What and Why is Hip?

Greil Marcus is obsessed with secret histories as manifested in inchoate habits seeking to amuse and distract themselves. His decades-worth of rants, ruminations, and reiterations wherein he tried to wed his foremost concern with rock and roll as an inevitable countercultural force that galvanized various energies that would, finally, transform the world in the same Hegelian way with the larger aims of politics and social theory, we are met with decidedly mixed results; lots of insight, extended bits of associative brilliance that only a word-drunk can manage, but a thesis, as an oral examination of what is happening in our world typified by art, music, demonstrations, technological upheaval, the excellent author falls short. Lipstick Traces, of all his work, is the best example of what he does. I would recommend it to the reader who is interested in reading the poetic extrapolations of a writer who thinks that he's found something significant in the rock and pop album he bought --things as substantial as the books he read in college--who cannot, or will not, stop microscopically examining the examples he brings up and construct a theory on which his metaphors can rest. Marcus seems to assume that the idea is implicit in the instances he pulls from the dustbin, but he makes the mistake of forgetting that he is supposed to be writing criticism, not poetry. Implicit is the idea that there are discrete but discoverable bits of spontaneous resistance in the arts to the dominant ideologies that control the money, the armies and navies, the cops, that are leading civilization to blind-sided destruction; that it is human nature to reinvent the world informs and concept that attempts to break an enforced world view. Marcus links Cabaret Voltaire, Dada, Rock and Roll, French Cinema, and, of course, Situation-ism into this scheme, but he never makes his case convincing beyond the apparent need for him to believe it himself. It seems a beautifully rendered bit of what might have been.

Marcus might have made his task simpler if he simply asked: "what is hip?" John Leland did that with better results. John Leland's Hip: The History is the sort of book I like to read on the bus, the portentous social study of an eternal essence that makes the reader of the book appears, well, Hip. This is the perfect book for the pop culture obsessive who wonders, indeed worries, and frets over the issue as to whether white musicians can become authentic blues musicians or whether Caucasian jazz musicians have added anything of value to the jazz canon besides gimmick. 

What we have with Hip is what Greil Marcus has been attempting to do for decades, which is write a coherent narrative of the margins of American culture, descendants of slaves and the children of immigrant parents, coalesced in ways in which each other's style and manner intermingled even if the respective races did not. The grace moment in history is that some beautiful things emerged from all this borrowing, posturing, and tension, the jazz, rock and roll, and a genuine American literary vernacular; the tragedy is that it took generations of racism and violence to produce the historical conditions for these vital arts to emerge. The question of Hip furnishes the theme that brings Leland's sources together--what appears is the story of two races that cannot live together and cannot be apart. 

Leland, a reporter for the New York Times, has done his research and brings together the regular doses of cultural anthropology, literature, and, of course, music to bear on this sweeping, if the unsettled account as to what "hip" is and how it appears to have developed over time. Most importantly, he concentrates on the lopsided relationship between black and white, each group borrowing each other's culture and suiting them for their individual needs; in the case of black Americans, rising from slavery as free people in a racist environment, Hip was an ironic manner, a mode of regarding their existence on the offbeat, a way to keep the put upon psyche within a measure of equilibrium. For the younger white hipsters, in love with black music and style, it was an attempt to gain knowledge, authenticity, and personal legitimacy through a source that was Other than what a generation felt was their over-privileged and pampered class. Leland's range is admirable and does a remarkable job of advancing his thesis--that is the framework of what we consider. The Hip is a way in which both races eye each other warily--and is sensitive to the fact that for all the attempts of white artists and their followers to cultivate their own sound style from their black influences, the white hipsters are never far from blackface minstrelsy. For all the appropriation, experimentation, and various perversions of black art that have emerged over the decades, there are only a few men and women who've attained the stature of their African American heroes, people who, themselves, were the few among the many. 

It would seem that an especially troublesome tract from the recently belated Norman Mailer's writings will be his essay The White Negro, published in Dissent in 1957 and later included in his landmark 1959 collection Advertisements for Myself. In a rough paraphrase, Mailer argues that whites need to emulate some of the jazz-inflected styles of black Americans, whom, he said, had developed an attitude, a lived philosophy in the face of the violence they face daily solely because they are black. Mailer placed a good amount of hope that the Beats might evolve in the Caucasian mind. Authenticity,a self rooted in primal reality and not lodged in a language-locked template was the goal. Mailer's assertions, to be sure, came under attack, not the least of the asides being that he was taking something of an exotic and racist view of the lives of black people. The misgivings are understandable.

Some of what Mailer said in the essay was embraced by some in the black community. Eldridge Cleaver, another man, obsessed with the metaphysics of personal violence as a response against Institutional violence, cited him favorably in his book Soul on Ice; Cleaver, though, was doubtlessly trying to rationalize the rapes he was convicted of as being political acts rather than demonstrations of pathology or, further, that the pathology itself was a result to being oppressed. It's a slippery slope, as Mailer realized. Horrible as it was, Mailer never used his stabbing of his wife Adele as an example of How-To-Be-A-White-Negro; his treatment of violence in later books was more measured, weary. All the same, the ethos of hip-hop and rap culture endorses Mailer's assertion that black Americans have authenticity and knowledge that the white community cannot have because of the fact that they live with an intimate, daily, as-is knowledge of violence as something that saturates their existence, that it might be visited upon them at any instance merely because of the color of their skin; many rappers, in principle, might agree with Mailer as well that the edgy style of hip hop is a result of their being forced to exist at the margins of the culture. Mailer writes that a significant reason that black American culture developed the way it did was in response to the racist violence that might befall them at any moment on any day. This was knowledge of violence whites did not and could not know. Mailer argued and postulated further that the cultivation of the style he wrote about, complete with its violent elements, was a canny response to the brutality that faced them. Mailer thought that whites ought to emulate the style of black culture to live more "authentically"; in either case, what Mailer talks about in the essay is that one is confronted with having to make a conscious choice in how one confronts stultifying conformity and Statist oppression. He does not argue for anything "intrinsic" in human beings and argues through the essay that one must deal with the consequences of their action.  What he saw in the urban black culture of the time was a particularly acute style and manner that could accommodate and hone the violent impulse and use the energy to a more creative purpose. This presents all sorts of problems for intellectuals and gullible whites (and blacks) attracted by the flashy density of Mailer's writing. Still, it should be noted as well that Mailer modified his pronouncements. Mailer, believe it or not, matured.Mailer, I think, though he had found a magic bullet of sorts with black style and how a younger, urban youth had adopted it and used it as a means to achieve a truthful existence in a violent world without the need of pure abstraction. 

Should poems be beautiful?

I like ugly, imperfect, ambiguous art, especially poems, but I also love form, elegance, an ordered pairing of opposing things that once, brought together, gives us a sublime thing indeed. What gets to me is a poetry that gets across what the poet attempts with a mastery of techniques that are true to themselves, not an ideology.Beauty is something that is limitlessly subjective, and as much as a protracted discussion about what constitutes a beautiful object can be, I'm inclined to think that poetry ought to be interesting on its terms, the best effort a poet and his or her craft can create with their talent and personal inclinations. The problem with insisting that a poem should be "beautiful" according to a standard imposes limits on what the poet can do with a work and, in effect, implicitly dictates that a work adhere to requirements that are ill-suited for an emotion, an idea, an event, an experience that would motivate a writer to compose some lines.

The beauty of the best poems I read comes less from their adherence to formalized structures and strategies as it does from those elements that seem to break away from the phrase-making one expects and combine with a writer's honed instincts for developing a rhetoric that allows a poem to stop you for a moment, ponder the phrase, parse the image, appreciate the shifts in tone and sound as layers are added, and appreciate the unexpected places where the stanzas stop, where they jump to, where they land. These are elements achievable in any number of ways. I care less for the aesthetic choice a poet selects from the outset than I do for the results he or she gets when they're finished with work and judge it ready for a reader's appreciation and response. The validity of any idea is in how it works. Henry James said that, in better prose.











"Interesting" might be a mild word, but I used it because I think it encompasses more things for discussion than whether one goes by whether a poem is "beautiful" or not; beauty, I think, is a banal consideration since it funnels one's concentration on the surface qualities of a work. You can discuss only so much about the heroic efforts of writers who desire to make their experiences--or the experiences they would like to have had--stand out because they've mustered up a High Rhetoric and a line of striking, fussed-over images. Beauty, more often than not in my readings, comes down to how well the world is made to harmonize in all its shades, hues, and tonalities, the conversion of notions into ideal types; what makes a poem interesting, the elements that bridge the gaps between experience, a philosophical position and the word choice which produce, in turn, that effect, the irony, the unexpected perception, gets glossed over. Interesting poems for me are those that get at the exactness of particular states of mind, shifts in personality, dissonant situations that are uncomfortably linked, and an understanding of what makes these written expressions fascinating makes for a fuller discussion, or debate, as it were. Beauty, for me, is a vague and useless term when applied on such a broad scale--as I mentioned before it's more compelling to discuss how successfully you think a poet is getting across those inexpressible things in terms of the unforgettable.

Too much of the time "beauty" represents a conservative, repressive and reductionist set of conditions that, at their essence, seek to contain whatever socially provocative or critical aspects a work of art, a poem, in this case, might contain and which could be delivered to a readership. Herbert Marcuse saw "beauty" as having become bankrupt a term in the late global capitalist formations after World War 2, and argued in his book "The Aesthetic Dimension" that the role of art is solely to produce joy, that state which comes from a liberated, enlightened condition, and that society's obligation to the artists was to leave them alone. I would agree with him, since what he wanted was a population that could uncover the wit and wisdom of a piece (in a manner of speaking) by considering the particulars artist's obligation is to be truthful to their gift, their talent, and to apply it fully so that the particular sorts of truth they're capable of sensing and sussing out from the dissonant happenstances that, presumably, are not readily gotten by those of us who go to work, have families, struggle with daily things rather than ponder the big questions.

This is Marcuse's point, in that he believes, quite beyond any political or philosophical predisposition regarding the default job and obligation of being an artist, that they are definitely the antennae of the race, that their senses are enhanced by their being poets, novelists, painters, architects and have the ability to make us aware of nuances and intrigues, truths usually not told nor considered. I would agree with Marcuse that the culture would benefit far greater from the work these folks undertook if the rest us changed the conversation about whether the poems, the paintings, the books , the buildings created by these folks adhere to a shackling set of imperatives and instead considered the work on its own terms--what is that the poem, for example, might be saying about a set of contradicting factors, and is the language adequate to the goal of helping you go further than the received reactions a duller aesthetic would have you settle for. It's a dialectic, to advance a singularly unoriginal idea about the process--I don't think the artist delivers a set of redecorated cliches about affirming life that experience proves to be patently false. Yes, the artist ought to challenge expectations, and the audience would need to argue how well the craftsperson succeeded in the attempt.

David Blair's Argument with Heaven

In some sense most of the poems we read tease the edges of a death wish, not in the sense that the poet desires to merge with the molecules and greet the large dark before him, but rather more like a curious soul daring the unknown and the unspoken dimension of human experience, the end of one's life, to reveal some knowledge. David Blair's  "A Poem About Heaven" poem seems something like that, a fragmented, giddy swirl of associations that have been triggered by his mother's death; what this mind creates isn't a metaphysical speculation on ideal associations remaining permanent while the flesh fails, or an autobiography to where another's mortality furnishes the punch line to one of the chapters, but rather a rush of sensation, of images, associations that bump, careen and otherwise swerve around one another.   As with the issue of rage, unleashed anger, overwhelming the mind to the degree that the world is presented as linked in a sequence of irrational targets that have misery to one's life, the shock that precedes the onslaught of grief is full of sensations of being whisked around a gallery of past events, significant and inane details dovetailing into one another against rational association. The silly and the sublime are not so much linked as they are twined and untwined in what seems like pulverizing vortex.

I am such an impressionist.
My legs get cold;
my arms get cold,
weird thinking of my mom dying
in my old bedroom, now the den.
And kneeling is weird. The northern lights, 
weird. Arcade lights. Wildwood, New Jersey,
weird, inside my eyelids. But I'm not thinking
of Poe again and the dance of colors.
I'm thinking of the hierarchy
that my mind wants Heaven to be.

A house keeping is suddenly in order, a reinforcing of what one knows in their world is required; Blair gives is a hurried desperation of one examining the things of their world, their experience, their accumulation of habits, talents, material things, in an attempt to repair the gap a family death creates. What he does here with the fast jumps between stanzas, the giddy and the reserved clamoring against each other to set the tone for the young man's attention, is create the sensation of being in free fall. It's not unlike being thrust into the reality of an old cartoon where the coyote, during his chase, missed the bend in a mountain pass and finds itself in mid air, falling only when it realizes that there is nothing supporting his feet; I think the feeling of spiraling down, clawing at the air for anything that might be there to grab onto, is unmistakable.

Why else
these figures
from a deck of cards,
kings and queens kneeling down to Jesus
in the neon shoreline,
tunnel of love, of horrors, boardwalk
attractions—
only these
are blissful religious figures. They kneel 

because they are weak in the knees.

So much goes through the mind, combinations of shock, anger, denial, fleeting relief; the narrator argues against the concept of heaven and assigns the kneeling tribute to a Jesus figurine not as an acknowledgement to divine presence but rather to weak minds or merely fatigue, insist instead that the things in the world he has grown to know, his family, friends, his community, have a significance that provides him with everything with everything Heaven was promised to be. The doubt is palpable, and the argument Blair's narrator tries to make lacks coherence, but this is someone trying to regain their balance, to brace themselves for the inevitable rituals he knows are coming.

<i>I go back downstairs
to a house full of the voices
of all my family, my whole life,
sure, we are going there.  

There comes the point in all of this frantic self-scrutiny where one the dissonant, radio like static of doubt, denial, anger becomes white noise of kind and fades and one is left numb, finally, alone with a stark

set of facts that makes the best lyric poetry and most inclusive philosophies seem no more than an archive of chiseled sophistry; there is the irreducible fact that whatever one thinks the meaning of their life happens to be, whatever one thinks about how things should be or how they should turn out, that however high or low one climbs or descends on the scale of measurable things , we all, finally, going to the same place. Blair's protagonist, it seems to me, isn't at this moment convinced that it will be place where they will all meet again; he is convinced, though, that it will be a situation when the arguments stop and there is a peace only eternity, by any definition, can provide.I think of the last lines as a paraphrase of Samuel Beckett's famous line " I can't go on, I'll go on." The whole enterprise of living becomes an intolerable burden, and yet one pushes further and deals with what's in front of them--family, job, friends, --because one cannot simply resign from their commitments. It's not that one cannot resign, of course, only that it's not simple. Blair's narrator by poem's end appears to come out of the conflictied swirl of sensations and decided to return to the family that quarrels, cries and banters, thinking , perhaps, that in the meantime, the time before one's own demise, it's better to be amid the clamor of the irresolute than be be  self-sustaining and isolated.

Oscars

There were no surprises at the Oscars, and I have to go along with the consensus that "The King's Speech" deserved Best Picture; in a year where there was some strong competition, the "The King's Speech" was seamless perfection in film narrative, from the script, cast, and direction. As much as I enjoyed "True Grit", and admit that I am a Coen Brothers partisan who will find genius more often than not in any of the films they make, there were times in their otherwise inspired remake where their energy, which is to suggest their enthusiasm, flagged. This, I think, was their downfall in the Best Picture category. Also, I was heartened to see Christian Bale get his Oscar for best supporting actor for "The Fighter"; he stole the movie and was blessed with a role that allowed him to show off his considerable acting chops. As with Al Pacino in "Scent of a Woman", the role justified the scene chewing; I do hope, though, that Bale doesn't repeat the riff ; it didn't do Pacino that much good in his subsequent films; save for a movie or three since his Oscar win, his RANDOM VOLUME!!!  the method has become a means of self-parody. Give that man a Soma soaked Twinkie. I was especially warmed by Melissa Leo's winning best-supporting actor as the domineering mother in "The Fighter"--I've been a fan of hers since she portrayed detective Kay Howard in the television show "Homicide: Life on the Street"; she was terrific, nuanced, crabby, an emotionally pinched person slow to change her distorted worldview, and Leo played it wonderfully.

The good graces of Mary Karr

I haven’t been to church in decades as a matter of habit, and confess the only time I set foot in a pew is for either funerals or weddings. One will have to take it on faith that while I haven’t renounced God nor made statements to the effect that ours is a reality without a spiritual r recourse, my ideas of spirituality have changed over the last forty years; it just seems to strange to think of God as being willing to be a bully demanding ritualized acts of devotion and loyality while a fate he won’t reveal , the “meaning of life” we drink too much booze and coffee to discern, unravels. Is the All Powerful a vain micro-manager? I don’t think so, and entreaties to Him can be done, I think, without wishing for more for oneself, or wishing harm to befall those who we think smited us. Yes, I turned my back and have little interest in investigating the religion of my youth, but surprise again, sometimes my curiosity is aroused, as it was when I happened across this fine poem by Mary Karr in online version of Poetry Magazine, a sly hymn called “Disgraceland”/Strange and wonderful; I am a lapsed Catholic at best (a curious agnostic, perhaps?), but I recognize the parallels Karr draws here with her truly ethereal poem.
Christ was of this earth and of the human race because his task was to suffer various degradations for preaching a moral philosophy that would, after all, deliver humanity from its base motives and actions, all this so he might transcend and come into that state of grace that is tempered, conditioned by experience. We come to know what it is we are being delivered from, the sins, their consequences, and their horrible toll. Karr's narrator, born into a Christian life, goes her own way, feeling each pain, pleasure, the exact quality of being human:Eventually, I lurched out to kiss the wrong mouths,
get stewed, and sulk around. Christ always stood
to one side with a glass of water.
I swatted the sap away.
Christ was always there with the glass of water, that thing that refreshes and gives life to tired limbs, but he would not intervene to make Karr's wayward soul come into the house of his father; she must know her own experience, have her own narrative to fasten a merging faith upon, and come of her own accord to another way of being;
When my thirst got great enough
to ask, a stream welled up inside;
some jade wave buoyed me forward;
and I found myself upright
in the instant, with a garden
inside my own ribs aflourish. There, the arbor leafs.
The vines push out plump grapes.
You are loved, someone said. Take that
and eat it.
A phrase you might have heard of; she had to get sick and tired of being sick and tired. This has all the trappings of things I hear at AA meetings, yes, but AA shares are either drunkalogues or hard-core sales pitches that will speak of an intervening Higher Power in Street terms. The quality of a good AA share is that one This poem is jargon free, as I read it, and the mention of Jesus and references to spiritual things are voiced in a tongue that is plain but not dull; her rhythm is sure.
It has been remarked that this poem isn't much more than what you'd get in a better class of women's magazines and that what delivers is a rather conventional story, but I think there are crucial distinctions to be made.This is quite a bit different than what you'd find in women's magazines, in that the ground covered in those articles are tear jerkers, better class or no, and there's an inescapable residue of self pity/self congratulation through out these publications that creates a particular consumer mind set that is perfect for delivering an audience an empathetic audience to corporate advertisers. The swings of the downbeat and the upbeat do not go against the not so subtle requirements of the revenue stream. Karr's poem is somewhat different, and she tells the tale differently as well; it is the form of testimony, of confession and reclamation, and there is no wallowing in the details of a wasted past; as per the requirements of contemporary poetry, pace Pound, Eliot and Yeats, there are associative leaps in the narrative, elisions, ideas contained in images that convincingly, for me, convey the more abstract notions of life with and without grace. Poetry isn't required to dramatically thrust a reader into areas of consideration they wouldn't have thought of or might have been too lazy to explore, but rather work well on its own terms, within its particular structure, congruent with its unique ambition.
This needn't be the grand entrance of Christ as one can read in Flaubert's tale "The Legend of St. Julian Hospitator" from his book Three Tales. Karr , in her own fashion, speaks of the Personal Jesus much is made of these days and finds Him in an unconventional, almost banal manner, after a life that, while not chaste nor righteous, isn't portrayed as especially heinous or glutted with evil deeds. What takes me my surprise is Karr's conception of a savior who speaks not to saving one's soul for eternal salvation but instead a Christ who can help her appreciate the life she has and make something useful of. This is a Christ who wants her to live fully on this earth, not to treat her religious experience like it were an audition for American Idol. Surprise, this is a Jesus who wants us to live as adults, not pavlov'd dolts who drool when a bell rings.
What I especially appreciate here is that Karr
 This is quite a bit different than what you'd find in women's magazines, in that the ground covered in those articles are tear jerkers, better class or no, and there's an inescapable residue of self pity/self congratulation through out these publications that creates a particular consumer mind set that is perfect for delivering an audience an empathetic audience to corporate advertisers. The swings of the downbeat and the upbeat do not go against the not so subtle requirements of the revenue stream. Karr's poem is somewhat different, and she tells the tale differently as well; it is the form of testimony, of confession and reclamation, and there is no wallowing in the details of a wasted past; as per the requirements of contemporary poetry, pace Pound, Eliot and Yeats, there are associative leaps in the narrative, elisions, ideas contained in images that convincingly, for me, convey the more abstract notions of life with and without grace.
Poetry isn't required to  violently thrust a reader into areas of consideration they wouldn't have thought of or might have been too lazy to explore, but rather work well on its own terms, within its particular structure, congruent with its unique ambition. 

Used Books: "Pastoralia" by George Saunders

A funny book

Author George Saunders is a crazed ,surrealist comedian who , in his tales of conflated literary genres and cultural traits defying any personalized sense of proportion  you might have and cherish, reminds you in moments of  the three year old for whom there is no required separation between ideas, things and the places where they may belong.  That is to say what ever makes sense in the telling of a tale is okay, is alright, is perfectly natural, "natural", that is , because it occurred to the three year old while his mind gathered it's narrative materials. Nothing is excluded, no matter how out of wac. So it is with Saunders, who's 2001 story collection Pastoralia is simply an inspired and condensed can of insanity.


Something about this world reminds me, fleetingly, of The Bed Sitting Room, a film directed by Richard Lester, where addled Brits go about their business after a three-second nuclear war, as if nothing had happened, unaware that their actions are very odd permutations of old habits. This , along with the fact that some characters are morphing into inanimate objects.

What's similiar is that they way you, like Lester, treat your inventions less as weirdness for it's own sake--Tom Robbins when he's boiling over--but how you keep the descriptions and the details of your character's lives in scale; your tone has the unfoldings and detail bask in the light of their own skewed logic: the details relate to one another. "Sea Oak" , with all it's reversals and inversions , pretty much gets the internalized logic of diminishing returns in strip clubs. The returned aunt from the dead, pissed an aggressive economic agenda for a family of whiners, was genius.His use of brief sentences and jerky dialogue makes this skewed universe clang and clack with a sound and feel not so removed from the actual world: his attention to the banal, and his twisting the items just so, makes this a wonderful set of satires. "Sea Oak" is particularly brilliant.

A basic and important strength in your writing is the spare style you prefer to use, as it allows you, it seems to be, to accumulate the carnivalized strangeness and build on it credibly, if that's the word to use. It gives your zaniness a subtle, additional dimensionality that makes this series of tales read like descriptions of a fully realized universe. 

Monkee Grip Glue

 The Monkees are evidently reformed and touring to cash in the 45th Anniversary of their being manufactured by Hollywood producer Don Kirshner and his cronies. An item in The Telegraph would have us believe that the fellows overcame the general scorn heaped upon them and ascended into what there was of the hallowed Rock Pantheon.  At best, the article was a vital piece of nonsense. 

Author, please pick up your last check on the way out, as this is the worst sort of puffery one could imagine. Precisely no one took the Monkees seriously as a band, and their chops as comedians were not held in high regard. Yes, they sold... millions of units, but so has Kraft Cheese, a product whose popularity reveals how scarce good taste actually is. The Monkees were a band for teenyboppers with allowance money to burn. It is possible to compare them to the Beatles or the Marx Brothers, but this only demonstrates their lack. They might have been pioneers of a sort, but they were and remain a fancy you grow out of as your tastes mature; there is the hope that a music fan discovers the excellent stuff. Theirs was music glutted by fads, gimmicks, and tricks heaped on albums of songs that were at best cast-offs from professional songwriters; it sounded corny back in the day, and the Monkees has aged poorly. It sounds pretentious, inane, flimsy constructions gussied up with every studio trick available. The Monkees problem is worse because, 45 years later, they haven't their youthful cuteness to help get away with the slithering saliva trail they called rock and roll. They are bound to look pathetic. Is this what fans really want to see? 

 T

The Monkees are not remembered for their songs but rather more like a disease a generation of love-sick tweeners shared; it was some overwhelming fever whose recollection involves the heat, not the melodies. I still run into people bringing them up in music discussions except as a bad example, and the book on the day-to-day mechanics of this money machine seems geared at a niche market, small but profitable. This just reinforces that they were musically mediocre and sub-minor in importance. I don't blame the band for going after a payday; after all, the Sex Pistols did precisely the same thing in the Nineties. However, the Pistols were at least honest about and called their trek the Filthy Lucre tour. What irritates me, among other things, about these hired hands as they still act as if they were involved in something that mattered. 

I should say that the mini-rant was not about these guys individually; Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork have chops, to be sure. But the distinction is that they were members of a combine that was a commercial venture... that was disguised as a rock band, and as far as rock bands go, they were lacking in whatever good graces it takes to be actual pantheon members. As an entity, the Monkees were a disgrace. The same may be said of the Sex Pistols Brit wastrels Malcolm McLaren hired to fulfill his fashion sense. The difference is that the Pistols had the integrity to break up unceremoniously. To paraphrase, Johnny Rotten asked the audience if they ever felt they'd been cheated at their last US gig. The Monkees, collectively or individually, never had the honesty to admit that they were a money-making fraud.

Of course, it complicated their eventual desire to be taken seriously. On the one hand, you had critics in the serious journals arguing that rock had become an art and whose collective preference was for bands and songwriters who had an organic quality to their music; music as authentic expression, experimental, poetic, reflective. How many artists actually made music that achieved these vague standards or created a piece worth listening to after the craze had passed is a matter of debate. The Monkees, to those writers, were a corporate monster, a Frankenstein's monster of borrowed parts taking bits and pieces of whatever was popular at the time--heavy rock, folk-rock, psychedelia, youth-quake lyrics, and so on--and slickly fused everything together in album packages geared to a teenybopper's desire to be both enthralled and convinced that they were "hip" despite being too young to go to nightclubs where the actual music was being played. Mike Nesmith turned out to be a fine songwriter and an influential singer and had an estimable if obscure solo career post Monkees, but his signing on with the Monkees was his Faustian pact. It doesn't seem that he ever quite lived down the fact that he was in a very popular and very profitable entity created by management to cash in. It's an unpleasant fact that the sense of irony in the Music Press hadn't yet increased to the degree as it had when Malcolm McLaren assembled the respective members of the Sex Pistols in 1975. McLaren's intention was to disrupt the music biz, being the Situationist he was, but also to make a bit of coin in doing so. The fact that the Pistols were thrown together, a contrived unit if one ever existed, only enhanced their authenticity as punk rock instigators. They got a very different result in the long run through what became one of the decade's central postmodern gestures.

Art and anger

Anger as artistic virtue is short-lived and becomes, too often, monotony. The idea that the artist must get himself into a full , frothing lather, burst out of his clothes while his engorged (and enraged) muscles morph to sizes beyond a believable scale is absurd on the face of it; the writer, the poet, the painter, the sculptor, the photographer,  the artist, whatever the medium, would be too intent on screaming "Hulk Smash Puny Critics" rather than focus their energy on the literal and metaphorical canvas in front of them. 

The artist, if nothing else,is that person who occupies themselves with expressing their sense of things in an externalized manner after  the things that they've taken in--a heartbreak, being fired, a wedding, good sex, a death, a disease, a visit from the In Laws--has gestated for a period, has been assimilated, so to speak, into one's being and the artist can attain equilibrium, for a while at least, through the  artistic act. 

The experience, that is, becomes the raw material the artist will use after  the rage has subsided and the painter, the poet, the  novelist has had their offended ego return to human proportions. Passion will remain, to be sure, but the anger, well...I would venture that the anger is an impediment and needs to cool to something that one can pick up and examine and , eventually,  use as something that motivates one to make reconfiguration, not commit homicide. This has presented a credibility problem for both aging punters and wrinkled heavy metalheads who find themselves trying to live up to a past decade's reputation with a gasping exaggeration. 

I find Chrissie Hinde attractive because she never lost her sense of humor or irony. Interestingly enough, she didn't market herself as an angry punk woman; the tone is bitter at times, more often bittersweet, and the attitude of her lyrics is that she pushes on toward the goal of making her life a good fit for the reality she's found herself in.

Target Practice

White European Americans are the only ethnic assortment someone can make fun of with impunity; it's now beyond whatever value it as irony or poetic justice and now exists as a bad habit for taking cheap shots.
A laugh and a good wicked snort can be had making fun of the habits of poets, but limiting the odd ways to white folks alone amounts to taking the easy way out no less than some of the poems that appear on Slate.

 Everyone is in a hurry to get to an easy punchline, not in the interest of having an audience see their own foilbes but rather so the motor mouthing wise guying can jet through another batch of sarcasms so lame that one wouldn't even dare utter them at 1am on a Comedy Store Amatuer Night.

Is someone brave enough to investigate the wierdness that besets ethnic groups in particular once they become infected by the poetry flu? Not really, it seems, and white people remain the easy target one may mock with out the slightest fear of being called to the carpet for the stereotyping disrespect. It's a sorry, lame ass practice.

 I don't think Americans are afraid of poetry;  that, I think, is an easy  way of explaining why poetr books don't sell and why it's difficult for a poet without reputation to get  himself or herself by wider audiences. Rather it's a matter of not many Americans, comparatively, think of poetry as a resource since we, as a culture, are not an introspective culture, but instead one that continuously looks forward to a future to be created.

Poetry, so far as the general reader is concerned, is a matter of one being alone with their thoughts and structuring their experience in a narrative form, a narrative that not only chronicles events along a time line, but also the nuance of experience, the fleeting sensation of something changing in their psyche. This requires making the language do extraordinary things to accommodate an uncommon interpretation of experience, and Americans, a people reared on the ideology of what can be done in the face of adversity, have no expansive desire to do something so impractical. Language is a thing meant to help us solve material problems, to achieve material goals, and poetry, a strange extension of linguistic twists and glottal clicks, clearings of the throat, a nasty cough, does nothing to put food on the table, put money in the bank, to further the quest to cure an endless variety of incurable diseases.

Poetry is immaterial to purpose, function, policy; the absence of larger audiences for poetry isn't about fear from a perception that it's a mode of expression that is the least useful among several the lot of us might select on a given day. There are those of us who would argue that poetry's lack of identifiable utility is exactly what attracts us to the form--I happen to think that , like Wilde, that all art is quite useless in practical application (save for the fact that I believe humans crave beauty in form and in expression) and adhere to Harold Bloom's running definition of what literature , in general, avails the reader : to paraphrase, literature (poetry) helps us think about ourselves. Americans , I think it's safe to say in the broadest sense, have no real desire to reside individually and psychically work their way to an "aha" experience with poetry as a conduit.

We do think about ourselves, but more in terms of accumulation rather than an inner equilibrium. The measure of a man is his wallet, not the subtlety of his thoughts, and this a form of fearlessness that borders on insanity.

What I Thought, What I Stole

A professor once point out that something becomes art once it is framed, no matter what that object may be. That was great, I thought, and spent the next couple of semesters elaborating on this notion over hot cups of coffee, pitchers of beer, book and record reviews I wrote for the college newspaper, and certainly, most certainly, on term papers I was required to write in my humanities classes. I was a smart cookie, indeed, smart enough to recycle someone else's solid point over and again in pursuit of status and good grades. The odd thing, though, is that whereas the bullshit that I produced as a young has been exposed as being dually pompous and naive, the idea of the frame is a solid one; it has the added benefit of being     true.

This idea originated with Marcel Duchamp as he exhibited his readymades, a classic dada gesture he offered with his ready mades, such as urinals hoisted upon gallery walls, and snow shovels on pedastals. The point , though, was that the object became an aesthetic object,denatured, in a manner of speaking , from its natural context and forced , suddenly, to be discussed in its very "thingness". The object becomes art by the lexicon we wrap around it, a linguistic default.  Duchamp intended a guerrilla action against the bourgeoisie and their monied, status  focus on works of art  with the hope of returning the population to  a state where perception hadn't been codified with price tag and a standing army. The notion, however, became the market standard, however, with Pop Art : art was free to wander around it's own forms and materials without having to address anything so  trivial as why we love Jesus or bother to own pets instead of raise children.

Whether the object is art as most understand art to be--the result of an inner expressive need to mold , shape and hone materials and forms into an a medium that engages a set of ideas about the world, or unearths some fleeting sense of human experience -- isn't the point here. Ironically, art, generally defined as something that is absent all utility, any defineable function, is suddenly given a use that is sufficiently economic, which is to keep an art industry in motion; it is the sound of money. DuChamp, and other dadaists who sought to undermine this idea of art and its supposed spiritual epiphanies for the priviledged few, instead furnished a whole new rational for art vending.