Making a living

Rock and roll is all about professionalism , which is to say that some one of the alienated and consequently alienating species trying to make their way in the world subsisting on the seeming authenticity of their anger, ire and anxiety has to make sure that they take care of their talent, respect their audiences expectations even as they try to make the curdled masses learn something new, and to makes sure that what they are writing about /singing about/yammering about is framed in choice riffs and frenzied backbeat. It is always about professionalism; the MC5 used to have manager John Sinclair, story goes, turn off the power in middle of one of their teen club gigs in Detroit to make it seem that the Man was trying to shut down their revolutionary oomph. The 5 would get the crowd into frenzy, making noise on the dark stage until the crowd was in a sufficient ranting lather. At that point Sinclair would switch the power back on and the band would continue, praising the crowd for sticking it to the Pigs.

This was pure show business, not actual revolutionary fervor inspired by acne scars and blue balls; I would dare say that it had its own bizarre integrity, and was legitimate on terms we are too embarrassed to discuss. In a way, one needs to admire bands like the Stones or Aerosmith for remembering what it was that excited them when they were younger, and what kept their fan base loyal.  All I would say is that it's not a matter of rock and roll ceasing to be an authentic trumpet of the troubled young soul once it became a brand; rather, rock and roll has always been a brand once white producers, record company owners and music publishers got a hold of it early on and geared a greatly tamed version of it to a wide and profitable audience of white teenagers. In any event, whether most of the music being made by Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and others was a weaker version of what was done originally by Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters et al is beside the point. It coalesced, all the same, into a style that perfectly framed an attitude of restlessness among mostly middle class white teenagers who were excited by the sheer exotica, daring and the sense of the verboten the music radiated. It got named, it got classified, the conventions of its style were defined, and over time, through both record company hype and the endless stream of Consciousness that most white rock critics produced, rock and roll became a brand. It was always a brand once it was removed from the black communities and poor Southern white districts from which it originated. I have no doubt that the artist's intention , in the intervening years, was to produce a revolution in the conscious of their time with the music they wrote and performed, but the decision to be a musician was a career choice at the most rudimentary level, a means to make a living or, better yet , to get rich. It is that rare to non-existent musician who prefers to remain true to whatever vaporous sense of integrity and poor.

Even Chuck Berry, in my opinion the most important singer-songwriter musician to work in rock and roll--Berry, I believe , created the template with which all other rock and rollers made their careers in music--has described his songwriting style as geared for young white audiences. Berry was a man raised on the music of Ellington and Louie Jardin, strictly old school stuff, and who considered himself a contemporary of Muddy Waters, but he was also an An entrepreneur as well as an artist. He was a working artist who rethought his brand and created a new one; he created something wholly new, a combination of rhythm and blues, country guitar phrasing and narratives that wittily, cleverly, indelibly spoke to a collective experience that had not been previously served.

 Critics and historians have been correct in callings this music Revolutionary, in that it changed the course of music, but it was also a Career changes. All this, though, does not make what the power of Berry's music--or the music of Dylan, Beatles , Stones, MC5, Bruce or The High Fiving White Guys --false , dishonest, sans value altogether. What I concern myself with is how well the musicians are writing, playing, singing on their albums, with whether they are inspired, being fair to middling', or seem out of ideas, out of breath; it is a useless and vain activity to judge musicians, or whole genres of music by how well they/it align themselves with a metaphysical standard of genuine, real, vital art making. That standard is unknowable and those putting themselves of pretending they know what it is are improvising at best. This is not a coherent way to enjoy music. One is assuming that one does, or at one time did, enjoy music. . What matters are the products--sorry, even art pieces, visual, musical, dramatic, poetic, are "product" in the strictest sense of the word--from the artists successful in what they set out to do. The results are subjective, of course, but art is nothing else than means to provoke a response, gentle or strongly and all grades in between, and critics are useful in that they can make the discussion of artistic efforts interesting. The only criticism that interests are responses from reviewers that are more than consumer guides--criticism , on its own terms in within its limits, can be as brilliant and enthralling as the art itself. And like the art itself, it can also be dull, boring, stupid, and pedestrian. The quality of critics varies; their function in relation to art, however, is valid. It is a legitimate enterprise. Otherwise we'd be treating artists like they were priests. God forbid.

Endorsement: Clint Eastwood makes Romney’s day | The Salt Lake Tribune

Endorsement: Clint Eastwood makes Romney’s day | The Salt Lake Tribune:

Eastwood is one of my favorite directors, and it's frustrating when a hero endorses a candidate who espouses policies that essentially embody a meanness of spirit. Eastwood is a well known Republican, of course, but I had thought that he would have no truck with Romney, who has turned into a sock puppet for Wall Street and the Tea Party. The irony of this match up shouldn’t be lost on anyone; Eastwood, who has had a long career in movies portraying characters of genuine integrity and honesty, has endorsed a politician who has shifted,waffled, and misrepresented his political positions during this campaign in a conspicuous effort to say anything in order to attain power.  In effect, Hollywood’s Last Rugged Hero has taken up the cause of of a candidate who is a wrenching combination of Thurston Howell 3^rd and Walter Mitty.  Republicans have always been about rugged individualism, and it's not a surprise that he aligns himself, philosophical, with the GOP's legacy bootstrap philosophy. But lately these fellows have just been mean, creepy social Darwinists in general, heartless bastards.  

Eastwood never struck  me  a  mean guy, but rather  as a man with compassion for human suffering. Suffering may be inevitable in our lifetimes, but there are things we can do for each other to increase a sense of community, a sense of serving a greater goal.It is a revelation that a man who has demonstrated real genius as a film maker--Eastwood-- seems to be falling back more on Party loyalty rather than supporting a candidate with real principles.

This makes the work of separating Eastwood's art from his politics problematic; it does, of course, introduce the notion that his best films have a political dimension, disguised under narrative diversions, that are not quite the Universal Truth of Human Experience liberal fans like me flock to when praising the director's films

 Eastwood's skill, honed over a long career, is that he has an instinct for a compelling human story and that he is especially adept at creating a framework where his direction is subtle, nearly invisible .           

He is technically able , but not showy. A strong script and a strong cast is what makes this man an amazing director. He may not be the most nuanced political thinker, but he does appreciate the nuances of emotion and human frailty in times of struggle. We will just have to take what we like and disregard the rest for later reference, I suppose.

GORE VIDAL

Gore Vidal will be missed because he was, perhaps, the last of the Great Public Intellectuals with the ability to discourse knowledgeably on an impressive variety of inter-related subjects. Let's say right here that Vidal isn't, of course, the last intellectual who will attempt to conquer all media and become on the few anointed by the Infotainment State to appear with bright elucidations on the variety of platforms available in a demonstration of Marcuseque tolerance that resists the codifications which allow corporate coffers to swell. There a number of others who can talk up a good contrarian view on a number of subjects, but none of them are as entertaining as Vidal had been, the cynic, the Wildean wit puncturing holes in the thin balloons of bullshit that his way. His presence on the talk shows throughout my childhood, admittedly, helped formed my progressive views and instructed me, more or less, to think harder on subjects, to be skeptical, to think critically, to be willing to change my mind based on new evidence; all that was good enough on the face of it, but that was essentially a side benefit of paying attention to what Vidal was, in fact, which was an entertainer, another distraction, a decent enough man to utter views half way critical of a racist/misogynist/ /homophobic status quo  who would not, all the same, dissuade viewers from purchasing the sponsor's products. It was a racket and Vidal knew it. But his performances on the talk shows did inspire me to read his books, which makes me thankful that the talk shows of the time--Carson, Cavett, Griffin, Mike Douglas--booked serious American writers as guests , a class of introverts who spoke of great things and ideas while the camera was on them and which, in turn, pushed me to the bookstore, the library sale, the library stacks to get their books. We can run down the list of items he had a nuanced opinion on literature, politics, antiquity, American history, film, particular and peculiar aspects, niches and submerged terrains of popular culture and the currents that ran under it. He was the man to read whenever a new essay appeared or a new novel appeared on the new release table in a local bookstore. He was a lively, challenging read.

Still, there was something about Vidal that struck me as being a mile wide and an inch deep; there are points in both his essays and the many, many interviews he gave where he would cite the same facts, make the same sweeping declarations, offer the same crowd-pleasing diagnosis as to what exactly the matter with American at large happens to be and the same crowd soothing prognosis for the country, citizens and culture at large if his advice were heeded; Vidal would often sprinkle his views with scattered facts, but he rarely cited his sources, rarely delved into a matter and provided substantial, vetted analysis of many of things he spoke. As with many people I've met over the decades, Vidal seemed to be a brilliant writer who can make provocative and well-structured speculations to the origins of our lust for power and the cultural and institutional disguises we disguise our ambition with, but remaining, by and large, an intriguing conversationalist, the center of every cocktail party who offers things more quotable than useful as regards policy.

 That being said, allow me to insist that I agreed with most of what Vidal noted and recommended for the country. Vidal was a novelist, most of all, especially brilliant and grossly underrated by critics who were condescending even when they were giving his books favorable reviews. And I think his intellectual legacy will be less the political writings for which he most noted for and more for the large body of literary criticism and book reviews he wrote during his lifetime. He was a first-rate literary intelligence, powerful, insightful, able to detect fakes, fads, and balderdash in the work of other novelists who were trying too hard to be unique. I am grateful to him for a long essay he wrote reappraising the career of novelist Dawn Powell, author of "The Locusts Have No King" and other novels; she is, as Vidal wrote, the best American comic novelist of the 20th century. His essay helped bring her books back into print. I wound up being doubly blessed, being a man who had the honor of reading both Vidal and Powell in the same lifetime.

Whattaya know?

 I was making one of my constant vain attempts to clean the apartment when I came across a dog-eared mass market of Danny Sugarman's Jim Morrison memoir No One Here Gets Out Alive. Sugarman passed away in January of 2005, and a little bit of a flash back was all I needed to drop the broom and delay the clean up. Sugarman had the fortune and infamy to have been hanging around with the Doors since he was a mid-teen, and spent a good part of his adult life cashing in on the fact. During the Seventies he was scheduled to do a college reading in San Diego, and the editor of a local music weekly I wrote for at the time gave my name to the events organizer to be  Sugarman's "local poet" opening act.  

I didn't care for Sugarman's writing, but there was money in the deal, so I went and did the deal, and found old Danny to be a very nice guy indeed. Not a shred of detectable ego . It was the most enjoyable fifty bucks I've ever earned. I have to say that the least enjoyable fifty bucks I ever earned was having to read No One Here Gets Out Alive for a review for a local underground paper. Even as a young man who hadn't yet outgrown his obsession with the late Morrison's confused poetics and drunk posturing.I thought Sugarman's book was too much of a love letter, a mash note he couldn't stop writing. That said,  I will add that I remember Danny Sugarman being a  super guy, friendly, supportive in my own writing. He bought a copy of a chap book I brought to the reading. Alas. The apartment, you guess rightly, is still cramped with stuff and dusty as ghost town plates.

SNAP SHOTS AND STILL LIFES

SNAP SHOTS AND STILL LIFES: "

Source: Uploaded by user via Ted on Pinterest

"

'via Blog this'

Loose Fitting

(A slight expansion of a previous post.-TB)
_____________________________________

I thought this small verse I wrote  was a decent attempt at the loose-fitting sonnet form, as practiced by Ted Berrigan and featured in Gerald Stern’s engagingly gangly book American Sonnets. The distinction between these efforts and the Elizabethan sonnets one parses in college courses is that the “loose-fitting” form (my phrase) is an attempt to bring the particularly American instinct to confess and promote one’s idealized personality in free verse, ala Whitman and Charles Olson , with the limits a more formal structure. The results satisfy nearly no one but those who appreciate perversions of form, with the hope something new emerges. Sometimes something does.  A side comment, the phrase “loose fitting” comes from  the last time I bought a near pair of jeans, forty bucks  worth for one pair, a cut of denim termed as such, looser than what you  would normally purchase I suppose. It maybe a euphemism  for sizes intended for those recently widened in the     waist line and who tip the scale more than they had. None of this, though, ads gravity y to the sonnet, which is precisely what it is, nearly weightless, but nice all the same.

Sonnet 16

A sign of the cross and a sign on the door or just sign

yourself out if it’s a weekend pass you’re dealing with,

sign yourself up for a moment in the sun when you

have your tax refund check in hand, give us some cash for

the diversions that approach the distraction level

of morons who get their exercise reading the labels

on records as they go ‘round and ‘round on the

phonograph, signs of life in a living room, your parents

house and sofa, I am hiding behind a chair before the light

switch is flipped and a panic like business plans that come

undone where you signed a dotted line that ends up

being a perforations around your wrists, like you see

on butcher’s charts, you know, under the sign that reads

NO CHECKS, NO CREDIT, DON’T ASK.

 Interesting, and as often happens on the forums, the first response to the poem brought something else in the poem to think about other than how well it works as an amateurs attempt at  more structured verse.  It’s a relevant to ask   how many people understand what’s  meant by an oblique reference  to phonograph record labels spinning around as they play. Good question. Who would have thought that LP's would be something that reveals your generation? I remember years ago talking to a young man , twenty years younger than I at least, about various matters. When it came time to say goodbye, I said "I'll see you on the flip side".

 He looked puzzled as we shook hands as asked me what I meant by "flip side". In an instant I realized that he was too young to remember long playing albums, vinyl, and briefly explained that before CDs records had two sides, side A and side B, and that the phrase meant the other side of the record. The long and short of his wasn’t crucial to anything at hand, nor was it that interesting to anyone, but it was informative that I was now old enough that some of the cultural references I'd been using for decades were now potentially incomprehensible to younger adults. Existentialism   returns to toss another bowling ball down that long empty hall called a mind: life is incomprehensible outside the meaning you create for it, and the terms of that meaning , subtle though  they maybe, are quickly made obsolete by perversions of old definitions, and changes in technology. "Flip Side"  has no slang currency. It has precisely the same resonance as that of an old man on a bus trying to tell a college student about his glory days of seeing the MC5 and the Stooges in a Church basement on Detroit's 6 Mile Road. The student's eyes are off in a stare, his head plugged into his telephone, pizza joints, barber shops and tattoo parlors stream by the passenger windows. So we should remember this : wear the moments like it were a loose fitting garment, and bring a change of clothes.

SHUT THE FUCK UP

There events in our lives that are so stunningly horrible and unexpected that the only response, it would seem, is silence, the ghostly quiet that follows a bloody battle, the closed mouth response that takes over after all expectations and assumptions about decency, order and general goodwill have been pulverized.  "The Dark Knight Rises" had  premier midnight showing in Denver this morning and a man shows up, wearing a mask, heavily armed; he releases a gas bomb and begins to open fire on the crowd; twelve are dead, scads injured. Nothing makes sense. 

But we do have yammering media reiterating the same    spare facts, repetitions occasionally seasoned with one talking head's glittering generality . It's not that we can't stand not knowing, it seems to me, it's that we can't stand the silence . We need to talk. And critics, it seems, need to seem serious about their jobs no matter how tangentially a bit of horror  touches their area of expertise. Salon's film reviewer Andrew O’Hehir just couldn't pass up the chance to opine on something where opinions are useless.


The shootings in Denver are awful, evil in their intent and effect, an act of a deranged man, a "lone nut", that has , so far, left twelve people. It makes all of us heartsick to think of twelve gone from this world due to one person's delusions ; it makes me even sicker that a professional stress monger like Andrew O’Hehir is already wringing his hands with this inane, vapid column attempting to establish who is responsible for letting this massacre happen.When confronted with the horrible, the ugly, the unthinkable, the truly tragic, the likes of O’Hehir respond with copious amounts of scapegoating, finger pointing, general pouting. I venture this a way for writers who make a living interrogating the ebb and flow of pop culture make themselves feel relevant when events makes everyone's interests and passions seem absolutely trivial. This sort of writing appears to be an attempt to moralize, but the tone, uncentered and lacking any real point, seems less like an argument or more like someone talking to themselves after an accident. It is babbling of the first order, disguised as commentary. Shame on O’Hehir for feeling compelled to add his two cents. Two cents buys you nothing.