Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Ballad of a thin man



The greatest gift the internet has given us is that it has made the stuff of our collective teen years, our conquer-the-world years into the stuff that is retrieved from that attics, basements and from the garages of  memory and posted on the social media one a user’s choice. We get to oohh and ahh   or groan with embarrassment over how wonderful or, on reflection, how preposterous the playthings our younger selves are in retrospect.  Barry Alfonso, writer, journalist and cultural historian par excellence, posted this on a site. I laughed when I witnessed this items reappearance, an album of Sebastian Cabot, gentlemanly English actor best known for his work as Mr. French on the hokey sitcom “Family Affair”, reciting the lyrics of Bob Dylan. This was, of course, intended as an inspired jam session in which Dylan’s worth as a poet was established without equivocation. The equivocation remains, though, as the results are a classic case of belated comedy. That accent and that acting style can't help but sound incurably absurd considering the kind of poetic vernacular Dylan, an idealized form of street jive. 

The problem is made worse in that Cabot's actorly dramatic pauses, his stressing of certain syllables over others in a line, the rising and falling of his voice as though in actual conversation, is just the sort of thing if you're dealing with the multi-rhythmic beats of Shakespeare, Marlowe or, say, Elmore Leonard; there is more for a man with a trained voice to work with. A parallel example would be that it is more interesting to hear Miles Davis improvise on "My Funny Valentine" or "Someday My Prince Will Come" rather than "Time After Time" or "Human Nature." Genius lyricist as he has been over the decades, Dylan’s lyrics is not stand-alone poems, as they require the melodies to achieve their full power. Cabot is game in trying to make these words seem larger than they are, but it is a ridiculous combination. 

The comedy is as unintentional here as it was in "Plan 9 from Outer Space"; since it was a "hip" thing at the time this record was made to insist that Dylan was a poet, first and foremost. Since this was the conventional wisdom at the time, it was also a selling point and doubtlessly some record exec had an idea that they should get a "real”, i.e. British actor to recite Dylan's words. Sebastian did what did best; apply his voice of refined elocution, to what Dylan did best. The results are a conspicuous mismatch, I think, and don't sense anything purposefully subversive, intentionally comic, or post-modernly ironic about this. It is funny in the way the pursuit of an innocently bad idea is funny--the awfulness is obvious to everyone but the participants, who've been seduced by their expectations.

Enigmas don't shop in their pajamas

There is an ongoing project among a current generation of critics and poets to make the ever baffling , provocative and incontestably brilliant poet Emily Dickinson a less problematic figure in the American literary terrain. Famous for her reclusive lifestyle and extremely selective preferences as to who she had personal contact and communication with,  some effort has been made to make  her a more human, more public figure. The publication of the handwritten "envelope poems" is the latest in the trend to bring her into the sunshine. I welcome the addition of more , previously unknown verse to her body of work, but the insistence on publishing them with careful rendered photos of the actual pieces of paper to be evidence of a growing fetishism; it seems less an effort to bring more insight into the words than it is , say, for an obsessed reader to imagine a real person who might have written these things in states of meditative reflection. That makes the book more stunt than an essential unveiling of  unknown poems. I wish there was a book merely with the poems printed, without the clutter. Here the result, for this   reader, is that the more I find out about her, the less is revealed. 

 Emily Dickinson was cryptic for reasons known only to herself, I’m afraid, but I am of the mind that she intended her compact lyrics to be interpreted any number of ways. Irony, contradiction, revelation; her poems move along general the general theme that one’s thinking, Dickinson’s, evolves with time, gently or brutally, and that the time to be a witness is finite. Nuances and whispered implications abound in her work and, beyond a loosely gathered bit of conventional wisdom about ED’s general themes and concerns; there is plenty in her work to warrant continued, fascinating and inconclusive opinions about where the center of the poem, its motivating core and precise particulars lie. But what is also fascinating and important to speculate is what’s not included in the poem; what is outside the text is a worthy subject of investigation/speculation.

 It is an element that makes ED contemporary to this day, as a body of work that still resonates with a modern readership discovering a wit, an insight, a corresponding feeling in her splendidly fragmented manner. My information is nothing else but my own reading gauged against my own experience, both as citizen and poet. What I’ve said I have found in the text, really. Literary commentary, of course, is not science and it is particularly pointless to insist on anything like “back to the data”. Historical context for poems is fine for perspective, but language is a living thing, not stagnate, as you know, and ED’s word choices. I am convinced that there are meanings in great poems that those most great poets were entirely unaware; poetry is an intuitive process however much a crafted discipline comes into play. There is the superficial element, the glitter, the dazzle, the alluring set of phrases that seem to say one thing, and then there are things that combined suggest and point toward matters perhaps the author might not have been aware of, let alone the reader. That is the joy of criticism, a rage of interpretative opinions based on the text. I fairly much reject definitive, “authoritative” interpretations of works of art. 

Saturday, February 8, 2014

Wings of Desire by Amy King

'
Wings of Desire  / BY AMY KING

This is what it sounds like outside,
fat geese and guinea hens holding hands.
I am 31, which is very young for my age.
That is enough to realize I’m a pencil that has learned
how to draw the Internet. I explain squiggles
diagramming exactly how I feel and you are drawn to read
in ways you cannot yet. Slow goes the drag
of creation, how what’s within comes to be without,
which is the rhythmic erection of essence.
Life’s little deaths, petite orgasms, as the French nearly said
but never came to. Feathers outstrip the weather
as we stand with binoculars inquiring how
winged creatures can hold their blood to warmth
without a proper insulation system overlaying circulation.
That is, sans fat and simple wooden bones with hair glued on.
Mostly though they pulsate on the horizons of backlit vision,
where we only meet the subways with handshakes,
the rainbow filters of downloaded electronica,
the telephone poles as archaic checkpoints to past cultures.
They don’t have screens to seek their cues in.
We drift from one culture to another and fight
the stitcheries of racism, classism,
anti-Muslim terrorists among us,
with overlaps in the complete dis-ease our bodies
settle into for next to no resistance.
So we create something else.
As in, roughshod moments of fake hate
will position a fluid hello of death rattles
that settle for the injunction of existence and state:
Here am I made manifest by not being you,
by not going in the same unsteady destination,
by not asking the questions or repeating
the paintings that came before me,
by not singing in the register of  your bubble baths
as you hug that person close in a wish to outlast
bullets, even as the light leaves your eyes
just a little next time we overlap paths.
So the hens and geese make us think in terms of help
outside, how they flap and move with fat ease in front of trains,
across the chopping block, to the hungry winters of final leviathans,
even as they land just so on the wires above us,
and we go on complaining, murderous, too far out, unspoken.

Like the man said and the woman toasted, this poem is a stream of hot verbs, adjectives and metaphors that link the perennial  quest for self-definition with the blunt truths about realizing that the world is merely a unsolvable phenomena that cares less of our unique personalities and exists only as a plain where other self-defined entities meet and learn to get along and love or to further dig in their teeth , gnash their respective rows of teeth and fight, with bricks, with bottles, with sex, with words. It is a struggle either as negotiation or war sans army  or navy, the playthings of the interior world come into the waking life and those of us with the habit of insisting that first thoughts are the best and most accurate find out rapidly or in drawn-out decades that it is not enough to express yourself or exclaim your philosophy of the moment to an existence that is abstract and other, it is more a matter of being yourself in  the midst of circumstances that don't know your name, of relating less theory to the community around you and more of the insight of lived experience , of  having been wrong and right in equal measures over the years and finding a true irony that allows you and the world to lean closer together, as if to kiss, to hug, to rejoice in the presence of people and places that don't repel you with secret identities and unspoken alternate plans. Amy King is a fevered search not for the absolute, for the genuine.

 What I love about Amy King's poems is the collisions she sets forth, the speed of her connections, how often her observance of the commonplace strikes a target, how fluidly accurate her remarks are, how truthfully dumbfounding the ironies are.  "Wings of Desire" is all of this, of course, a debate those parts of the self that want to rule an interior perfection where it is always elegance at a whim, and the those other elements of personality that look out the window of the soul to world that it wants to be a part of, to be in love with, to conquer, to change and to merge as one with. Hers is a detailed Baedeker guide at a little over the legendary 45 RPM; it's hardly a matter of noticing telling details of the constructions, social and material, that form the resemblances between our Ideal Types and their expression on the Physical Plain, this is also a series of voices from inside the perception that sees the flaws in the design, the dysfunction of the results, the turmoil the best intentions create. Here is poetry about shaking your head, running your hands through your hair, gathering your wits and deciding, after road-testing your theories for decades, to be yourself, finally, unashamed of your talent, unembarrassed by your desires. You cease to be a problem to solve. Like a poem, you do not mean. You be.

 Amy King is fast and blunt and writes in lovely, magnificently fast lines that are something like the quicksilver bebop of Parker, the modal transformations of Coltrane, the hard-shovel digging of a McLaughlin; in all this accelerated, excited revelation, though, is tenderness, the center of the heart that is at war with its own contrary impulses, a consciousness that seeks the true center of being in the eyes of others it seeks to be connected to. King's is a poetry of that desire and those mad flights. Her poems are about love and touching, groping, kissing, caring, finding a truth beyond words that cures the senses. Her poems are manic and magic and the sort of thing that gets me thinking and back to the keyboard, writing my own crazy language.

Friday, February 7, 2014

At risk

Culture is worth a little risk, as Norman Mailer would have it, but we should add that that we need to skeptical of anyone's say-so and disdain any set of world-shrinking absolutes. Cultural pontiffs often enough start off as punks in the alley hanging out by the stage door 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.

 Culture is worth a little risk, of course, but there are times when culture is the risk.Mailer's quote, originating in his seemingly glib response to convict /  author's Jack Henry Abbott's murder of a waiter not long after he'd been paroled on the Authorities belief that he had rehabilitated himself by becoming an author. Mailer, we remember, had stabbed his wife Adele and nearly killed her. The books he wrote following this heinous incident were in large measure sincere and often brilliant mixtures of existentialist self-definition, mysticism and imaginative takes on the psychology of violence, of how it is often the result of the lone m person without means who attempt to berserk themselves into transcendance. He had given us one  fantastically problematic novel, An American Dream, in which his hero defies the combined forces he imagines have conspired against him and aspires to become a "new kind of man". The  consequences of that saga are anything but reassuring , especially for Mailer himself.  One of Mailer's heroes, William S.Burroughs, drunkenly shot and killed his wife Joan i when trying to shoot a glass off her head with a pistol. There have been times, more often than not, that I  wish the pontiffs , the pundits and the writerly men of action had stayed with their pens and pages and left the guns for the truly deranged who didn't care a wit about art or a nuanced philosophy behind their violence. Here we pause and wrestle with our conscious  and ponder if we can compartmentalize our horror for the acts these writers commit and still esteem the  brilliance their writing has challenged our bed rock assumptions with. In either case, these patently evil and insane events were motivations for the future prose of both writers--Mailer commenced on a life long inquiry into the spiritual malady that makes violence the preferred means to move events along in society , and Burroughs, not the most expansively regretful man in show business, as much said that the accidental murder of his wife Joan was the reason why he wrote from that point forward. Wrote Burroughs:

I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out..
Both men seemed to continue writing in order to buffer themselves against acts that were  irrefutably ugly, evil, foul; the sheer process of making the world a  new, over and over, with their fiction, of combining different elements, subverting some genres and extending others, of making the fact of existence a cruel and painful process through which we conduct ourselves with some modicum of grace and invention, or relinquish our wits and allow strange and  powerful forces to manipulate our lives and  make a a mockery of what intellectual integrety we thought we possessed. the respective bodies of work of Mailer and Burroughs seem, to me, a heads up to the reader that they are at risk for merely being born, univited, in the middle of someone else's agenda. And the critic, the pundit, the explainers of art that offers no solace nor comfort, make a career practicing an extemporized philosophy that translate the literary horror and bludgeoning poetry of writing that seeks to make the fairy tales and their tragic ends palatable by acting as if there is a lesson to be learned. A doomed practice, I suspect, as I see day when we will have no real use for priests, film reviewers and reviewers who think they are priests . 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 gard impulse; I am all for risk taking and rule breaking, but even the nastiest, least comprehensible bodies of work created by suitably sociopath  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 making. The secret history of art history, the  secret history of artistic expression, is how much social misery the creative impulse has caused. This is why I tend to support subjective or heroic criticism--the critic less as taste maker 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.

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Dickinson and Pound: the long and short of it

A major movement in the creation of a modernist poetry was the effort to slough off the well-worn devices of  the last  three hundred years of poetic devices and the creaking, rusting, swerving structures that gave them purchase and replace them with a more direct address of things. One could also maintain that there was a concentrated effort to make the idea behind poems and their subjects clearer and less abstract as well. What was once useful in a world where God was the prime mover and quite nearly each thing and event that was beheld was the result of His good graces and undisclosed Plan was now a quaint murmur of suffocating cliches and half-hearted apologies that obscured the actual world; the phenomenal world was hidden from view , what was considered wisdom was only a means to contain the masses. Robert Pinsky, in an intriguing blog entry, brings to our attention the two poets , Emily Dickinson and Ezra Pound, who had done more than any other in creating the style and means of a  very succinct, blunt modernist verse. One wanted to maintain an internal equilibrium with what she wrote on paper, the other wanted to change the world in something very much like his own image.


This is an interesting connection  Dickinson and Pound, with two unlike personalities. Dickinson didn't care to make her thoughts clear for public consumption or to see the world differently; what she poems were notes to herself , where the solitary but active mind's penchant for irony, contradiction and a changing personal outlook on mortality, over time, were all the mattered to her. This was the poetry of a mind that, by need for personal preference, was solitary much of the time, dwelling, thinking, abstracting on much of the insoluble vicissitudes of life, those matters being nothing less than the self in the world and arguing whether one were merely existing or if the fact of one's flesh and blood constituted a benefit to the world.  

This is the unending introspection that is seamless, without end or beginning, a stream, and her writing, I believe, was a project to pare the  overlapping ontologies that might have driven lesser minds to variations of unhinged utterances and present them as clear perceptions, jewels of irony and reductionist wit. Hers was a desire to make her own notions clear, concise, beyond the confusion a studied rhetoric brings. She was so direct that hers was an abstract art that rejected Abstraction for its own sake. I've always thought of her poems as akin to a view through a microscope, or at least an intense focused  magnifying glass. 

She suggests, I think, the writings of Wallace Stevens decades later, and John Ashbery more decades later still, with her world so closely observed and tersely addressed that her estimations constitute a category of Ideal Types ; certainly her work seems dedicated to the short summations of proposed notions and how those notions come up short;  the elision in her  work , for me, is an absent middle section where the theory was applied and  where it had failed. The third part of the poems are the results, the moral, the larger irony of expectation meeting the unfathomable truth that is existence, replete with a result quite unexpected.  I don't think Dickinson's poems were mere jottings; they are, I believe , products of hard, concentrated reflection and it is the poet's genius that made those leaps of perception into the dense, difficult poems that are her legacy. Hers was a clarity meant for her self alone, a method of reaching conclusions on matters her imagination would not leave alone. Her short hand taught contemporary, by direct readings or the influence of other poets who arrived in Dickinson's wake, how to  turn introspection into an enticingly evocative sort of poetry , a system of insight that challenges philosophy as the best method as to why life is so difficult and why we make ourselves so unhappy with the given strata of existence.
Pound, to the other extreme, was very public , dynamic, restless with his notions and had a life long desire Pound, to the other extreme, was very public , dynamic, restless with his notions and had a life long desire to change the manner in which the masses saw the world. Rid of the culture of outmoded, old, obsolete, incorrect and purposefully deceitful cosmologies and you will improve our collective. His inventions took much from the Chinese poets he admired and claimed to have translated--whether he really understood what they were doing or saying or whether he did any actual translation is another matter. Pound wanted poems to have the ability to get things exactly; there was the appealing idea in the kind of Modernism he proposed that we have to shed the baggage of the past, the useless and irrelevant inventions of antique times and make for ourselves a new way of using language that can pierce the  veil between us and the actual world; he wanted to break the shackles of the overly -referenced Plato's Cave  so we can enter the light, figuratively (I suppose) with a native language that was means of witnessing , defining and molding reality, not masking it in excuses and daydreams.
“Society for me my misery
Since Gift of Thee—”

Dickinson, as I understand her, was not a fan humanity , and preferred her thoughts and her privately considered things to the clamor and debate of the many who would battle over the right to name the world and its contents as they think it should be. She kept her own consul and had no patience for what others thought or thought of her. Being public was a burden beyond what her personality desired; in this couplet, which I suspect is indeed a couplet, she considers the state of being noted, notable, famous for any reason a misery that she ought not suffer . Being known beyond Amherst was an undeserved gift to the world, as reputation that accompanies fame presents the world with a ready made narrative of someone’s life and presented her with the problem of having to live up to a plot line that she felt had nothing to do with her. Being comprehended or understood by the masses was a useless option for her. While Dickinson wanted to everyone to mind their own set of affairs while she tended her own piece of the earth, Pound, again, wanted to have language be capable of getting an image exactly, as would a photograph; the thinking , I think, is that he wanted to get beyond the metaphysical conceits that an older poetics contained. On the face of it this seems admirable, but what he wanted to do was to have the world see the world as he saw it, precisely, without romantic resonance and the nuanced variations that come with the habit (and the political tumult as well). He wanted to settle matters quickly and have folks move into a new, dynamic direction. Essentially, I believe his basic goal with his project of boiling down the language was an effort to turn whole populations into cattle.

This was, more or less, the intention of the Imagists from the start, to write manifestos, to argue actively and loudly against older literary conceits and decadent cultures, to purify the senses and the words used to define the world and to remake  a world for the future.  This is an attractive pitch on the face of it, that art must create new ways of seeing the world, but Pound's poetics were mixed up with his politics which were, we remember , racist, anti-Semitic, and was attractive to various avant gard movements that were obsessed with machines, speed, destruction; the world must be destroyed by virtually any means and available technology so that new ideas of how society is to be structured can arise. 'Structured" is the operative word, as Pound wanted power over people more than control of his own writing;  Imagism, it seems to me, was only a start of growing set of ideas that the world could only be changed through violent dynamics. 

He blamed a lot of groups for what he considered to be the decline of Western culture and it's not surprising that he found a patron in the Italian Fascists , for whom he made propaganda broadcasts during WW2.   Brief, clear, concise descriptions of objects , the hall marks of Imagist poetry, remain in strong evidence in more contemporary work by younger poets.  He had an agenda, though, and his is the case where we can give thanks that poets are not the literal legislators of the world.

Saturday, January 18, 2014

Dylan's Greatest Lyrics (in small caps)

1.just like a woman
2.desolation row
3.memphis blues again
4.it's all over now baby blue
5.girl from the north country
6.positively 4th street
7.i want you
8.ballad of a thin man
9.chimes of freedom
10.visions of johanna
11.like a rolling stone
12.sooner or later (one of must know)
13.crawl out your window
14.too much of nothing
15.tears of rage
16.all along the watchtower
17.you aint goin nowhere
18.the mighty quinn
19.mr.tambourine man
20.drifter's escape
21.farewell , angelina
22.gates of eden
23.simple twist of fate
24.just like tom thumb's blues
25.love minus/no limit
26.queen jane approximately
27.spanish harlem incident
28.when i paint my masterpiece
29.maggie's farm
30.it's alright man, i'm only bleeding
31.i shall be released
32.high 61 revisited
33.a hard rain's a gonna fall
34.absolutely sweet marie
35.i dreamed i saw saint Augustine
 



I do admire the work of artists who remain interesting as they get older, but it is a fact that many writers, poets, songwriters do their best , most compelling work in their early years. Dylan is one of these--the greatest songs , in my view, were those that combined equal elements of Surrealism, Burroughs inspired language cut ups, blues and rural south music vernaculars, and heady doses of French Symbolism by way of Rimbaud and Mallarme. This gave his stanzas a heightened, alienated feeling of sensory overload, making him  principle Lyricist of the bare existential absurdity that life happens to be. No one got to the infuriating heart of the sensation that life had ceased to mean anything after those matters that "mean" the most to us--marriages, friendships, tastes, financial security, spiritual or religious certainity--were changed, destoryed or simply vanished. Dylan's writing was of the individual suddenly in the choking throes of uncertainty , batting back encroaching gloom with the kind of swinging, poetic wit that reassembles existence. It is stance, a state,an aesthetic state of being that made it possible for him to fire on all cylinders for a good run of time. Generally, the poetic quality and intensity that Dylan produced in the longs on the list I made are substantial body of work that lines up perfectly with and matches the strongest work by Eliot, Pound, WC Williams, Burroughs, Ginsberg. It is also not the kind of work you can keep doing for a life time; like Miles Davis, he had to . His mature work has quite often hits the mark and offers the long view of experience in an especially moving way. Just as often, I think he misses the mark and overwrites or is prone to hackneyed phrasing. There is much quality to the later songs, but as a body of lyrics, they are not among Dylan's greatest.

Dylan is called more often than not a poet because of the unique genius of his best lyrics; I don't think he's a poet, but a songwriter with an original talent strong enough to change that particular art forever. I do understand , though, why a host of critics through the decades would consider him a poet in the first place. My list are the songs I think that justifies any sort of reputation Dylan has a poetic genius. I like most of the songs mentioned above for various reasons other than the ones on my initial 35 choices; the longs there manage an affinity for evoking the ambiguities and sharp perceptions of an acutely aware personality who is using poetic devices to achieve more abstract and suggestive effects and still manage to be wonderfully tuneful. No one else in rock and roll , really , was doing that before Dylan was. On those terms, nothing he's written is quite at the level of where he was with the songs on my list; this list consists of the body of work that substantiate Dylan's claim to genus.

"Just Like a Woman" is one of the finest character sketches I've ever heard in a song. What's remarkable is the brevity of the whole, how much history is suggested, inferred, insinuated in spare yet arresting imagery. I rather like that Dylan allows the mystery of this character to linger, to not let the fog settle. It is the ambiguity that gives it's suggestive power and there is the whole element of whether the person addressed is a woman at all, but rather a drag queen . It's an open question, it's a brilliant lyric.

"Drifter's Escape "was on twice and is now a single entry. There is a concentration of detail in the lyric, a compression of Biblical cadence and sequence that makes the song telling and vivid not in it's piling on of stanzas , but in its brevity. He does the same for "All along the Watchtower", which i regard as a condensed "Desolation Row," a commentary , perhaps, from the tour bus just passing through; the tour guide finally tells the driver "there must be some kinda way outta here." What I regard as the true "poetry" of Dylan's music is in the earlier music, where he is spectacularly original in how he forced his influences to take new shapes and to create new perspectives. Post JWH, I just find too much of his lyric writing prolix and meandering, time-filling rather than revealing; the surreal, fresh, colloquial snap of his language has gone and is replaced with turns of phrase that are trite , hackneyed, ineffective;' they strike my ear as false. Even "Blind Willie McTell" , a song  that has been persuasively  defended by intelligent fans of Dylan's later work, strikes too many false notes for my tastes  Musically it  drags  and philosophically seems a victim of convenient  thinking,  a PC version of Song of the South; some of the imagery is simply cloying and seems more suitable more for Gone with the Wind than a poet of arguable worth
...See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a-moaning
Hear that undertaker’s bell...

Really, that is awful, a dreadful presentation of atmospheric detail meant to create historical context and mood, but it trades on so many received ideas of slavery, racism,the south, et al, that the intent no longer matters. It strikes as more minstrel show than tribute. Had anyone submitted this to a serious  poetry (or lyric) writing workshop, it would have been handed back to us for revision, with the advice that we rid the narrative of the creaky, questionable window dressing. "When I Paint My Masterpiece", in contrast, works wonderfully because of its lack of any messages about social justice. It works because it is a sharp, terse, vivid travelogue, vague and evocative in equal measure. The ambiguity and absence of relevance to anything other than Dylan's need to speak off handedly about a in interesting time in the life of a particular character is what makes this song memorable.

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble
Ancient footprints are everywhere
You can almost think that you’re seein’ double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs
Got to hurry on back to my hotel room
Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece
She promised that she’d be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece

Perfectly natural language here, good and unexpected rhymes, telling use of local detail that give us color and history without sagging qualifiers to make it more "authentic", the lyrics are recollection of a trip, of places visited, of perspectives changing, a nice string of incidents in a language that sounds like a real voice telling real things, with genuine bemusement .
Well, I had a feeling that the general good feeling this album conveys is that Dylan wasn't trying too hard to prove he's a genius. The record is straight forward and the language is remarkable free of affectation , a tendency that has plagued him, post JWH. I especially like "Sign in the Window"; it has the sincerity an actual and momentary acceptance of where one happens to be in a certain part of life, and offers a new set of expectations.  

Thursday, January 16, 2014

SEX WRITERS AND HOUSE WORK

I’m a sex writer with a secret shame — hoarding - Salon.com:

Salon has always been editorially obsessed with sex-talk, convinced, perhaps, that the prosaic writings of those engaged in the continual grinding of genitalia constitutes a literary form who's time has come. It is , of course, porn for the nervously middlebrow, a poor sister to travel writing. 

Now we have a sex writer who is more interested in doing field research than keeping a clean household. Salon, we thought, was supposed to be covering the culture in a smart and literate way, but these stories are tiresomely shallow beyond a certain point, being neither things we can relate nor shocking nor insightful . I am not , of course, a mental health expert, but I find it ironic that someone who is interested in lifestyles that push back the boundaries of sexual expression , so to speak, has come up against a literal wall in their real   world domicile. There is , in fact, scarcely any more room  for clutter in the space provided. 

Our writer, seeking to cram as much life into the years she has on the planet, perhaps has used up her psychic space allowance for ignoring larger issues both the clutter and the sex drive might be symptoms of. Again, I am not a mental health expert, but I can sling a metaphor or two.

 Sometimes the metaphors are apt.

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Black people and white people are different - Salon.com

Black people and white people are different - Salon.com:

Elon James White is trying to be the Supreme Irony Monger of America's racial divide, but he spends so much time stopping, digressing, changing gears and repeating some rather obvious insights, borrowed from decades of past comments on matters ethnic and bitter, that it's near impossible to know if there's any real point he's trying to make. Does anyone really think that his take on Haley Barbour's selective recollection of his college days is fresh, insightful or expressing a bottom line no knew was there? Doubtful. 

This smug  rant is a trite  wallow in what's already been said in work places, bus stops, cable tv talk shows, newspaper columns , and certainly on innumerable blog entries. It's not that the topic, the differences in perspective between white and black people, is tired or solved or without urgent need of honest discussion. White isn't the one to lead anyone out of the forest, though, as he's too busy strutting in front of the peanut gallery playing that only tune he knows on that banged up trumpet he carries around.

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Bunk rock

I gave up hope for rock criticism developing into a respectable form of criticism when I realized that it was, for the most part, a pissing contest for most of the guys who decided to try their hand at it. For every Bangs and Young, there were dozens of lesser lights who proved, at length, that they could make noise aplenty but offer little or no light on the subject. Much of it has to do with how well the current state of the music happens to be, of course, but pop music criticism did come to the point where everyone was recycling what everyone had already written, and the two trajectories  offered readers by the end of the seventies was incomprehensible Greil Marcus/Dave Marsh obscurantism, which insisted that the music they listened to in college dorms was the Spenglarian peak of civilization and that every note played afterward was an inferior facsimile of the authentic, or the knee jerk Bangs imitations where wave after wave of typing nitwits missed out on Lester's capacity for feeling deep emotion and his brand of self-criticism and instead freight us with jabbering sarcasm by the carload. Jim DeRogatis , rock critic for various outlets , author of the Lester Bangs biography "Let It Blurt", rounded up a slew of younger, Generation X pop writers and invited them to select a classic rock album, an album, by consensus, considered to be Canonical and there for inarguably great and then to debunk an older generation of critics' claim for the lasting greatness of those records. It's an interesting idea, I admit, but the result, an anthology called "Kill Your Idols" is a miserably strident, one-note mass of pages dedicated to puerile dismissals of a lot of good, honest music. "Snotty" doesn't do that particular disaster justice.

The problem with the generation of rock critics who followed the late Lester Bangs was that too many of them were attempting to duplicate Bangs' signature and singular ability to write movingly about why rock and roll stars make terrible heroes. Like many of us, Bangs became disillusioned with rock and roll when he discovered that those he admired and was obsessed by--Lou Reed, Miles Davis, and Black Sabbath--were not saints. The discovery of their clay feet, their egos, and the realization that rock and roll culture was a thick cluster of bullshit and pretentiousness didn't stymie Bangs' writing. It, in fact, was the basis of Bangs transcending his limits and finding something new to consider in this. Sadly, he died before he could enter another great period of prose writing. "Kill Your Idols", edited by Jim DeRogatis, is an anthology that is intended, I suspect to be the Ant- “Stranded”, the Greil Marcus edited collection where he commissioned a number of leading pop music writers and asked them to write at length about what one rock and roll album they would want to be left on a desert island with; it's not a perfect record--then New York Times rock critic John Rockwell chose "Back in the USA" by Linda Ronstadt and couldn't mount a persuasive defense of the disc--but it did contain a masterpiece by Bangs, his write-up of Van Morrison's album “Astral Weeks”. His reading of the tune “Madame George” is a staggering example of lyric empathy, a truly heroic form of criticism. "Kill Your Idols", in reverse emulation, assigns a group of younger reviewers who are tasked with debunking the sacred cows of the rock and roll generation before them; we have, in effect, pages full of deadening sarcasm from a crew who show none of the humor or sympathy that were Bangs best qualities. Bangs, of course, was smart enough not to take himself too seriously; he knew he was as absurd as the musicians he scrutinized.

"Kill Your Idols" seemed like a good idea when I bought the book, offering up the chance for a younger set of rock critics to give a counterargument to the well-made assertions of the essayists from the early Rolling Stone/Crawdaddy/Village Voice days who are finely tuned critiques gave us what we consider now to be the Rock Canon. The problem, though, is that editor Jim Derogatis didn't have that in mind when he gathered this assortment of Angry Young Critics and changed them with disassembling the likes of Pink Floyd, The Beatles, the MC5; countering a well phrased and keenly argued position requires an equally well phrased alternative view and one may go so far as to suggest the fresher viewpoint needs to be keener, finer, sharper. Derogatis, pop and rock music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, author of the estimable Lester Bangs biography Let It Blurt, had worked years ago as record review editor of Rolling Stone and found himself getting fired when he couldn't abide by publisher Jan Wenner's policy of not giving unfavorable reviews to his favorite musicians.

His resentment toward Wenner and Rolling Stone's institutional claims of being a power broker as far as band reputations  is understandable, but his motivation is more payback than a substantial refutation of conventional wisdom. The Angry Young Critics were too fast out of the starting gate and in collective haste to bring down the walls of the Rock Establishment wind up being less the Buckley or the Vidal piercing pomposity and pretension than, say, a pack of small yapping dogs barking at anything passing by the backyard fence. The likes of Christgau, Marcus, and Marsh provoke you easily enough to formulate responses of your own, but none of the reviews have the makings of being set aside as a classic of a landmark debunking; there is not a choice paragraph or phrase one comes away with.

Even on albums that, I think, are over-rated, such as John Lennon's Double Fantasy, you think they're hedging their bets; a writer wanting to bring Lennon's post-Beatles reputation down a notch would have selected the iconic primal scream album Plastic Ono Band (to slice and dice. But the writers here never bite off more than they can chew; sarcasm, confessions of boredom and flagging attempts at devil's advocacy make this a noisy, nit picky book whose conceit at offering another view of Rock and Roll legacy contains the sort of hubris these guys and gals claim sickens them. This is a collection of useless nastiness, a knee-jerk contrarianism of the sort that one overhears in bookstores between knuckle dragging dilettantes who cannot stand being alive if they can't hear themselves bray. Yes, "Kill Your Idols" is that annoying, an irritation worsened but what could have been a fine idea.

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Vanilla Fudge: YOU KEEP ME HANGING ON

Man oh man, what a band. They were a band of technically competent musicians who came up with one good production, their inspired production of "You Keep Me Hanging On". It was an inspired move to slow down the Supremes' most jacked-up hit . Instead of the ringing -telephone shrillness of the original, this became instead a mock-fugue, building tension and releasing it effectively erotic explosions. Sometimes I still thrash around the living room with this song in my head, miming Vince Martel's clanging power chords with broad sweeps of my hand. VF's arrangement of this song became the standard approach for the most part; Rod Stewart did a credible take of his that borrowed heavily from the Fudge's initial recasting. Sadly, though, the band relied too much on that one idea, too often. 
 
Their songs, original or reinterpretations, tended to be dirge like and down right pompous, dullsville, a drag. And their album "The Beat Goes On" beat Yes to the punch , producing the single most pretentious and bombastic concept album years before the British band mustered up that three disc Hindenburg they titled "Tales from Topographic Ocean." Vanilla Fudge has a mixed legacy, but the one thing they did well, the storm and thunder that comprises their version of "You Keep Me Hanging On", they did brilliantly. It is a thing forever and so few of us accomplish that even in our most inflated fantasies.

Thursday, December 26, 2013

Song Cycle by Van Dyke Parks: Americana Sublime



Song Cycle -- Van Dyke Parks
Purchased for a buck at a garage sale, an over-busy if an often inspired bit of Sixties art-pop. The ambition is the attempted embrace of the width and breadth of American popular music, and though Parks fails to accomplish this, the disc is admirable, with the embrace of Gershwin, ragtime, and Charles Ives being nicely enveloped within a semi-scored album where the "concept" album achieves what other rock art music fails to get; the concept meets up with continuity. Always interesting, though Parks' voice is nasal and over-enunciated. His lyrics have been described as "esoteric Rod McKuen", which is fine if that's all you can think of when poetry comes to mind. It reads more like if James Merrill rhymed consistently in his elongated stanzas. Fantastic job on Randy Newman's "Vine Street". "...But, in truth, more often I just reach for Harry Nilsson...." is what critic Miles Milo said in an online forum when the chatter dwelled on this disc for a few postings. Point taken, in as much as Nilsson was as hooky as he was the musically brilliant; he was as much a wise guy as a whiz kid. That said, I am getting more into Song Cycle the third and second time I gave it spin today, and for all the obvious trappings of Sixties simulacra when it comes to replicating older regional styles, ala Sgt. Pepper (a curse a few survived when they tried the album-as-art business), this particular disc has integrity and some guts under the esoterica. Parks' version of this exotica is lusher, more loving, and akin to what E.L. Doctorow had done in his period novels Ragtime and World's Fair: the resplendent vision of a more elegant and simple time is made odd and unfamiliar as contemporary psychological crises emerge from the tasseled finery. His perversions, his dissonances are delightfully bracing, if such a thing can be; the smart move is that he goes after Ives and molds the orchestrated and grandiose Americanism into something large, a little insane but not evil by any means. The ideas work as a unified whole. His grasp of orchestration and classical composition exceeds what Frank Zappa brought to the public. Plus, "Vine Street" is simply one of the best covers of a Randy Newman tune I've come across in my years. An additional plus is his deconstruction of "Donovan's Colours"; the original melody is all but obscured and obliterated outright by Park's inspiring pile-ups of sound and overt virtuosity.