Bitch slapping talent

 I agree that talent that does not "risk" something in the expression --the poet, above all else to be interesting and intriguing to an inquiring reader, must have the nerve to risk failure and have, as well, a casual attitude to the possibility that he or she might wind up being embarrassed--gives us mere professionalism. But too often the creed is risk for its own sake with a contemptuous dismissal of the idea of "talent" as being a cruel hoax perpetrated by a long-running gang of conservative, homophobic, racist, anti-woman punks; I understand and generally agree with the critique, but somewhere along the lines what used to be considered "risk-taking" turned into another gathering of stylistics which has woefully influenced a couple of generations of writers. I seem to remember that genuine risk taker, whether Burroughs, Artaud, Beckett, Joyce, Ginsberg, Stein, Joyce, had solid foundations in tradition; they had a knowledge of what they were transgressing, taking apart and reassembling. 

They had that thing one calls "an ear" for the language they loved enough to master as writers and loved enough to goad it to forms that sharpened our collective wits with it in mind to see the world in new ways and so change it to something closer to the truth. Criticism, of course, judges how well these writers and others succeed or lapse eventually of their careers. History is not always kind: Kerouac was tone deaf, puffed up and pretentious in his rants, Ginsberg when from being genuinely inspired by visions and the legacy of Blake and Whitman and the Bible and became, in time, a mere self-chronicler, while Burrough's perversions, distortions, realignments, and genre-jumping fictions remain lively, fresh, funny and sinister, the definition of the Edge so many of us want to flirt with. 

The point is that talent and risk, ie, experimentation, need to be reconnected in a meaningful way that can, perhaps, spare us from another generation of too -easily published poets who seem little more than children banging on pianos that have had the keys removed.I would agree with the general assessment of the risk/talent dynamic, but I would venture further and argue that we need to skeptical of anyone's say-so and disdain any set of world-shrinking absolutes. Cultural pontiffs--choice phrase, Ace--often enough start off as punks and wind up giving us revised histories of their salad day heroes by arguing at length that the music, the novels, the plays and the poetry they liked in college and early professional life didn't try to smash rules, break forms or set fire to the palace, but rather tried to return art and aesthetics to principles that have been dormant, abandoned, forgotten. Eloquent apologies for one's formative taste, though, does not constitute a defense of the starker, more brittle frameworks that have dissolved like so much sugar in the guise of avant guard impulse; I am all for risk taking and rule breaking, but even the nastiest, least comprehensible bodies of work created by suitably sociopathic experimenters there are things that catch your ear, your eye, your fancy as you read what's in front of you, there are measures of genius that find that one thing in experience, that issue that no one had engaged, that combination of forms, ideas and attitude that had yet to be combined that strikes you a get level as real genius. 

I think these elements are genetic, organic, a hard to phrase dimension of human experience that transcends, easily, the problematics of social construction and canon makes. This is why I tend to support subjective or heroic criticism--the critic less a tastemaker than as someone who gathers their responses knee-jerk and reasoned both and conducts an inquiry to his own first-person criteria as to what constitutes failure or success in a frame, in a line, in a string of musical notes.

Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, reviewed. - Slate Magazine

Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, reviewed. - Slate Magazine:

'This is of great interest, as The Other Most Important American Novelist, Thomas Pynchon, has added his comic paranoid spin to the 9-11 attack. Bleeding Edge, reviewed by  Slate writer Troy Patterson in a a prose style that is ,well , ejaculative, sounds like a dense, comic masterpiece in a minor key. Powerful historical forces interest Pynchon greatly, but no more than does small things that get caught  up in the galvanizing events of change.

Patterson's best phrase about Pynchon's fiction-- V, Gravity's Rainbow, Crying of Lot 49,--is the presentation of history as farce; while Invisible Forces and conspiracies unconscious of their own existence gather, mingle , galvanize and alter the fates of nation, Pynchon concentrates on the regular Joes and Jessicas in the streets, in the cafes, at their workaday jobs, trying to make do and contend with their own comparatively picayune disasters and passions. Whatever grand , destructive, epoch changing things that take place outside the doors of where they live or work are merely the contents of a weather report--rain, snow, earthquake, V2 raid or terrorist attack, everyone adapts their plans and coping techniques and continues as they need to, as they must. 

Don DeLillo,  the writer who shares with Pynchon my Most Important American Novelist assignation, wrote his 9-11 novel, Fallen Man, which seemed, sorry to say, a bit tired; the mixture of odd, random elements from the culture , as translated by television and internet, contrasted , continually against a cast of emotionally neutered characters trying to reconstruct their sense of  autonomy following the horrible events, does not convey the implied irony DeLillo has a master at . 

Loss as been a larger part of DeLillo's writing, the center of his magnificent poetic style, but following the sustained genius of  his masterpiece Underworld--the secret history of the second half of the American Century-- the further extrapolation of the subject on an event of such horrific violence that what is inexpressible eludes DeLillo, who is usually a man who can create a sense of  moods that otherwise defy language to  contain their essence.

 Short as it is, Fallen Man plodded with heavy feet. Pynchon, from the sound of Patterson's review, makes it sound as if the reclusive author contained and converted the energy  of  the hysterical response and decided to laugh, the joke being that despite the blows to our lives, our cities, our metaphysics of order and purpose and our rational attempts to reconcile horror against Grand Designs and Great Agendas, life, being life, goes on, it goes on. Pynchon finds the fact that the smartest among us don't get this and the activities we create in response to disaster is , at heart, a comedy. I look forward to reading this.

Are Andy Warhol's 15 minutes over? |

Are Andy Warhol's 15 minutes over? | Art and design | 

The idea that Pop Art was, in fact, Capitalist Folk Art, a form natural in its development as artists, naive in the most intelligent way, intuitively understood that the iconography and discarded wreckage was a form of art. French critics and habitual theorists have witlessly obfuscated this point, to the point that the actual no longer exists, and now there are only unceasing replications of a vague idea of historical imagery and design. I always preferred Walter Benjamin's essay 'Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", as I think the same ideas are explored earlier in the age, with a cheery optimism and mystical poetics that is hard to resist.Benjamin was romantic enough to believe that art was a good thing for the individual and for the culture as a whole. He was convinced that the mass-reproduction of art images was necessary for a beneficial, if violent transition. Art revealed to the many empowers those multitudes to dream of possibilities and the methods of fomenting the change.

Benjamin believed that art's principal function was to produce joy, which one could consider to be a heightened sense of awareness. Warhol reflected this, though he wasn't a polemicist or an activist. He was an artist who liked things from pop culture and things that are thrown away. He was interested in how factory goods looked when they were tattered and torn around the edges. He was in love with the imperfection of the much circulated meme as it went from one copier to the next. While Warhol's art did make me aware of how much economy, finances, and manufactured consent shaped my tastes, one wonders at Warhol's refusal to lecture, to say what he thought, and to say what he thought. He was a serene Buddha who gave us a mirror of our consumption who revealed, without rant or rhetoric, what's consuming us.

Wood Allen's "Interiors" and critical revisionism

Woody Allen’s Interiors: Revisiting Allen’s first Ingmar Bergman-inspired drama. - Slate Magazine:

Woody Allen's new film "Blue Jasmine" has been getting some of the best notices  for the director's late-areer efforts, a fact that justifies, perhaps, a reexamination of some of his other less fondly remembered, less discussed films. Allen, more than any American film maker, deserves a retrospective. Slate has argued that Interiors, his first straight on drama , no comedy, and a stylistic tribute to his hero Ingmar Bergman, actually rises above its reputation as a stiff and shallow presentation of depressed , well read white folks and is , indeed, a serious, inspired drama. Reading the article convinced that there are indeed nuanced themes that course through the decades of films Allen has written and directed since the  60s, and that growth from being an inspired slap stick comic with a library card to a more verbal, nuanced, cerebral film maker leads inevitably to a film like" Interiors".

 Still, I don't think it's anything near Allen's best work. In this case, the general consensus I read among long time Allen fans is correct, that the movie is a paceless, stationary    bore. The irony is that Woody Allen has done inspired parodies of other film directors through out his professional life and his mitigated his penchant  for genre tributes with a Burlesque crudeness,a low wit , that kept him from taking himself so seriously. At the end of the day it could be said that "Interiors" succeeds in being Allen's parody masterpiece,  mimicry and mockery  so dead on target that you mistake it for being the real article; it would more credible to argue that Allen's real intention with this film was comedy of the most subtle and perverse type, that which imitates the pervading , saddening stylistics of Bergman's  movie introspection to an obsessive degree, producing an effect of unreality, a critical distance that prevents the audience from engaging characters who really comprehend the psychology that motivates the shuffling movement.

This leaves the audience in a bewildering state of nagging "what the hell?", wondering if they should laugh or be moved by what they've seen. The joke , of course, would be the theories film goers would construct to make sense of the time they spent in the dark, growing listless, watching actors stare past one another. Even if this were the case, I prefer the simpler explanation: "Interiors"  was an important  transitional film for Allen to make, but that does not remove the fact that is a dull  transition that fortunately led to better work to follow.

RAPTURE

 (What I should make clear is that I am not a practicing Christian , have the mind of an agnostic, and haven't much faith in theologies that pretend they have knowledge of what the end of history is like. I do appreciate the poetry of The Rapture concept, though, and meant only to create a "what-if" scenario, such as what would be like if this event occured in one of the many neighborhoods John Cheever might have attended cocktail and wife swapping parties at.I'm agnostic toward religion, not God. I've done my seeking and have found what I've needed. Needed today, to be even clearer.
A usefully spiritual life is a day-at-a-time thing, and this day, this morning I'll seek guidance for the day yet to come. Plainly, I don't think God is much concerned with getting the lot of us into Heaven as He is living good, useful , creative and and kind lives in this life, on this planet. If God is all wise and all knowing, He hasn't the time nor patience to set up our existence like it were a Game Show. -tb)

 RAPTURE

The mailman drops his parcels and

falls to his knees in the middle of the street

 

as a light comes through the clouds and

makes the commotions of the city radiate

 

gold tones like the frozen poses

of ancient photographs

 

found under the stairs of every parent’s house

that aging children have to close.

 

You see the mailman on his knees and wonder

why he’s praying, hardly aware of the increase in light

 

or the music that blares all the big band music of

trumpets and saxophones that disguise the grind of

 

passing cars, it’s such a shame that religious fanatics

are hired to deliver the mail, you think, so much depends

 

on what comes through the System, envelopes full of

what’s owed and what’s not covered by any plan

 

that can be written down; you run the water in the sink,

 you wonder where did the clouds go? 

There is no rain anywhere,

says the radio announcer,

and the light is tremendous all over the globe,

 

there is not a dark corner

 in any corner or nook on the earth,

 

And then the radio gives out to static, and the TV

releases itself to snow, the music in the street is very loud

 

and swinging hard to the left and the right and then right down the

middle as all the notes scurry brilliantly through the hedges

 

and up the driveways, into the homes with each reed instrument

improvising disembodied melodies that form their own sheet music,

  

That is a very loud set of speakers in that passing car, you think.

and the radio announcer cuts through the music and says something you

 

hear as that millions of people all over the world have just vanished in

plain site under bright light and big bang music, gone in a wisp and puff of smoke,

 

You look at your watch and note that it’s time for lunch,

the clouds have fallen over the city again, the sky darkens,

 

the shapes of the neighborhood take on their deep hues again, saddened

with history, dense in dumb witness to what never ends,

 

You stop, look out the window; you turn off the water you ran,

in the middle of the street, by itself, flat on the cement,

 

The mailman’s bag and his clothes,

topped by his hat,  kissed by a cool breeze.

Wow--Moby Grape

Their first album, Moby Grape, is on generally considered one of the best albums done by a Sixties American band, and with good reason, but I've got a soft spot for their sophomore effort, the much-maligned Wow. It certainly deserved some critical slamming sit received when it was released in 1968, as the band and producer had a batch of solid songs they wanted to gussy up, festoon and otherwise psychedelicize in the trend of over-produced pop wrought by Pet Sounds and Sgt.Pepper. Large parts were literally unlistenable--at the time of release, the band killed the "news-tolgia" fad of the period that not only had one song written and performed in the 20's style but which also required the poor stoner to get up and change the album speed from 33 and 1/3 to 78 rpm. The results were not amusing. Some songs come out unscathed, though, as with "Motorcycle Irene", "Murder in My Heart for the "Judge","Can't Be So Bad". At heart a good band gone bad from drugs, ego, and mental illness, but what they had, briefly, was terrific talent. Jerry Miller was one of the best blues guitarist of the period, bittersweet, and fluid in ways Mike Bloomfield never quite realized, Bob Mosely was a natural blues belter, and Skip Spence was an American Syd Barrett, fried before his time. Needless to say, I'm burning a disc of the best tracks and jettisoning the artsy remainders, which are unsustainable and hopelessly junked up with effects.

Tom Cruise autobiography: His recent movies Oblivion, Rock of Ages, and Jack Reacher. - Slate Magazine

Tom Cruise autobiography: His recent movies Oblivion, Rock of Ages, and Jack Reacher. - Slate Magazine:

It's not so odd that a number the plot points in Cruise's movies echo themes that appear in the confounding mythology of his religion. Certainly one could also harp on the Catholic themes in the novels of Graham Greene and yield a bounty of evidence ; we don't, however , tend to get bent out of shape over the religious overtones of the novels or their more sinister implications and instead prefer to enjoy a good yarn. Greene was good at writing good yarns. The main concern with Cruise isn't whether his movies have a subtext endorsing a controversial cult, but whether Cruise is consistently adept at choosing good movies to star in. Like anyone else in the public eye and who stars in movies, his track record is uneven, although his batting average is better than Nicholas Cage's. For Cruise himself, he is a puzzling man in terms of his public persona, but my principle concern is whether the movies he elects to make and release for my consumer consideration are the fully realized entertainments worth the ticket price. Or the rental price, for that matter.