Quadrophenia

The Who's Quadrophenia is one of the dullest albums ever released by a major rock band; it marks the spot where songwriter and guitarist Peter Townsend's abandoned (or lost) his genius for composing witty rock and roll and wicked power chords that were the cornerstone of all things anthemic in the grinding morass that largely was rock and roll when bands sought no longer to be fun or entertaining, but significant.  There is nothing wrong with significance on the face of it, but that quality is generally the result of inspired work and an unmediated commitment to a creative surge that cannot, truthfully, be duplicated by force of will. Townsend, in my view, opted to make significant states in his lyrics at the sacrifice of the light touch he could frame in the context of a four chord song. 

Where the previous double album, the rock-opera Tommy was buoyant, rocking and didn't want for guitar hooks or the riffs, Quadrophenia got as serious as a ditch with songs that were bloated, wooden, humorless, positively no fun. It merits a mention that the theme was incomprehensible and that this is where Daltry's voice finally gave out. The guitar chords, once crashing, smashing and slashing in all the old descriptions of youth rebellion, were now leaden, robotic, rusty. All that was left was a cracking bellow that made you think of nothing except an old building collapsing under its heft.  Ambition is fine, but not without an idea of what you're doing. Someone told songwriter Peter Townsend that the modernist tradition demands a diffuse narrative, broken up in sharp pieces, and lacking resolution, techniques I fancy myself, given my devotion to the poetry of Eliot, Stein, and Silliman, but there is a knack to doing things that way, an "ear", if you will.   Sentences and ideas that don't necessarily follow one another inconveniently logical, causal order require arrangement, a sense of what doesn't go together the right way: there is a reason why Bob Dylan's surrealism remains powerful five decades later and the more recent writings of Springsteen, someone clearly influenced by Dylan's turn to obscurity, are hardly quoted at all. 

 Another problem as well might have been an inferiority complex; he stopped being an artist, writing and recording wonderful, brilliant, ingenious rock and roll songs the moment he started to try to be an artist on other people's terms.  It's a self-conscious artiness that has made his music frightfully didactic, incomplete and a chore to bear.

The Man Who Was Not There

As usual with Coen Brothers films, The Man Who Wasn't There is visually stunning, and has it's share of odd touches and sublime moments that set the film makers from the rest of the herd, but I thought it was the least interesting of their films.

The varying elements of a James Cain flavored noir thriller filtered through Camus-toned existentialism and the zany insertion of UFOs makes me think of bright guys brain storming against deadline; much of the meaning of Coen Brothers movies is open ended and deferred, but this film just couldn't merge the oddities. Billy Bob Thorton, though, needs special credit for maintaining his granite faced deadpan in a film full of eagerly demonstrative actors. He portrays his emotionally somnolent barber with less expression than a pair of pliers left at the bottom of a over-stuffed drawer in a typically crowded work bench; like the pliers, this is a man who is forgotten, anonymous , virtually invisible despite being part of the everyday scenery.His flat effect is so consistent and untouched by a hint of actorish  style that you can well imagine the character relishing the burn in the throat and the coughing and hacking that result in  the excess because it is one of the things that might penetrate his otherwise impenetrable numbness.

He he clips hair, sweeps up the clippings, and chain smokes his way through the film, Thorton's already sunken cheeks and general skull-hugging features take on the grisly isolation of a long abandoned building under the movies effectively baroque use of high contrast black and white. Still, this has the feeling of an exercise, a project to keep their hands in the game while the brothers Coen finesse their next major project. Visually gratifying, but the movie bombs over all because there is nothing inspiring in the plot to make the movie seem like another more than an empty stage.

Why American novelists don’t deserve the Nobel Prize - Salon.com

Why American novelists don’t deserve the Nobel Prize - Salon.com: "The basic problem is that there is only Nobel Prize for literature and there many thousands of published writers who fancy themselves suitable and deserving of the award. It's not unlike the billions (and billions) of sperm swimming upstream madly to fertilize an egg that will only take accept one. Ninety nine percent of the those contending for what the prize simply don't make it; given that the Nobel Committee has to consider writers from a fairly broad range of poets, novelists, playwrights internationally, we are a bit too sensitive about not having a winner in a good many years. We are in competition with writers of other countries, after all, not merely with other American writers. It does, though, make for convenient news copy that will attract readers to the presence of whatever advertising happens to be lurking near or hovering over the editorializing about the continued "outrage". Our lazier arts commentators can then enjoy themselves with the Full Nancy Grace, sneering, pouting, whining, insinuating about America being passed up for the prize and cash reward the comes with it.

I do believe, though, that the Nobel folks do not like American writers in particular and that the remarks that have been made in the name of the Nobel Prize is dumbly Eurocentric; as the specific qualities a writer's body of work needs to have has never been articulated beyond the misty generalities of helping humanity understand its soul and its true self in the best and worst of conditions, the idea that American scribes are too insular, too narcissistic to be considered worth considering as a higher class of literature seems capricious at best. Writers are self absorbed, period, no matter where their bloodlines come from; it is the conceit that each of them has that theirs is the voice and the insight that makes them different from their fellow citizens. The task, though, is to judge what they do with the self-concentration, something the Nobel Committee is unwilling to do; contempt before investigation, I believe. The Nobel Prize, though, is one thing above all else, and that is worth remembering; pointed bullshit and frippery . We could all do better and just read our literary discoveries , shared them with our respective communities, and passed on the the amount of smoke a batch of self appointed Deacons of Taste are producing .

TONIGHT

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Gawker suggests Lindsay Lohan should die and cash in

It's tragic enough that some parts of the media make a profit following the downward movement of the hapless Lindsay Lohan, but it is morally criminal, I think, for a publication even as ethically freelance as the Gawker to infer that Lohan ought to kill herself as a means of reviving her popularity. There is only a limited amount of schadenfreude any of us can justify; Lohan was not an incredibly rich, powerful, influential figure setting herself up as moral paragon.

The self-righteous without their trousers on in the presence of small children and bankers with their hands in the till should be made to do a long perp walk and given an extra kick. Lohan was not one of those, but rather a minor league actress with small measure of success who , through her own decisions and compulsions, succeeded in screwing the good thing she had going for herself. She had it made, she messed up, she couldn't change her ways , seem contrite , she may well be one of those people who is incapable of understanding what part she played in her undoing. We all know people like this; we have had our laughs, our snickering around the coffee table, but it stops being funny. It becomes pathetic.

All you can do at the moment when you realize that your witnessing someone in the thralls of unmanageable complication is wish them well, hope things improve, take whatever moral you might construct from someone else's misfortune and attempt to have a constructive , helpful day after that. For Gawker to make gratuitious remarks about Lohan's appearence, ie, her "prematurely aging breasts", and to suggest death,self delivered or as the result of further misadventures, as a credible option for rebranding makes me think that these folks are themselves are bored with the story, bored, perhaps, with the whole task of sniffing the ground for whatever droppings and scat celebrities might have left in their wake. I imagine an office full of incredibly unhappy and bored people in front of computer monitors indulging a shrill, false glee, the kind of elation that seems little more than a thin curtain between them and The Abyss. They , perhaps, considering death to be one of their options as well when the volume on their self-congratulations subsides for a moment; they are, perhaps m Bored to Death and cannot help but project that onto the celebrity mishaps that are their stock and trade.

Perhaps they have a wish to end it all. I would accept Gawker merely ceasing publication, going offline. Going flatline would be extreme, even in Gawker's case.

linda's donuts

Barry Alfonso This is the home of the WARM HAND-OFF... November 2 at 5:51am ·  Ted Burke There's a HOT ONE with name on on it waiting for you to rest your dogs inside November 2 at 6:36pm ·  Barry Alfonso Are those radioactive cooties lighting up the pink sprinkles on your cruller? November 3 at 7:24am ·  Ted Burke Those are the donuts with the Magic San Onofre Glow Sparkles. November 3 at 7:27am ·  Barry Alfonso One bite and Ed Clark's forehead will grow another three inches! November 3 at 7:29am ·  Ted Burke They are going to use those donuts to make their new sign November 3 at 7:30am ·  Barry Alfonso Japanese donuts line the runways of Lindberg Field and can be seen from Mt. Laguna. November 3 at 7:33am ·  Ted Burke Linda is a massive thirteen tentacle mutation that lives inside the lean to in the alley November 3 at 7:38am ·  Barry Alfonso True fact: prior to the Jack in the Box restaurant going up at the corner of Garnet and Lamont, there was a burger stand that had a big sign proclaiming 'HOME OF THE TEXAS MONSTER." I guess there have been a host of fetid, horror shambling about this region for eons... November 3 at 7:45am ·

Take this and thrive, Pal.

Since writers are in the habit of making up stories as a matter of habit and profession, each of them, not just the beats, "faked" everything. 

That shouldn't be surprising from a class of folks we look to for tales, fables, metaphors and such that we might use , in some loose way, in making our own lives fit our skins better.

 The question is how well ,uhhhh, how artful one is in manipulating language towards the creation of fiction or a poetry where the world as its spoken resounds with suggestion and portents of secret knowledge.

William S. Burroughs was the one stone-cold genius among the Beat writers ,was the most interesting and successful destroyer and re-creator of literary form, and maintained what Mailer called a "gallows humor" that allowed him to explore the gamier side of human personality without mythologizing the journey. 

Ginsberg's early poems , as well, were filled with the bulls-eye hitting jeremiads that were such an exact fit for the condition he described that it still comes off as a fresh and blistering criticism of a culture that seems interested in no more than conformity.

 Fakery is what one expects and demands from creative writers. Beat enthusiasts might blanch at the notion, but comes down to the skill of the writer to get away with the imaginative tall tales he's putting forth. 

 The issue, it seems, is how well do we remember the lies that we've told others over the years when we might have otherwise kept it easy and simply told the truth.