I saw this when it was first broadcast and thought even then that it was
an inspired mismatch of musical sensibilities. Jones is one of the
greatest white rhythm and blues singers of all time--range, power,
nuance, texture echo Otis Redding, Ray Charles
and Solomon Burke with stunning ease and feeling--but he is incapable
of just standing still and singing the notes. He over sings this
tune--too much melisma on a song requiring a less protective approach is
melodramatic, not dramatic, and can seem silly although it is fun to hear Jones
give an overwrought reading of the warning that the listener ought to
be ready to cut their hair should things get hairy with the Man. The swinging, swank, tight slacks wearing Jones, that guy who has to keep that pelvis in motion regardless of subject matter, mood or prevailing fashion and decor, gets down with The People! Odder things have been aligned, I guess, but not many.
Interesting band reactions as well; David Crosby looks amused and looks to be
suppressing a snicker, while Stills sounds inspired by Jones' gospel
inclinations to be a soul man himself. Neil Young, the only member of CSN&Y of any kind of brilliance, appears thoroughly unamused.
Monday, July 29, 2013
Friday, July 26, 2013
It used to be that "hero" and "jerk" meant the same thing...
Truthfully, I used to like Aerosmith
quite a bit and still get an adrenaline rush when I hear their best tunes.
Guitar-centric rock was my preference in the Sports Arena days, but where other
bands of the era now bore me and dated themselves badly, AS were pretty much
the best at catchy riffs, savage, terse guitar solos and absurdly clever double
-signifying lyrics. The words “hero” and “jerk” meant pretty much the same
thing, a person, usually male, who lacked social grace and /awareness and would
subject the surrounding community to eruptive demonstrations of a personality
that was the breathing variety of
spray-can graffiti, bold, smeared, runny, jagged and stupid as a bag of wood
chips. Luckily, yes, luckily, I survived the
best I could do in those days and learned that there were more
interesting ways to make art, to have a conversation and woo a potential lover,
subtler forms of conversation and chatter, smarter ways of making your presence
known. But we all have to start somewhere; I was lucky enough to have wanted to
aspire to being somewhat more than a farm-league lout.
The combination of riff -craft and
professed cocksmanship was made to order for any frustrated 20-year-old genius
yearning to abandon his book learning' and take up the microphone, center
stage, instead. As you know, my tastes have gravitated, gratefully,
towards mainstream jazz and blues over the last thirty five years--classic
Miles, Coltrane, Mel Lewis, Wayne Shorter, Joe Pass, lots of Blue Note,
Atlantic, ECM, Pacific Jazz, Verve, Impulse, Fantasy record releases--and rock
and roll no longer interests me in large measure. But I still get a charge when
a good AS is played--I rather like Tyler's rusty drain pipe screaming and I
believe Joe Perry is one heck of a good chunk-chording guitarist. It helps, I
guess, that these guys never got far from some rhythm and blues roots, even if
those roots come from the Stones and not Motown or Stax. This may be damning
with faint praise, but they were a brilliant expression of a young glandular
confusion.
What makes this art is this band's
skill at sounding like they never learned anything fifty feet past the school
yard and not much else beyond the age of 25. As we age and suffer the
sprains , creaks and cancer symptoms, inherited and self-inflicted,
our past gets more gloriously delinquent more we talk about it and we find
ourselves gravitating to those acts of yore who seemed to maintain a genuine
scowl and foul attitude. Nearly any rock band based on rebellion and
extreme bouts of immaturity just seems ridiculous after awhile--Peter Townsend
is lucky enough to have had more ambition in his songwriting with Tommy and Who's Next to have lived down the dubious distinction of
having written the lyric that exclaimed that he would rather die before he got
old. Aerosmith, in turn, still sounds good and rocking as often as not
simply because they have mastered their formula. The sound a generation of us
newly minted seniors occasionally pined for remains the audio clue to an
idea of integrity and idealism; what is disheartening, if only for a moment, is
that this band's skill at sounding 21 and collectively wasted is a matter of
professionalism and not an impulse to smash The State.
Rock and roll is all about
professionalism , which is to say that some 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 oooopha. The 5 would get the crowd into a 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 integetity, 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 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 muisic--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 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 change. 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 middlin', or seem out of ideas, winded; 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.
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, pedestrian. The quality of the
critics vary; their function relates art, however, is valid. It is a
legitimate enterprise. Otherwise we'd be treating artists like they were
priests
Thursday, July 18, 2013
Photo copied genius
Plagiarism seems a sociopathic activity, like other forms of theft,
petty and grand. The thief, due to whatever contorted world view, finely
ratcheted system of rationalization and a dependable lack of conscious
that they're doing any something wrong, will merely take someone else's
writing and assign their name to it, no problem.
The only labor involved was the discovery of the writing that's about to be absconded , and whatever effort it took to cut and paste the material. What is especially aggravating isn't the big names that have been caught pilfering from other authors--Goodwin, Ambrose and Haley can at least fall back on laying the blame on harried research staffs--but rather t
I ran a poetry series for years in the seventies and eighties, where open readings were featured, and among the other poets, good, bad but definitely original in their work, where three regulars who read Dickens, Blake, Eliot, Marvel and Johnson , each of them claiming to have written the poems they just voiced. Others in attendance at these readings couldn't believe what they were witnessing, but no one said anything, fearing a fight or some such thing, until finally I cornered one guy, a forty year old, at the end of the last open reading I would MC. He'd just read a thick, awkward Canto by Pound, and I could see a dog eared copy of Ezra's poems crammed in his backpack. He taken the time to type out what he was appropriating , and introduced the poem as "the hardest thing I've ever composed..." I told him he has to stop taken credit for poems someone else composed. Not blinking, he stared at he, zipping his backpack shut, obscuring the Pound volume I conspicuously made note of. "Fuck, you man," he said,"language is free and genius isn't understood
in it's lifetime."
"Ezra Pound is dead for decades" I said,"and I still don't like him. But you gotta stop saying his stuff is yours."
He walked out, the cafe owner turned out the lights, and I stopped hosting poetry series that night onward, and that is precisely the reason I'm still able to write and read poetry without losing a lung.
he
thievery of the truly mediocre scribe who continually gets caught using
other people's writing as his or her own, and yet continues to claim
authorship for the work of others.
The only labor involved was the discovery of the writing that's about to be absconded , and whatever effort it took to cut and paste the material. What is especially aggravating isn't the big names that have been caught pilfering from other authors--Goodwin, Ambrose and Haley can at least fall back on laying the blame on harried research staffs--but rather t
I ran a poetry series for years in the seventies and eighties, where open readings were featured, and among the other poets, good, bad but definitely original in their work, where three regulars who read Dickens, Blake, Eliot, Marvel and Johnson , each of them claiming to have written the poems they just voiced. Others in attendance at these readings couldn't believe what they were witnessing, but no one said anything, fearing a fight or some such thing, until finally I cornered one guy, a forty year old, at the end of the last open reading I would MC. He'd just read a thick, awkward Canto by Pound, and I could see a dog eared copy of Ezra's poems crammed in his backpack. He taken the time to type out what he was appropriating , and introduced the poem as "the hardest thing I've ever composed..." I told him he has to stop taken credit for poems someone else composed. Not blinking, he stared at he, zipping his backpack shut, obscuring the Pound volume I conspicuously made note of. "Fuck, you man," he said,"language is free and genius isn't understood
in it's lifetime."
"Ezra Pound is dead for decades" I said,"and I still don't like him. But you gotta stop saying his stuff is yours."
He walked out, the cafe owner turned out the lights, and I stopped hosting poetry series that night onward, and that is precisely the reason I'm still able to write and read poetry without losing a lung.
A personal note
photo by Jill Moon |
Two milestones came and went by earlier this week, the first being a routine promotion in the ranks of early citizenship by my turning 61 years of age, the second being the miraculous achievement of 26 tears of consecutive sobriety. Grouse as I might, my dismay at getting older, of garnering more birthdays while
I'm still able to breathe, is because of what happened the day after my natal birthday 26 years ago,which was to finally just abandon the jail cell we call the ego and admit that nothing I was doing was working out and that, in short order,
I would face the likely prospect of joblessness, homelessness, and a likely death. That hasn't happened yet and to this day, despite my frequent eruptions of personality (materializing the form of tantrums, arguments, curmudgeonly lectures and unexpected flair ups of tasteless repartee) I am awe of what happened to me two and a half decades ago; to this day, again,
I haven't quite figured it out other than I stumbled into a community of sober people whose collective experience matched and exceeded mine and that they had found a solution to their alcoholism and addiction with a spiritual means that they gladly shared with me. This is not to say that I got religion and that's my intent to preach--I am loath to be lectured to, and I remain agnostic with regards to the consolidated concepts of organized religion--but I think it suffices to say that I've adopted a set of principles that have kept me on course for a good number of years through celebrations and tragedies, good news and bad news and no news at all. I look around and find myself blessed with friends, fellowship, good health, a personality that is happier more often than it was no that long ago.
What a strange ride it's been, what a wonderful journey it remains.
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Is anyone else weary of over reaching essays declaring Poetry either dead or hopelessly out of touch? Mark Edmundson takes a turn at being the drudge
This is a spirited response to the 2013 Mark Edmundson essay in Harper's in which he declares American poetry obscure and out of touch. The "out of touch" accusation is legitimately up for debate, especially what that nondescript thing it is poets are supposed to be in "touch" with to begin with, but the charge that poetry is obscure misses the point. Edmundson sounds repulsed that modern in this country has become more difficult in many ways, that the clear vision of someone who can truly see as they are, without filters, is instead beset by clouds. It's the other way around because when it works, poetry is a case of the thing that was formerly being seen finally being given definition although, in the initial perception, that set of elements, the new connections between items that were unknown until the poet's discovery of them, is unrecognizable. Piety is about giving names to things that refuse, so far, to have them. Poetry is poetry precisely because it is more obscure in expression than even the most knotted prose style; it's safe to say that poetry from as early as we decided to subject it to critical agendas has been praised for its ability to avail the poet and thus the reader to witness connections between things--humankind and its experience in the world, whatever ideological or spiritual dogma informs the monologue-- that clean syntax and standardized reason would not.
The trick Edmundson tries to pull is Intimidation through Erudition--the sheer speed and volume of the writers he cites as evidence of his perceived trend toward obscurity and "being out of touch" and those he mentions favorably are located in the essay to impress, not substantiate. The problem is basically that his subject is too large--American Poetry has a rich and praiseworthy tradition of "difficult" poets and poetry who require more contextualized discussion, and that it is the tendency of serious poets, generally speaking, to address their ideas in ways that challenge conventional language use. He speaks of "us" and other tropes of so-called "real world" touchstones that are ignored in too much modern poetry, proceeding blindly (and blandly) under the assumption that everyone's experience of the world is popped from the same mold. This amounts as an insult to poetry itself and speaks to the limitations of Edmundson's imagination. He makes me think of someone who grabbed too many things from Supermarket aisles who thought he could shop without a basket; the results is that half of what he tries to bring to the cashier is dropped in his carelessness and haste.
The irony of the long battle for concrete and clear expression in poetry only gives rise to new forms of obscurity, for the most part. For all the modernist talk of addressing objects directly, free of literary baggage and abstraction--no ideas but in things, etc--we have instead of new forms of obscurity. But obscurity is a loaded word and I think what Edmundson objects to is ambiguity; whichever one you choose and whatever kind of poetry you’re dealing with, whether light bulb bare or elephantine and dressed in relentlessly hard to place analogies, a reader still needs to work through the poets filters and conceits and put the pieces together. The cry against obscurity, per se, is a straw man--what really counts is discerning and judging how well one uses that innate ambiguity/obscurity, and that is a discussion that needs an actual framework. My basic criteria is how well the poet uses this freedom, this allowance to be off center and slightly vague in his or her argument; does the writer give us a sense of what they are getting at in terms of the memorable, the truly unforgettable, are they original in metaphor and simile, are they a pleasure to parse, or are they merely another slog through trope-heavy ineptitude? Edmundson's point is a non-starter since he insists that obscurity ought "never” to be part of a how poetry is defined and that the principal aim of any valid poetry is to bring "clarity" to its subject. This is a plainly, baldly, stupidly reductionist argument that denies that the world has changed dramatically since the era before prose forms usurped poetry's standing as the dominant narrative form, and that the ways of thinking of the world, of perceiving the bigger picture hasn't been affected by the ongoing flux of new technologies, economic orders, long and bloody wars, natural disasters. Where the role of art, poetry included, was to reconcile the human race's bad fortune with religious dogma and the like (which promised both purpose and coherence if a subtly and not so subtly shackled population remained complacent and accepted the status quo), the influx of rapid change, due, perhaps, with the invention of movable type and the increase of literacy and the general rise of expectations among workers and middle class in their lifetime, not the ones waiting for them in a theoretical heaven, the world came to see as less definite, less clear, in need of a more subjective response in order to connect the raw edge of one's experience against their expectations. Art changed in turn, a natural and right response to the general dialectic that I believe history orders itself as. Edmundson wants the world to remain fixed in the old Platonic notion that there is an immutable reality behind the mere appearances of
This world and that poetry must continue to seduce us to describe an Ideal that is more perfect, more real (for that matter) than what we have in front of us. This default metaphysics is wishful thinking and a strained argument for the dominance of the sort of window-pane clarity he insists on--it is a dangerous argument because rather than doing the real intellectual spadework of discussing, dissecting, digressing and discerning what is valuable, interesting, notable, entertaining, awful, ordinary, cliched, trite , contrived among the many varieties of poetic forms available to us, he would simply wish that the last four or five hundred years of the modern era never took place; it is a dangerous idea to try to roll back people's thinking back to before the 16th century. I hardly like every "modern" and "obscure" poem I read--I dislike most poems I come across--but the point is to develop an ongoing critical response where qualities of worth and mediocrity are made clearer with regards to the way the diverse majority of us actually live. What Edmundson proposes is taking us to a land where dead things and ideas, so-called, carry more weight than what is alive, witty, interesting because of the elan that makes it unpredictable. Edmundson doesn’t want to start discussions, he wants to end them.
A localized, qualitative criticism would be better for getting people interested in poets and their work; this debate, about the vitality or sterility of American Poetry, speaks broadly, too broadly on either side. So broad that much is much is undisguised and the point finely lost. Who are these people yelling into their cell phones about the price of multigrain bread? What does the bread taste like?
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
CLOUD ATLAS: visually arresting, unbearably pretentous
I had a chance to see “Cloud Atlas” last night, something that was, in essence, a three-hour tour of your own living room. This movie was ambitious, a delight to look at, and thoroughly pretentious. The actors gave uniformly fine performances and the design of the whole enterprise had a nice feel and look, but it was long, long, long, and finally made laborious by a vague pedanticism, a lecturing quality conveyed continually when spotlighted characters happen to have an "a ha" experience in which things are revealed give a little speech about the interconnections between people and their events, across borders, cultures, times, dimensions. The Wachowski siblings seem incapable of making a smart sci-fi movie that doesn't lay out its alleged philosophical underpinnings while already tone-deaf and padded dialogue.
They should try an experiment and adapt an Elmore Leonard novel to film, "Pagan Babies", say, or "Mr. Paradise". Leonard's crime fiction, specifically those featuring the hi jinx of chatty, nitwit criminals in and around the gravel and grime of Detroit's gothic ruins, has the sort of fast thinking, cleverly arranged wording that is both memorable and compact;attuned to ironic asides rather than summary declarations of what has gone before and what the nuances should be notices on the way to a unifying theory of bad faith. His dialogue is texture and lends complexity to the characters as they go about their mission to gratify their baser instincts. Shakespeare would appreciate Leonard's skill. The Wachowski siblings, specifically, to resist the urge to engage in junior college metaphysics and bring their talent for sharp visuals in line with writing that moves the plot and entertains while it engages. They need source material that will slap the bullshit out of them.
Sunday, June 23, 2013
http://youtu.be/1ZSSQ1q3HiYGuitarist
Allen Holdsworth first came to my attention as the lead player in the
British hard rock band Tempest, which was led by drummer Jon Hiseman.
The band itself was quite good, if bedeviled by inconsistent material,
but Hiseman's drum work was particularly good, a combination of Mitch
Mitchell and Elvin Jones, snappy and brisk. But it was Holdsworth who
got and kept my attention; the guitar improvisations were a revelation,
years ahead of the stylistic curb when Eddie VanHalen would suck up all
the attention among guitar fanatics.
Holdsworth was a bold and
exploratory soloist, blessed with a fluidity and speed that are
distinct, and a technical agility to start a solo in any position, in
any key, from any angle he chooses. There is something cerebral and serene about this musicians alacrity as a improvisiational thinker; his solos are vexing for those wanting typical whiz kid wheel spinning offered by Malmsteen wannabes and those who want their jazz fusion players to be either witlessly conservative in the chicken scratching department, or technically impressive and impatient , as has been Al DiMeola's preferred style for decades, whether playing electric or acoustic guitar. Holdsworth is one of those artists who regards each solo as an original composition--there are beginnings, middles and ends. There , in addition to the eccentrically articulated lines he assembles odd chord voicings, unusual mid-tones , and an ever surprising series of brilliant stretches of fleet inspiration.
Even when he was playing over the
Cream-esque riffs of Tempest, Holdsworth aimed toward a jazz complexity.
That side of him was amply filled during his later stints in the bands
Soft Machine, Gong, Jean Luc-Ponty and The New Tony Williams Life, and
especially his own series of solo efforts and collaborations. He is
among the few guitarists from that period who continue to interests and
intrigue me, as his combination of register-jumping speed, oft-kilter
cadences and phrasing, and grandly convoluted note combinations makes me
think of improvisors no less grand than Coltrane or Wayne Shorter.
Yes, I think Holdsworth is that good.
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