INNOCENCE IS NOT A CHOICE

Innocence, it seems, is a nice way of saying ignorance, which would imply that the gaining of wisdom is a hard process, full of rude awakenings, startling revelations, melodramatic shifts in cosmology as one continually learns that the neat scenario one had while younger , with their neat and simple relationships predicated on convenient cause and effect, is grossly inadequate.

God gave us senses so we may learn from our experience and cobble together as we go along, a practical philosophy of everyday life. Wisdom, if you like. It seems that one is likely to realize that they are a victim whether they like it or not, and that the blissful sleep of ignorance of one's state of being exploited and abused is illusory at best.  I think  stupidity is a choice people make  because it is the closest they will get to absolution for the results of their choices, and ignorance, likewise, often enough seems a willful defense mechanism that relieves one of their obligation to use their senses to grow and work within the world as an active, creative agent. This is the crucial issue for Blake, to believe in a God will intercede and make everything okay with a kiss and a feather or a promise of endless bounty on the other side of this life, or that one is here with the senses a Creator gave him or her, with a brain that can process and organize experience into a framework, narrative perhaps, the keeps the world that is both fluid and coherent.

"The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly." --Wallace Stevens

The belief in a fiction, I assume, is that one believes less in the fiction's generic outline of the relationships between personality and the delicate details of the atmosphere , and more that the fiction works as a means that enables individual and collective imaginations to commit themselves creatively to what other wise would raw, unknowable data. We are the author of our own book, so to speak, we are all writers of a particular fiction that enthralls us, and the key to a belief in an operative narrative form is to realize that we can change, alter and modify the fiction as needed. Not that it's an easy thing to toss off, as an after thought. But we make our narratives from the things we do , and this reminds me of the oft-quoted line from Vico, paraphrased here: Only that which man makes can man know.

JF GOES SOUR MASH

Social media is the focus point of where our collective anxieties gather and express themselves in status updates and links and selfies and photos of cats gutting old shoes ; it's an easy thing to damn , it's a  bitch to withdraw from. Jonathon Franzen is having  it no easier than the rest of us with Facebook, Twitter, what have you. And it gives him another chance to become Premature Curmudgeon, the fellow who views the world as little else than a bothersome set of feet in hob nailed boots trampling on is front lawn. His rantings in his book Smarter than You Think highlights his dim view  of the literature possible in  140 characters,The article goes on at length to make an obvious point that should only take a paragraph or two to explain, that nearly every communication technology  has had harsh critics who concocted various scenarios of the end of all that is decent and civil. It does not, though, offer up credible suggestions as to how Twitter, in itself, has improved anything; the evidence , anecdotal perhaps, it that it has allowed more people to indulge in their worst behaviors. The social sphere, such as it is, has become a more crowded, more vulgar, ruder place for the introduction of cell phones and texting. Franzen, hardly one of my favorite writers--he is an incessant worry wart who's prose is elongated neuroses with pretensions to elegance--but on this matter he and other critics happen to be right.

 The comedian Louis CK by referring to a credible, recent past, before cell phones and instant messaging when civilized people learned to how to be alone--millions of us managed to make our way through the day being, at various times, alone with our thoughts, sans distractions. We may not have liked the alone time, but there was a sense of being able to talk to people directly when you needed to, using social skills that reflected a social personality, or lack of it.We are now pulverized by the fear of being alone for even a few minutes--we have to check our status updates, we have to make some kind of noise that others can hear, we have to rattle the proverbial tin cup agains the bars of our our own under  interior prisons. The point is that you were able to handily shift from a silent, interior existence to one that was fully engaged in the public eye without worrying if you're going to cause a car wreck in the transition. 

The pathetic fact of our urban existence is that none of us can escape the sense that the real world has been turned into a  voice mail --talking to people is frustrating because everyone is on the phone and we must wait our turn and , when our turn arrives at last, we rush our sentences, we compress our points, we speak in semi literate half thoughts    because we sense the dread phone will ring again and cut off the conversation before anything useful, either socially or psychically, gets said at all. 

 True, true, the technology isn't going away and that it is a matter of getting used to a new way for the culture to communicate its collective expression, sublime, middle brow or moronic, but that is not a good thing and yes, future devices , codes and technology will , in effect, make these protests seem shrill and silly. That does not undermine the criticism, though; the coarsening of how we treat one another continues. It seems to me that what we do is what any person would do who is too lazy to fix a whole in their living room wall--after awhile you get used to it  being there and after awhile longer to convince yourself it was an ethical, aesthetical, philosophical choice you made. It's a mind fuck , is what it is. It's merely settling for a degraded quality of life.

Questions to me about Me.

1.  What is the best or most meaningful gift you ever received?
For my 25th birthday, a Hohner Marine Band harmonica wrapped up in a bundle of new underwear. This was from a friend of mine who didn't think much of the way I played.
2.  What was the best-received gift you ever gave anybody?
The album "The Photographer" from composer Philip Glass. This was the minimalist's reed-thin commemoration to the photographer Edward Muybridge, whose motion study experiments laid the ground work for motion pictures. My girl friend at the time , a set designer, played it constantly while she cast about her studio, bringing the interiors of a fictional world to life. 3.  What historical figure would you be most interested in meeting?  
John Coltrane. 



4.If you were a country, which one would it be?
The United States of America.
5.  Was there any part of your schooling (elementary, secondary, university, vocational) that you especially liked or disliked?  Why?
My favorite stretch of education was in college, at the University of California, San Diego. This was where I  developed my own voice as  writer and gained the chops to be a poet worth reading. It was right about this time that my experience began to catch up with my aspirations. And I met the woman I would fall in love with , and remain so to this day, over three decades later. 6.  Think of all of the places in which you've ever lived, or visited. Which is your favorite?  If you had one day to spend there, what would you do?
San Francisco. If I had only one day to spend there, I would just want to walk around the neighborhoods and investigate the odd configurations and twists and angles of the blocks. This is a built on hills and the buildings, as intriguing a gathering of architecture one is likely to find in North America,had to accommodate an earth that would not yield short of a declaration of war.

7.  Have you ever Googled the name of someone you hadn't thought about in years?  If so, did the results surprise you?
A woman I dated in high school, my first girl friend. We met after we made contact and communicated for a bit and dated for a short while. It was a nice reunion, short lived, no tears.  8.   If you had the opportunity to become the President of the United States or the Pope, would you take it?  Why or why not?
Neither. It is not in my nature to wish a heart attack on my person. 9.   What is the most surprising or unexpected thing anybody could learn about you?
That I am a good writer,a  great poet, a former carnival worker, an especially talented blues harmonica player, and that I am modest as a ball of string. 10.  If you could bring five books with you to a desert island, what would they be?  What else would you bring?
1.An American Dream--Norman Mailer

11.  Butter pecan, cherry vanilla, rocky road, pistachio or chocolate chocolate chip?
      Scotch rocks or nothing.

Christ almight, what now?

I had a professor once point out that something becomes art once it is framed, no matter what that object may be.

This Marcel Duchamps' idea, a classic Dada gesture he offered with his readymades, such as urinals hoisted upon gallery walls, and snow shovels on pedastals. The point , though, was that the object became an aesthetic object,denatured, in a manner of speaking , from its natural context and forced , suddenly, to be discussed in its very "thingness". The object becomes art by the lexicon we wrap around it, a linguistic default.

 Whether the object is art as most understand art to be--the result of an inner expressive need to mold , shape and hone materials and forms into an a medium that engages a set of ideas about the world, or unearths some fleeting sense of human experience -- isn't the point here. Ironically, art, generally defined as something that is absent all utility, any definable function, is suddenly given a use that is sufficiently economic, which is to keep an art industry in motion; it is the sound of money.

Duchamp, and other dadaists who sought to undermine this idea of art and its supposed spiritual epiphanies for the privileged few, instead furnished a whole new rational for art vending. 

Loose ends and asides

 The Spectator is , from appearances, not a fan of philosopher -turned-millionaire sophist Alain de Botton,  having recently ran an online squib questioning his intellectual heft, his actual worth to a thinking readership, and his integrity. "Why Alain de Botton is a Moron" is the title, and not a word of hit is a compliment. My favorite line in this piece describes de Botton as an "egghead", the sort of person who can "beat you in a pub quiz" with their eidetic propensity of remembering every detail they've ever read, but who has a personality that is all but lacking in true intellectual force. That is to say that for all the lifetime of reading across a wide swath of literature, art, philosophy, history, the savant doesn't seem to have synthesized anything resembling an interesting interpretation of what they've gorged themselves on. The knowledge seems only to have made the dull even duller, made their inanities even more colossally vapid. Alain de Botton is a business man who has found out that there are larger paychecks for dispensing bumper sticker adages and homilies than there are in reams of abstraction. Which is fine, I suppose, he has the right to make the best living he can from the materials he chose to master. Funny thing is that this article reminds me of the notorious critic John Simon, a polymath of a nasty-assed reviewer who has an enviable erudition that has, none the less, failed to inspire him to a higher level of negative reviewing; his put downs are cheap, vulgar, sarcastic , mean for reasons that are more venal than they are descriptive of art that fails to measure up. Another "egghead", a large set of references to underscore a resolutely idiotic set of responses.

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The Point took on the skeptics who were not so enamored of HBO's "True Detectve" with a  smart defense of the philosophical asides and raspily mumbled disquistions of Detective Rust Cohle on HBO's brilliant series "True Detective". Debate rages as to whether the nihilist outlook he seems to represent are pretentious and not defensible as intellectual concepts, to which this author argues convincingly, I think, that the bleak cosmology Rust is a witness to are in fact, defensible as points of discussion. Beyond that, though, he seems to remind us that "True Detective" is a drama, an inspired work of fiction with a narrative that dwells, physically and psychologically, in dark places, and that fictional characters are allowed to speak with a heightened eloquence.My concern, basically, is in whether the conceit of Lovecraft meets Nietzsche meets James Lee Burke works together as a conceptual mash up. It does, indeed it does.

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The thing about heroin is that it at the end , it turns the user into a cliche many of us in our impressionable (and gullible) youth considered to be romantic, a dead junkie found in an apartment/bathroom/back alley dumpster with a needle in their arm. So much blather has gone on about how artists are so sensitive that they have to alter the way they feel in order to merely exist, that they need to take the edge off because the world and their perceptions of how to put it back together again in art work gets to be too much. I call absolute bullshit and say that a gifted artist dying from a self-administered drug overdose is tragic, yes, but also a very stupid , inglorious way to die. What we have is just another dead junkie who could have lived longer and done the world more good with their creativity. It's time for us to change our thinking on the whole notion of Doomed Genius and Brilliant Wastral; it is time for us to arise from the death trap that is the confessional school of poetry and the sex drugs and rock and roll vibe of the sixties and maintain and insist that YOU DON'T HAVE TO KILL YOURSELF IN ORDER TO VALIDATE YOUR ART and that we can STOP CO SIGNING THE BULLSHIT THAT MAKES IT OKAY TO SPOUT CLICHES, PLATITUDES AND OTHER FATALISTIC BULLSHIT ABOUT THE DYING FOR ONE'S ART. Life is a gift and art makes life worth sticking around for and drugs are, plain and simple, a 24/7 example of bad news made real.

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 Salon has become of the scold of the online left-leaning press, a humorless, neurotically PC collection of gadlfies and nags tut-tutting the ebb and flow of popular culture.  It's one thing to offer cultural criticism that takes on the contradictions and unintended ironies the enclosed words of Hollywood, literature, technology and the like give us; wit, though, self-effacement of a genuine and stylish sort as well, go a long way in getting a readership to finish your articles and respond to your ideas and not your attitude. What's one to do? Stop reading it, I suppose , and cancel my Facebook  endorsement. In a recent  spasm of strained contrariness, writer Alexander Zaitchik announces that the much heralded new "golden age of television" is a hoax and that t TV remains, in essence, the "vast wasteland" that long-ago FCC head Newton    Minnow declared. The remark has  been a cornerstone of the anti-boob tube harangues for decades, but it is instructive to read the full quote, not the snippet"

When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

This piece seems to be more about showing us how much nay-saying media criticism the author has read rather than  being a nuanced and plausible debunking  of the claim that ours is a new “golden age” for television drama. The substance of Zaitchik's argument is substantially the same one that has been made against television since the 50s by cultural snobs on the left and the right; it is a technology that exists only to lull us into a state of illusion and accompanying delusion. Beyond the reiteration of the ideas of Marx, Adorn and Chomsky , the article  is by a tweedy bore dismissing television's contents as a whole, generalizing about the medium in general and failing to cite specific arguments about why  dramatic shows fail to live up to their acclaim. In plain fact television drama has vastly, dramatically changed in the last two decades, and a surprising amount of it is of great quality, complexity, style; drama that is worth talking about is the sort of narrative that takes the classic issues of being human , stories inhabited by characters who are  filled with assumptions of how the world should work and how it should respond to human desire and endeavor, and to view, investigate, explore the responses of characters when their agendas aren't met and their expectations result in circumstances they didn't foresee.

There is a splendid, wonderfully balanced complexity in The Wire, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Top of the Lake, Breaking Bad; the early promise of cable was that the increase of channels across would be the medium in which writers, directors, actors, artists    of all sorts would finally find a place to create quality work. The shows I’ve mentioned are a partial fulfillment, and I think the issue is how to make sure this influx of quality content continues. As it goes, I really don’t know what it is Zaitchik is grousing about besides the  currently  trendy refrain of this being television’s genuine magic period. I dislike herd-thinking as well, but when my complaints are        registered and a sufficient amounts of spleen have been vented, the truth remains the truth, unchanged by festering resentment. In this instance, television has become as good as its fan it has.

 

DIANE WAKOSKI KICKS OUT THE JAMS

Nothing clears the sinuses faster than a choice blast of an angry woman's tirade, especially someone who can write sentences that way a butcher wields a knife. Witness this from poet Diane Wakoski , from her 1988 collection Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962-1987:Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch .for my motorcycle betrayer.God damn it, at last I am going to dance on your grave, old man; you've stepped on my shadow once too often, you've been unfaithful to me with other women, women so cheap and insipid it psychs me out to think I might ever be put in the same category with them; you've left me alone so often that I might as well have been a homesteader in Alaska these past years; and you've left me, thrown me out of your life often enough that I might as well be a newspaper, differently discarded each day. Now you're gone for good and I don't know why but your leaving actually made me as miserable as an earthworm with no earth, but now I've crawled out of the ground where you stomped me and I gradually stand taller and taller each day. I have learned to sing new songs, and as I sing, I'm going to dance on your grave because you are dead dead dead under the earth with the rest of the shit, I'm going to plant deadly nightshade on your grassy mound and make sure a hemlock tree starts growing there. Henbane is too good for you, but I'll let a bit grow there for good measure because we want to dance, we want to sing, we want to throw this old man to the wolves, but they are too beautiful for him, singing in harmony with each other.

 So some white wolves and I will sing on your grave, old man and dance for the joy of your death. "Is this an angry statement?" "No, it is a statement of joy." "Will the sun shine again?" "Yes, yes, yes," because I'm going to dance dance dance Duncan's measure, and Pindar's tune, Lorca's cadence, and Creeley's hum, Stevens' sirens and Williams' little Morris dance, oh, the poets will call the tune, and I will dance, dance, dance on your grave, grave, grave, because you're a sonofabitch, a sonofabitch, and you tried to do me in, but you can't can't can't. You were a liar in a way that only I know: You ride a broken motorcycle, You speak a dead language You are a bad plumber, And you write with an inkless pen. You were mean to me, and I've survived, God damn you, at last I am going to dance on your grave, old man, I'm going to learn every traditional dance, every measure, and dance dance dance on your grave one step for every time you done me wrong.What's remarkable is that there is no submerged meaning here, no symbolic hints at the author's ongoing despair and struggles with a festering hurt. Wakoski has no time for that, addressing her anger directly, doing everything except naming name a name. This is a knuckle sandwich of a poem, and Wakoski is one of the few poets whose dedication to getting her emotional currents rightly expressed in her work I can bear to read at length. Over anything else, she is a choice poet, and better, a good writer. "Fun" might to egregious a word to apply to her, but there is that element that draws one to read her again. And again.Motor Cycle Revenge Poems was one of the five essential collections an aspiring undergraduate poet had to have at my school in the late Seventies, and Wakoski's collection holds up well because it was outside the whimsy and cant of the Sixties counter culture from which it sprang and dealt directly with things that were unspoken for women writers, unbridled anger. There was no flower power, there was no easy sex or sandalwood and black light posters, this was a woman's rage tempered and honed by style that only sharpened the wit. That razor's edge could slice and dice her motorcycle betrayer as fat or as thinly as she wanted, and list the crimes, the sins, the absolute arrogance of being the clod-thickened, presumptuous male.

Tellingly, this collection dove tailed with the emergence of feminist activism, when women involved in the movement announced that they were not going to make the meals and run off fliers for the next Black Panther legal fund raiser. Wakoski touched a nerve,lit a fire, she let the dynamite shack explode. I always like a poems by a woman who ends a dedication to a former lover with the deepest hope that he fall off his motorcycle and break his neck.I would assert that Wakoski found conventional poetic styles insufficient for the amount of resentment she needed to express and instead found a way that made unfiltered anger a true poetry. This is not an artless diatribe, a sustained screech or mere primal howling. It is writing, through and through, and what she does here is in an idealized vernacular, the voice of someone who has had no voice other than wimpering submission to a man's will and whim finding one over time and submits an articulate, white hot indictment of the man (or men) who did her ill. There is rhythm her, wit, and the anger is crystallized, etched in acid, phrased in cadences that are memorable and ring true. It is a monologue, and could be in a contemporary drama--Edward Albee wouldn't mind calling these lines his own had he written them. These poems are where rage is tempered and brought to the fine, slicing edge of genius.

The Doors on Ed Sullivan, 1967: "Light My Fire"

The Doors on Ed Sullivan, 1967: "Light My Fire":

Greil Marcus is an erratic rock and roll and pop culture critic, a survivor of the early days of the counter culture who,through a combination of obsessed observation of the rapidly changing terrain of American life and outright careerism, has made himself into The Grey Presence of The Big Beat. I have always imagined him looking into the mirror trying to imagine himself as gnarly combination of Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, thinking his duty is to rise the discussion of rock music and the other arts that follow in its wake from a mere cataloging of guitar riffs and hidden messages of baroque ,obscure lyrics to a concentrated hermeneutics aimed at clarifying the historical forces that inform the spirit, direction and sheer force of the new arts. 

In  his books "Lipstick Traces" and "Invisible Republic", Marcus has argued that the formerly divided parts of America, the separate strands of it's immigrant population, here by choice, persecution or brute force, were now merging over a long , arduous period, occurring less, he implies, as a decisions of individuals who would like a more interesting , varied, dynamic democracy in which to flourish and be creative, but as an inevitable consequence of processes engineered in the Heavens; History was going toward a long term destination, each period's style , innovations breakthroughs building upon the stale, innovations and breakthroughs of the period that came before it. You get the idea, I think. Marcus writes enthusiastically like a smart undergraduate who had done exceptionally well during a course sequence where freshman and sophomores were required to read and discuss the Great Books in comparatively short order who then sought to apply every basic concept he'd absorbed to every pop culture artifact that happened upon his radar.

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