CHOKE ON THESE WORDS

Well, yeah, I'm grumpy some of the time, and I've been accused of being a curmudgeon in regards to National Poetry Month, the annual  dedication to an elusive art with a small audience that itself is divided among several hundred-seeming schools of thought as to what is genuinely worth reading or promoting. The reservations come chiefly from the attitude that poetry is something pathetic in itself, with Special Needs, and that there is a collective delusion in the publishing world that poetry can be made more popular by hyping the form with the cliched hokum that sounds culled from New Age screeds. It's a little infuriating to witness an art that you believe, at it's best, sparks the unusual idea or the unforeseen connection within a reader be reduced as something that  marketers promise to deliver a consumer to an even deeper vat of circumscribed thinking.

I wouldn't say my remarks about National Poetry Month are grumpy, just realistic. On the face of it I welcome a month dedicated to the art , craft and diversity of poets and their work , and even think that the month might well bring new readers to poetry as something they'd read in their leisure time. The problem is that once we give someone or some thing a special day, week, or month for the nominal purpose of increasing awareness, most of the population bothering to observe what the calendar day commemorates will nod their head, bow their head, read a few poems, maybe buy a single volume that will likely wind up half way finished and atop a coffee table, a page bent down to mark a page,not be picked up again, and then be done with it for the year. It certainly gives major publishers significant favorable publicity so they can present themselves as more than bottom-line obsessed subsidiaries of malignant media corporations: look at what we're doing to support the arts, look at our love of poetry!!There are poets who benefit, many of them I count my favorites, but the fact that poetry in general has a month dedicated to it's supposed welfare seems more to me that the rest of the literary world considers the form a poor, sickly relative; April as poetry month is the metaphorical gulag, a ghetto, a hospice, that space where this art, which no publisher seems to know how to market so it contributes usefully to their bottom line, is allowed to make it's noise, indulge their rhetoric for a short period in the spot light before being ushered from the stage and back to the margins.

Poets, the work they do, the theories they develop regarding their art has been the most rarefied and most diffuse of the arts as it developed since the encroachment of Modernism over turned the conventional thinking about poetry's form and purpose. It's been to poetry's advantage, I think, that the audience has been small, very small, compared to the other genres that help publishers make their payrolls and their dividends, since the relative obscurity has allowed poets of many different styles and concerns, politics and agendas to advance their art and arguments , both Quietist and Post-Avant Gard, unconcerned with a commercial aspect that wasn't theirs to begin with. National Poetry Month is something like a zoo the city folk may visit on their days off , and the poets are the exotic creatures who will perform their tricks, do their dances, take their bows for the smattering of applause and loose coin that might come their way. Generally speaking, poets and their work would be better off, and saner as well, if the illusion that a dedicated month will increase the readership and increase book sales as well.It would be better for poets to stop behaving like their in need of rehabilitation and went about their business, doing what we're supposed to do to the best our individual and collective abilities. If the work is good, interesting, of quality on it's own terms, the audience , whatever the size, will come.

_____________________________

Clapton assessment

I lost interest in Clapton's guitar work quite a while ago. Post-Cream, his solo work was pretty lazy, with outbreaks of inspiration , such as Layla or his wonderful blues disc From the Cradle. Others may feel differently,but he seems to have recycling old riffs for decades; I count from Wikipedia that he has released 16 live albums under his name over the years, a sign of  laziness, as no new material is coming forth, but also of arrogance, a conviction,if unspoken,that each of his long blues solos is a work of art, ready for prime time. 

This works worth Coltrane to large degree, in my view (and tastes) and much less satisfactorily for Keith Jarrett (who noodles as much as me combusts with inspiration). It's not so objectionable for a jazz musician to have numerous live albums over the course of a long career since a tenet of the jazz aesthetic is that no two improvisations on the same song are alike. 

Each performance is a unique work of art, and able jazz players are able to recast,re-imagine, re-brand their signature songs continually. Clapton,though, is not a jazz musician, but a blues player, with a far more limited vocabulary of ideas that simply repeat themselves. There is redundancy in his execution that becomes wearisome with all those elongated solos. These days, where he gets my attention is less the addition of new musical ideas or context, but rather by the quality of fire he brings to the old material, to the signature riffs and phrases. My favorite example is his reunion with fellow Blind Faith member Steve Winwood from 2009. Clapton's guitar work burns hot,fevered, intense, inspired throughout the two discs. This two disc set more than reclaimed Clapton's greatness from drifting, plodding and dispirited money grab that was the 2004 Cream reunion.

What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?

Following allegations by creditable women that horrible albeit talented Hollywood men  have  harassed, molested, fondled , raped them over long periods of time, it merits asking , as The Paris Review does, what we do with the work of artists who are simply monsters . It's not a fashionable thing to suggest, but I go with Trust the tale, not the teller. I am inclined to think that artists, good- natured or foul in personal relationships, make sincere attempts to make art that represents some better version of themselves. Art making, whether writing or making movies, composing poems or painting in realistic or abstract variations, is a process that, at bottom, tries to make sense of a problematic world and the individual's responses to it. Even terrible people, monsters even, can provide creations that provide insight insight, wisdom, a sense of useful irony in the guise of metaphor and other devices. So yes, we should continue to honor the work of monstrous men who've been long praised as great artists. whoever we happen to be talking about, the critical consensus has long been in place, formed over decades of critical review. 

This assume, of course,that the host of critics haven't been shilling for these horrible males. Let us assume, then, the novels, the movies, the poems, the plays, the paintings, the TV shows that have been highly regarded by critics and audiences are indeed good as quality, worthwhile items of art that have met rigorous criteria. criticism, popular criticism, needs to learn again an old lesson, that depth of talent does not indicate quality of character.Art has a tendency to outlive the awful men who created it. Picasso, from all accounts a genuine creep, remains in discussions and continues to be shown in museums because he was a great artist who changed the way we think about art. Pound remains important as poet and theoretician of art and poetics despite his antisemitism penchant for  treason and racism.Sinatra will likely remain the shining example of what a singer-crooner-interpreter needs to be in spite of his horrendous treatment of women and his tie ins with the Mob.We could go on.Art is long, life is short, and the reputations of truly gifted artists who were, as well,monsters in personal behavior lingers much, much longer in the historical memory than do a ignoble acts. I've no problem factoring personal aspects of artists into discussions of their art as a means to understand how specific works achieve their power, but for flushing whole bodies of work because of vetted and not so vetted accusations of being less than wholesome would remove an unbelievable amount of aesthetic benefit from the world. 

Artists , even on their best days, never rise above the status of being human; there is no requirement for them to be saints. There are requirements,namely laws,for them being acceptable citizens, and they must be held accountable for their actions in the world they live in. The work, though, is a different matter. My nose offends me because I think its too large, but I will not cut it off nor spend the time to repair it through surgery.

Tom Rapp, Pearls Before Swine founder, RIP

Tom Rapp, co-founder, guitarist, singer, and principal songwriter for seminal Sixties Underground band Pearls Before Swine, has died, age 70.  I had three albums by Pearls Before Swine in my time as an earnest seeker of weird new music, One Nation Underground, These Things To and Balaklava at various times. Like fellow travelers Kaleidoscope, and the Holy Modal Rounders, PBS emerged from the Folk Boom of the early Sixties, when the interest in roots music and sounds from other cultures had largely by-passed the interest in creating yet more safe, commercial Top 40 hits; the interest  aligned with poetry, expanded improvisations, motifs previously heard only in university special collection listening rooms, an interest in trying out ideas to see what it would sound like,  however ragged or rarefied. I wasn't a Rapp devotee, but I did like his general approach to being a product of the counterculture. His songs were simple but alluring, just exotic enough to surprise you when you otherwise might have switched albums. His lyric writing was haphazard, kissing the edge of psychedelia but smartly confining itself in an amiable surrealism that relieved the verities of being young and naive.  Other times, his lyric was sharp and beguiling from the imagery stance; he never achieved the polish of a Cohen or Simon, the feathers and lace lyricism of Mitchell, or the dark, rococo symbolism of Dylan, but there was an appeal he, a genuinely odd take on circumstances he found himself involved in, and sly wit that undercut what might have been insufferable pretensions by many drug-informed bands of the time. The Sixties were an age when naive art had, in large measure, gone far beyond the endearingly insular to levels of unprecedented pomposity and egocentric self-regard. Rock and roll, suddenly an art form with nascent critics and literature department dropouts egging the rabble onward with their guitar bashing and cotton-mouthed pronouncements, became the refuge for many of the marginally musical who overrated their abilities and sought to crowd out the real talent from whatever crash pad couch they happened to be sitting on.  

The joy of Tom Rapp and Pearls Before Swine was that he wasn't concerned with convincing the world of his genius. Like any poet I admire, large talent or smaller, the business of writing poems, or songs, was one of accurately recording one's impressions, perceptions and fleeting grasp of intangible details, catching them as exactly, as faithfully as the phenomena itself, eschewing the construction of an ersatz philosophy. This hearkens back to my taste for William Carlos Williams and other Modernist poets who desired that their language have fidelity with the world that their task wasn't to make sense of the world, to render it coherent to a narrative still be written, but rather to have a sense of the sphere one inhabits, that is, a sense of participating in the commotion, marveling and dismaying in turn as events unfold. 

Rapp wasn't as melodramatic as I might make him sound--he was, in spirit, a what-the-fuck-hippie not dislike the Grateful Dead's lyricist Robert Hunter in temperament. Rapp had whimsy to temper his fatalism, and he lacked the fashionable weariness so many singer-songwriters affected during this period. He never pretended to be 30 years older than he was; he acted the age he truly was, which made the reports from his imagination seem fresh and enduring, if, as already mentioned, a bit awkward and unpolished.  I enjoyed them for what they were, unique, minor, a breath of fresh air. Much more fun than the Incredible String Band.

i am compelled to share this with all you John Mayall fans

Foghat were among the unfortunate realities of arena rock, a blues rock band so uninspiring that calling them “pedestrian” is to overrate their quality. They were everything that could possibly go wrong with a white blues band. Wooden rhythms, clanging arrangements, anemic guitars, adenoidal vocals. I saw them several times because they were on the same bill with bands I wanted to see. Edgar Winter Group, J. Geils Band, Bob Seger? This was the 70s, when the brilliant, the mediocre and the largest category, the absolutely abysmal performed on the same bills ; you had to grit your teeth, swallow hard and take it like a champ, aware that sitting through another unturned, zombie-shuffling set by Foghat was the condition you needed to agree to if you wanted a chance to see a true living legend live. It was like getting hit by the same bus over and over and over again.

A memoir by Robert Christgau

Going Into the City:
Portrait Of a Critic
as a Young Man
By Robert Christgau 

I made it halfway through Robert Christgau's memoir Going Into the City: Portrait Of a Critic as a Young Man before I had to put it down. Memoirs are a literary excuse for interesting people to talk about themselves due to an inherent belief that merely being themselves, sans compelling intellection or objectively intriguing art--novels, movies, poems, paintings--is enough to fill a book. it's likely that my lapse was due to the format Christgau chose; too much him, not enough of the world that formed him as a thinker about Pop Music and related concerns.I'm tempted to pick it up again, but I hesitate, I stall, I make excuses to do something else, considering that Christgau's obsessiveness, perfect for a critic, can be hard to take for long in a book that is supremely autobiographical in nature. I have been wishing that someone would take his best essays from his website and collect them into a volume or two; on rock and pop and some other matters of culture is always an intriguing point of view and it would be great to have those views between covers. 

I'd been reading Christgau's insular, fannish, personal and idiomatically dense reviews for decades and rather liked the idea that I was part of the cognoscenti who could parse his sentences and follow his train of thought. "Any Old Way You Choose It", his collection of longer reviews and pieces gathered from the Sixties and Seventies, is one of my all-time favorite essay collections, a brainy, chatty, at times exasperatingly idiosyncratic journey through a couple of decades of extraordinary innovation; I love it for the same reason I still cherish Pauline Kael's "I Lost It At The Movies", for that rare combination of true fan enthusiasm and discovery. As with Kael at her best, you can sense the moment when Christgau comes to an insight, a discovery yet undiscovered by other writers; he has that element of "ah-HA! “Coming to his Consumer Guide column, where he would review anything and everything available, from the varied strands of rock, disco, reggae, folk, jazz, and pop was like meeting that clutch of friends you knew in college who considered rock and pop the emerging Grand Art. His was a column where I found someone who kept the conversation going, and strange and self-indulgent as it may have seen, it was fertile ground to debate and exchange ideas on the relative qualities of music. Anyone who's been through this bit before, the obsession with rock music is an art and establishing the critical terms with which one can assess, appraise and make note of what makes albums worth the purchase, appreciates the kind of critical thinking which becomes a habit of mind. In college I was Arts Editor of the thrice-weekly campus newspaper and was required, in addition to my studies, to write a crushing amount of column inches a week on matters of music, theatre, television, movies. Rough life, I know, but it was a lot of writing none the less, and the chief debt I might have toward Christgau, an admittedly sketchy model for a minor league reviewer, was the creation of a tone, a style. 

The Village Voice, founded in the fifties by Norman Mailer and Dan Wolfe, was formerly noted as a magazine where the pittance that writers were paid was somewhat compensated by the freedom they had to develop a writing style, ideas, and journalistic beats. It was a writer's publication, and that was the chief attraction for a reader who wanted more than cooker cutter reviews or cursory coverage of politics and culture. Christgau is a product of that freedom and developed an argot and style that was intended for those as obsessed and concerned with music as he was; he is a critic, not a reviewer distinction being that the critic assumes that his or her reader has the same background in the area under discussion as they do. Unlike reviews, which are final and absolute and brook no discussion beyond name calling, Christgau's essays are addressed to the concerned, the convinced, the true believer that pop music traditions matter as much as so-called High Culture expressions. This leaves him incomprehensible for many who think his writing is too dense with insular references and verbal shorthand to bother with, but that was a chief part of my attraction to his writing. There were many a time when I was in my twenties when I hadn't the slightest idea of what he was talking about-- who was Adorno? Marcuse? Sun Ra??-- but the subject matter at hand compelled me to investigate references further. It was an old-fashioned enterprise, his column in one hand, a dictionary and an encyclopedia at the ready to clarify the murkier waters of his prose. Any inspiring critic does that. Christgau and the late Lester Bangs gave me some ideas and methods in learning how to write fast, and well (or at least well enough that some light editing could be done without a major operation and my copy could be taken to the typesetter before the deadline). What is impressive about Christgau is his catholicity of taste, his constant curiosity about new sorts of noise and racket, and his ability to form connections and generate operate theories. 

His writing is unique, and the Village Voice's loss will be another editor's gain. Christgau certainly tried to be confessional, tell all essayist, a horrible habit from the sixties that still infests popular nonfiction these days, as when he reprinted a long piece in "Any Old Way" about a trip across country with his girlfriend Ellen Willis and, in what was ostensibly an essay dealing with ideas, chronicled the events precipitating their break up. It was a rather aimless accounting, neither interesting as personality gossip nor compelling as an intellectual argument. It was just...awkward, not unlike someone who feels they have to talk about something that is a change in their life but cannot find the words that make you empathize. I rather enjoyed his prejudices, snobbery and the like, and I liked the fact the reserved the right to change his mind about an artist, even if only for one album. He as a critic, a dilettante, someone's who's a propensity toward prolix was intriguing, attractive, worth the bother to pour over when he was engaging the popular culture he thrived on.

Two Guys Will Yell at You. Reasonable Rates

I read smart critics with a flair for prose, knowledge of the medium they're assessing, and who go beyond the common stock clichés, platitudes and ritual complaints and back up their remarks with pertinent examples. Also, the critics I prefer are pretty much a literate sort, knowledgeable of the arts in general, literature, and who have a grasp of social issues. It's not that I expect critics to deliver exhaustive dissections of films each time they write, but the ability to refer to poetry, novels, plays, music knowingly and coherently and not just other recent movies from the last 30 is an element that brings something "more" to the analysis of a film. It keeps the criticism fresh, genuine, honest, whether the judgement is positive and veering toward the negative. "That's just your opinion" is a response that doesn't cut it, really. Indeed, a critics' view is his other opinion, but that ought to go without saying. Some opinions have more value than others; I prefer the reviewers who get me thinking about what I saw.

 If I come up against a well-written and knowledgeable review that challenges my opinion of a certain film--or novel, play, record album, whatever--it's my task to respond with a strong counterargument. I either shore up my position or be willing to modify my view. Mostly, I reserve the right to change my mind based on new evidence, a strong position. Time was when readers of film reviews debated the merits of what Hollywood did in frank but civil exchanges; debaters engaged each other's ideas and left personal attacks for the wallowing habits of the less perceptive in our midst. Just think of it, the glorious ebb and flow of conversation on subject you're thoroughly engaged with, trading critiques, asides, remarks, information, insights and fertile comparisons of differences with a host of others with whom you may disagree entirely or partially, but who are no less passionate about the arts than you are.

 Imagine as well such knowing and exciting talk without a death threat, a misogynist aside, a racial slur and other varieties of input that demean another's humanity without purpose. It's a wearisome fact that civility seems to be a concept that no longer has utility. Where are the Duncan Shepards, the James Wolcotts, the Manny Farbers , the Paulin Kaels of this generation? Who will be our next Lester Bangs, our next Robert Christgau? Attention spans, as a function of understanding a lot of information and to have a Big Picture as to how the world is operating , a picture that can be tweaked and modified as history marches on, seem no longer able to sustain concentration on those matters that require evaluations longer than a Tweet or a Facebook meme. This shrinking concern for context and critical discussion has effected our politics, as we've become creatures moved to quick frenzies of irrational absolutism  at the mention of code word, the flashing of a threatening meme, the rattling of a rubber sword in a tin foil scabbard.The point is of reviews, and the right to free speech, is to motivate us to have discussions about thing we're passionate about and perhaps learn something from someone else's point of view. But it seems we've rapidly getting to the point where these discussion threads are snake pits for anonymous character assassination. This is a damn shame, as it represents the growing refusal for many of us to take responsibility for our ideas and deeds.