book that would come out of this would be "The Faith of Graffiti".

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Terry Gilliam Gets it Right


I liked the Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, although Terry Gilliam is far from my favorite director; for all his general flash and opulent imagery, he cannot tell a story, really, and he likes to crowd the frame. His movies tend be like a shut-in's apartment, cluttered with piles of undifferentiated stuff.Many appreciate his willingness to toss in everybit of historical aracana into his heaping constructions of detail, but this the very thing that stops me, nearly every moment , from appreciating the absurdity he purports to advance. Sticking through the impressive messes that are Brazil or Baron Van Munchhausen aren't without their rewards, but Gilliam's desire to fill each inch of his frames with his patisches is ,to use the former analogy, like making a nervous path through so much precariously balanced deitritus in order to get to the kitchen, or the bathroom. Simply stated, you get impatient for the payoff, if not the point. Heath Ledger's death, though, had an upside side, since it seemed to force Gilliam to stream line his storyline and create a structure justifying the additions of Jude Law, Johnny Depp and Collin Farrell to replace the sadly departed Ledger. Without giving too much away, it works more often than not. And, as usual, there is plenty of cool imagery to wrap your senses in.

I equate clutter with flash, and it's the case that Gilliam really does not allow us much time in his films to allow his designs to register or resonate. It's the kind of flash one means when they discuss carnival game decoration--lots of cheap prizes dressing up a joint (I am an ex-carnie, after all) meant to attract attention, not intelligence. I... See More often wished there was less ebullience and more discretion in his designs; his best visual ideas goto waste. In "Imaginarium", they do not, as the tragedy with Ledger forced Gilliam to limit his range and so lend his story a logic that made sense in the terms of the fantasy he was operating within; he paid attention to his idea and didn't overshoot it.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Last Resort

A poem from Rafael Campo lights up the current issue of slate, "Resort" finds a son watching the aged father sun himself while on holiday, staring at a visage that is already wonderful, and yet with a fixity that causes one to think he may be peering beyond the veneer of appearance. One wonders as well if his mind, at this stage of life, is acting as an editor of and is leeching meaning and associations from the activity that happens the old man's eyes . In some ironic way there seems to be a serenity that one wishes for when they get older, an acceptance that life will become an even playing field and that wisdom will inform the brain and the heart to remain calm, to breathe deep, and appreciate the moment one is ; the fear is that acceptance has nothing to do with the calm, the unnerving serenity, as that applies an application of will. It is, rather, age, a fading memory, the world becoming something like a Wallace Stevens terrain, pure , perfect shapes and arrangements, with the father being only one element an assortment of other things.


No one
is poor. Like lions caged too long, the waves
loll lazily along the beach. He stares
out at the bright horizon, lost in thought.
I wonder if his memories might hurt.
Tonight, beneath a moon as clear and plain
as need, we'll drink banana daiquiris.
He'll ask the mariachi band to play
a Cuban song, which they'll almost get right.
But in the morning, he must realize,
we'll still awaken here. Same sun, same sea:
the simulation, if more dream than real,
is close enough...



The son wonders what his father is thinking about and wonders if the quiet state is either a profound contemplation of things , or the consequence of lack of thought. Campo doesn't belabor the point or lard up this lyric with a routine confession or lacerating self-examination, but achieves instead a nearly perfect three way balance between a beautiful location, a qualified projection of another's thoughts, and the narrator's own undecidedness about his father's state of mind and comfort; it's a skillfully arranged scenario where a complex interaction of detail and perception are conveyed in language that presents the dueling impressions of exterior beauty and psychic restlessness.

Beyond that, of course, is the perennial mind/body split, voiced in terms of whether a person of diminished capacity is getting the most for their money as they are situated in a beautiful clime, during a perfect day. Nature, though, cares nothing of our aesthetic situation, in fact does not think at all and merely exists as ceaseless churning process, a notion that comes back to us at the end of our contemplation that despite our desires that our mothers, fathers, sons and daughters and, perhaps ourselves, live forever, in memory if not monument, we are mortal and part of the natural process we want to tame with vacation and leisure time, and that the clock is always running out.


The birds-of-paradise,
though mute and flightless, still preen in the breeze.
And even as the clock runs out for all of us, the perfect arrangements of the Wallace Stevens landscape remains, and assortment of objects and natural things gathered in a space as perfected forms, each placed where roots might grow or dust may gather, silent, unmoving, in place, balancing a frame so it does not topple over. There is the old distinction between phenomena, those things of the world that are perceived through the senses, and noumenon , things that independent of the senses , things in-and-of-themsleves. The first would describe that which man can know, an environment he can define and outline in terms of his own senses and biography, and the second , those things that are knowable only to God. I don't know how religious Wallace Stevens might have been, but he loved being in the second terrain, among those objects that are seen from a point of view that is free of the inevitable subjective filters , a dimension where what we think or what we've experienced matters not at all and the forms are just forms, beautiful in their purity, unsullied by experience.
The son, the old man, the resort, the birds-of-paradise are elements to some design that is unrevealed. Campo, I think, could be making the suggestion that the aesthetic rigor to isolate these scenes from autobiographically inclined interpretation is part of an attempt to grasp the larger mysteries of existence we would otherwise go to religion or philosophy for. Life, whatever it's means, goes on. The beauty that one had beheld with their senses will not vanish once one has departed their flesh; the beautiful things remain, other sensibilities will argue their qualities. And when they are gone, birds-of-paradise and like things will still preen in the wind.The point seems that the frame remains, nature is constant and self correcting , that our imaginative alignments of what actually exists beyond our senses go with us when we go

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

CONAN O'BRIEN IS LAME!

NBC seems to be the F Troop of television networks, first allowing a prize like David Letterman to profitably embed himself over at CBS, and now all but destroying the luster that was formerly the Tonight Show with the contretemps regarding Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien. Of the two unfunniest comedian-talk hosts in history, the Peacock Network gets to keep the schmoozing Lantern of Obvious Punchlines Leno, while having to pay O'Brien a cool forty million dollars to take a hike. That's not a bad payday for someone who never improved his delivery, timing or punchlines in the decade plus he hosted Late Night; there was an unsettling, not endearing nervousness about the man's manner (as opposed to style) in front of an audience, and he always made think of the one funny friend you have who thinks he can be a comedian. Yes, you know the punchline, the night your friend signs up at local comedy club amateur night, he breaks out in flop sweat, his topics conflate with one another like unruly schools of fish, his tongue seems to swell, his twitchy delivery is one click away from a sobbing breakdown.

At his best, he seemed like he was rehearsing his ad libs in front of the bathroom mirror; at his worst he looked painfully ill-at-ease, often times casting a sidelong glance that made him appear like a rushing pedestrian trying to catch his profile in a store window. I would say good riddance, of course, but it's only a matter of time before Conan O'Brien sets up shot on another outlet, Fox most likely, and the likes of us looking for something to gaze upon while sleep descends on not quickly enough will have to rush past this over paid stiff's limp humor. To make matters less appealing, we'll have to pass the crusty walls of Lenoland on the way to catch Letterman's usually sprite monologue. One may avoid the whole ordeal, to be sure,by going to bed early; sleep has never seemed more attractive.