Reactions to Fame

What happens to artists that get famous? It’s not a situation I have any direct experience of, but with thousands of documented responses, it isn’t hard to piece together a general picture. Fame is an extreme circumstance, one that makes daily tasks most of us take for granted as “doable” well-nigh impossible. Fame is interesting largely because of its extremity; that it sets famous people so far beyond the pale of normal society and methods of socialization. When creative artists become famous, the phenomenon of fame often becomes a thematic element of/in their work. Where fame is concerned there is also an extensive “casualty list,” and famous people with “self-destruct” buttons are in particular danger. Some of the pitfalls would seem to be these: wanting to stay drunk/high all the time, believing one’s self to be invincible, craving inordinate amounts of love/sex/affection, betraying a weakness for promiscuity, and beginning to believe one’s own hype. On the other hand, it’s presumptuous, as a non-famous person (as, in other words, an outsider), to try to be authoritative about the phenomenon of fame. Fame seems to turn its screws on a case-by-case basis, and to exert its influence unpredictably. I want to take a look at three cases, which vary widely and wildly, to try and generate a kind of spectrum about how artists react to fame. One is tragic, one’s comic, and one is right in the middle.

Few would deny Syd Barrett a place as one of the most unique songwriters in rock history. His songs were quirky, pastoral, whimsical, LSD-trippy, and often employed odd chromatic chord changes. His biggest hit, See Emily Play, begins with Syd dragging a school-ruler down the fret-board of his Fender Telecaster. Syd was also wont to use his Zippo cigarette lighter in lieu of a bottleneck slide. The problem was this: it was the Summer of Love in Swinging London, and Syd (along with Pink Floyd, which then included a “The” beforehand) was getting famous. Syd’s friends kept “dosing” him, sending him on one LSD trip after another, over a period of months. As time progressed, Syd was unable to extricate himself from this negative LSD nexus. He was naïve, barely post-adolescent (21), and extremely good-looking; he began to withdraw behind a frighteningly blank stare. By the end of the year, he could barely stand up, let alone perform. Syd Barrett’s story is the ultimate “too much too soon” cautionary tale. He left behind one masterpiece album (The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which takes its title from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows), and a few desultory solo albums recorded after he left the Floyd permanently in 1968. Syd’s inability to navigate the choppy waters of counterculture fame became fodder for songwriter Roger Waters, the group’s de facto leader after Barrett’s departure. Waters effectively turned fame into a metaphor for the human condition, and this resulted in albums like Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, which made Floyd famous in the States.

John Ashbery (in)famously remarked, to be a famous poet is not to be famous. Poetry fame usually consists of coterie fame, “city fame,” bunches of big fishes in small ponds. It makes me think of the Kurt Cobain song Territorial Pissings. Usually, fame in poetry comes with age, and is still held within strictly defined bounds. There is also the little issue of material compensation— in poetry (prizes and grants aside), there is usually none. Think of the most well-known poets of the last fifty years— Creeley, Ashbery, Ginsberg, Sexton, Plath, Lowell, Bukowski. These people either got rich through trust-funds (Lowell), writing novels (Bukowksi), or business savvy (Ginsberg). Poetry book sales are usually not substantial enough to make a difference. Poetry fame is “no-money fame,” which often necessitates academic involvement. I’m on the fence about whether there is any commensurability between media fame as we know it in 2009 and poetry. If there is no genuine media fame in poetry, then there would seem to be nothing to react to on this level. The phenomenon of the Byronic, of the poet-as-mainstream celebrity whose books sell in mass quantities, has not been visible in 200 years. Even the Beats are nowhere near. So, it will be difficult to get a true reaction to fame from a genuine poet until one arises that achieves some semblance of mainstream fame again (fan that I am, I don’t count Patti Smith or Jim Morrison as poets). This is the “in the middle” to Syd Barrett’s tragedy.

Andy Warhol had the brilliant idea that fame was essentially another commodity— it could be manufactured, packaged, and sold. That fame was essentially “business and nothing else” was a truth Warhol put into play in the movies he made with his cadre of Factory superstars. Warhol manipulated the banality of mainstream fame both to send up its ridiculousness and to show that the trick of generating fame was both easily accomplished and easily mastered. The films he made are less remarkable, as works of art, for what’s included than for the motivating ideas behind them. Much of it has to do with the fact that these movies were Warhol’s reaction to his own overwhelming media fame. That you really can’t put your finger on the emotional heart of these movies (assuming there is one, which there may not be), how much the Superstars mean what they say and say what they mean, is beside the point. The media creates Superstars just to have something to sell, and Warhol blatantly did the same thing, and wound up subverting and reinforcing media ethos at the same time. I call Warhol’s movies comic because I think they were meant to be funny; all the subtexts that people see in them would not have been visible (or relevant) to Warhol himself. It was also Warhol’s clever way of deflecting attention away from himself, of using his fame to promote a stable of “talents” who might not be Oscar-worthy, but who could give perceptive viewers a real sense of what New York street-life, party-life, and society-life was like in the 1960s. Warhol was more skillful than almost anyone else at taking his fame and working it. That may be the most intelligent reaction to fame there is.

Post-Avant Pedagogy

This semester at the University of Oregon, John Witte is teaching a course called Literary Editing. He is using a variety of texts, including poems from myself, Amy King, Todd Swift, and others. I'd like to personally thank Witte for including me in this interesting syllabus, which you can read here.

The &Now Awards: The Best Innovative Writing

Several of my Apps that originally appeared in Jacket #31 are now to be released in The &Now Awards: The Best Innovative Writing, an anthology-cum-textbook being released by Lake Forest College Press and to be distributed by Northwestern University Press. You can buy the anthology here. You can also take a peek at who the other included authors are here. Congrats to all involved, and thanks especially to editors Robert Archambeau, Davis Schneiderman, and Steve Tomasula.

Unique, Absurd

Sometimes something (that you might or might not call a work of art) has something unique about it, which makes it stand out, even if in some ways it seems like kitsch. That even kitsch can be valuable, is an invaluable lesson to learn; also, that absurd things can be unique. All good works of art have something to offer; but not all of us have the capacity to be artsy all the time. Art is inherently demanding; it forces new truths and new realities on you. Most of us have moods in which art is just too much, and settling for kitsch isn’t such a bad option. But kitsch is like everything else; some of its’ good, some of it isn’t. What defines “good kitsch”? I’d say it would be kitsch that has something about it that “higher” art doesn’t. There’s a certain amount of freedom you get when you aren’t trying to be an artist, when you’re just having fun. That’s where both the “kitsch attraction” and the “kitsch factor” come into play. So, I thought it might be cool to have a look at some good kitsch. I know some people might find it objectionable that I lump Robert Frost (who is, arguably, canonical) in with kitsch, but I feel that much of what has happened “around” Frost involves him being taken for kitsch, and I do feel that his “folkishness” has a kitsch element to it. Similarly, Wonder Boys is not just kitsch, but a serious comedy with kitschy elements.

I was talking to a friend about (and the situation itself is a kitsch cliché) those soul-searching late nights that many of us have, and I found myself (quite inadvertently) quoting Supertramp’s The Logical Song. There are funny things about the song— the sax solo at the end, the bizarre, clunky rhymes that jam up the verses (liberal, cynical, intellectual, criminal), the late 70s “soft-rock” production values and keyboard sounds. But the magic here is all in the bridge; in it, Roger Hodgeson lays down what amounts to a radically bastardized existentialism: “there are nights when all the world’s asleep/ the questions run so deep/ for such a simple man/ please, I know it sounds absurd/ please, tell me who I am?” The presentation of these lines, with the chord changes and the saxes chiming in, is extremely bathetic; but I realized, as I spoke with my friend, that no other song says precisely this. Supertramp are one of those strange bands that contributed a handful of stalwart songs to classic rock radio and then disappeared. The Logical Song, if only for the “existential bridge,” is unique in the classic rock canon, so much so that it really does have its own use value, which cannot be exchanged.

Robert Frost holds an odd place in the pantheon of Modernist poets. At one point, he was tremendously popular among the general populace, and among politicians (President John Kennedy feted him), and he was by no means considered kitsch by everyone. But the folksy, “rootsy” quality of his poems has come to seem (particularly in experimental circles), in many ways, pretty hokey. No interrogations into language, not even the faintest nod to disjuncture or Modernist impulses (collage, discontinuity), lots of overt (and obvious) sentiment. Frost is stigmatized with a certain kind of jingoism, following in the tracks of Thoreau and Emerson. It’s all about American cliché virtues—
individualism, self-determination, and the way men (and it is almost always men) embody these things. But a poem like The Road Not Taken, as hokey/folksy as it is, tells pretty much the truth about what a life in art is like. For all intents and purposes, artists do go down the road less traveled. They choose an unusual path that often offers little material compensation. So the poem works both as a metaphor for an artist’s life and a direct representation of it. Kitsch or not, the poem is generally applicable to many of us. And because it actually applies to us, it (arguably) transcends its status as kitsch as much or more than Supertramp does, and becomes a useful commodity.

Wonder Boys, I think, is something else— genuine art that’s just a little kitschy. But this movie moves me for such a personal reason that I almost feel like it’s pointless to talk about it. It happens to be the only movie I know of that directly addresses creative writing programs in American universities. I have an MFA and an MA in English— how could I not get attached to characters like Grady Tripp and James Leer? It’s like watching a part of my life. And, as hard as it may be to believe, I really do have an MFA story as ridiculous as what happens in this movie. Let’s just say this: it involves a blog. The Michael Chabon book is an excellent work of comic fiction, and so is the movie. But because the story is so comic, with bits of physical comedy thrown in and incredible situations, it’s literary without necessarily being “artsy.” Its’ value to me is specific, and personal. And every MFA program, not just mine, has stories this convoluted and incredible (even though technically this movie concerns undergrads). There are real Grady Tripps and James Leers all over the place, and I’ve known many of them. So for those of us who have done the creative writing in an American university thing, there’s no way around the attraction that this movie holds. It shows us something that we can't see anywhere else.

Art and Madness

Artists are (sometimes) bonkers. Many of us who are in the game know this, and understand the reality of it. Are psychiatrists bonkers? Judging by what just happened in Texas, probably. How about lawyers and politicians? Probably; the human race often seems pretty bonkers, actually. But in the hierarchy of madness, artists are at least “up there.” I defy any artist worth his or her salt to deny this. Maybe it’s because art is so connected to extremities— of feeling, form, and thought. Maybe it’s because artists are more in touch with the collective unconscious, with impulses and images that float around, waiting to be captured. Maybe it’s the separation from the comforts of mundane life that many of us eschew. In the end, it doesn’t matter that much, because art is funny— once you’re in, it’s very hard to get out. William S. Burroughs forgot to mention that art, like language, is a virus from outer space. But it’s a virus that makes some of our lives worth living, even if the vast majority of human beings get along alright without it. I thought it might be useful to show a few instances in which madness can actually help artists create. The examples I’ve chosen are not people who lost it forever, but rather artists that went through a period of darkness that enabled them to create something extraordinary. As has become customary, the movie segment is different, and has to do with the madness of a specific character and how it makes a movie work. But, within or without, madness it is.

Devoted David Bowie fans can argue endlessly about what his best album is. I’m not going to pull an arsehole move and say THIS is his best album; I’ll simply say that Station to Station, which was released (I believe) the week I was born (2/76), is my favorite. I don’t like it specifically because Bowie almost went mad making it, but, for better or for worse, it does add to the album’s aura. Most serious rock fans know the stories involved— Kabbalah, Los Angeles, cocaine, witches, pentagrams, Aleister Crowley. What’s important is that Bowie integrated these things into the album, without turning it into a comic book, the way that someone like Jimmy Page did. Actually, some things no one (to my knowledge) has even spotted. Like on the CD insert, not only is Bowie doodling the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, he has the planetary attributions filled in as well. There was some serious immersion going on here, occult wise; but it wouldn’t matter, if the quality of the album weren’t also uncanny. Bowie seemed (again, for better or for worse) literally to have channeled and harnessed all these occult energies into viable art, a musical synthesis that put soul, disco, Kraut-rock, Euro, straight rock, funk, and torch songs into a blender and came out with a unique, irreplaceable whole. And, from everything he’s said, went through absolute hell doing it.

T.S. Eliot, also, had an interest in the occult, but was inclined to be patronizing about it. Thus, you get the ditsy tarot card reader in The Waste Land, his most famous poem, and the drowning man, and the man with three staves. How many people know that Eliot composed what became (in Ezra Pound’s judicious hands, and editing this poem could be the most important thing Pound ever did) Waste Land in a sanitarium in Switzerland? The pressures of working at a bank and living with a mentally unstable woman had driven Eliot to the brink. So, he produced roughly forty pages of what he called “rhythmical grumbling” and handed them off to Ez. Many people believe that this collage, so bleak yet so expansive, secular but with non-secular overtones, is the most important poem of the twentieth century. Honestly, where twentieth century poetry is concerned, what doesn’t it dwarf? I feel that even many century XX “classics” are mediocre in comparison. William Carlos Williams, of course, complained that WL put poetry “back in the classroom,” with all its arcane symbolism and recondite references. But that’s a small price to pay (I feel) for the visionary power of the piece as a whole, where the parts add up to more than their sum, and to all the many facets of twentieth century art that this anticipated, up to and including facets of popular music like hip-hop techno (sounds like a stretch, but it isn’t; think “sampling”). And if Eliot hadn’t had a nervous breakdown, the whole thing wouldn’t have happened.

Madness in a work of art is a little different. Representations of madness, especially in movies, can be very compelling, because almost any sensitive person can identify with madness. Travis Bickle, the protagonist of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, seems to represent a specific type of American madness: violent, anti-social, willing to destroy in the name of justice. In some ways, he’s a sophisticated Rambo. The scenes with both Cybil Shepherd and Jodie Foster are painful, as Travis tries to make successful human connections. In the end, all of Travis’s madness (and the actions it leads to) leave us with unsettling questions— does the end of Travis’s actions justify his madness? Do we become complicit with him if we approve of what he’s done? Eliot’s poem is often thought to implicate a secular society, a G-dless world; Travis Bickle seems to implicate a society, not just for being secular, but for being crass, ruthless, mercenary, “scummy,” and completely lacking in innocence. And, of course, the final question that rises from this, and perhaps from the whole movie: is Travis Bickle mad? This is an instance of a filmmaker specifically investigating these issues, and from a point of sanity and comprehension. As such, it makes a neat contrast to the first two bits, in which a felt madness dictated the creation of the work of art. But, consciously or unconsciously, the “mad” elements here are impossible to efface.

Eventualities

Many good works of art, whether they’re famous in their day or not, exude a kind of “afterglow effect.” They have enough value that isn’t just hitched to one era to continue to shine, and to give pleasure to audiences. Why some good art isn’t big in its own time is an interesting question, with no single answer. Sometimes, it has to do with the personality of the artist. Some artists are just too difficult, too defensive, too ornery to make a name for themselves; some are too shy, too diffident. Whatever the reason, the idea of a “late rise” is by no means unheard of. “Posthumous rises” are not uncommon either, especially in literature, where books take time (from years to decades to centuries) to sink in, and initial receptions don’t matter that much. Popular artists generally put more of a premium on initial receptions than literary artists do, because (often) their livelihood depends on them. Poetry stands at an extreme in this regard— in poetry, initial reception counts for almost literally nothing. The afterglow effect is all-in-all. It doesn’t help that poets so often stand in the way of their own work— bickering, being pointlessly uncompromising, believing the world owes them a living. But all art-forms have stories of artists who for whatever reason couldn’t catch a break during their life-times, but received validation, vindication, and valorization after they died. Here are two exemplary ones, and something a bit different.

Nick Drake made three gorgeous, little-heard albums between 1969 and 1972, and died of an overdose of anti-depressants in 1974. He died feeling himself to be a failure. However, over three decades word of his albums spread, and as of now he’s almost a household word. Drake’s case is comparatively simple— for Nick, there were specific reasons why he couldn’t become famous. He refused to tour, do interviews, or any kind of promotion. He found any kind of social contact whatsoever almost unbearable, and was wont to retreat behind a wall of absolute silence. The miracle isn’t that Nick Drake didn’t make it; it’s that the three albums (Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter, Pink Moon) got recorded at all. Nick was extremely lucky to find, in producer Joe Boyd, arranger Robert Kirby, and even famous accompanists like John Cale, people that could make his visions concrete realities. Nick’s rise began in the late 1990s, when Volkswagon began using his song Pink Moon (title track from the album) in a car commercial, and was consolidated when Fly from Bryter Layter showed up in The Royal Tenenbaums. Nick even got a nod in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. All three of his albums are now respected as popular classics; there have been biographies and movies. He had to get out of the way for this to happen.

It’s become such a commonplace to think of William Blake as a leading Romantic poet that it’s easy to forget that for almost the entire nineteenth century, he was no such thing. Blake is extreme— it took almost a whole century for his work to catch on. It’s also astonishing to go in depth with Romanticism and find that William Wordsworth actually knew of Blake as early as 1812, and approved of him (over Byron). So, what’s with the hundred-year gap? Blake’s multi-media presentations (text/paintings) were prescient, but also made Blake difficult to fit into known frameworks of poetry presentations. In art, it’s not enough for people to know you; people need to know what to do with you. No one knew what to do with Blake for a long time. Blake’s posthumous fortune was tied in to his being very in tune with the Zeitgeist of the twentieth century, rather than the nineteenth. Nietzschean iconoclasm, also initiated in the nineteenth century, began to take hold as an influence in the twentieth (sometimes in benevolent contexts, sometimes in evil ones), and Blake’s iconoclasm, which challenged traditional notions of morality and religiosity, fitted in squarely with this. It made Wordsworth and Coleridge’s parochialism seem stiff, pompous, and outdated in comparison. Blake can even cut it with a po-mo crowd in a way that the other Romantics can’t; his longer texts, their outrageous mythologies and trailblazing irreverence, fits in with the irreverence of post-modernism, in a way that Byron (the next obvious choice) can’t match. Where Romanticism was concerned (and the New Critics somewhat aside), the twentieth century belonged to Blake, even as it dawns on us that the twenty-first century has made things up for grabs again.

This one is more a suspicion than something that’s actually happened: has David Lynch ever had a box-office hit? Certainly not on the level with someone like Spielberg. But I think Lynch’s films will continue to grow and gain in importance as time goes by. It all has to do with Lynch’s unique vision of American, which exposes the seamy underside of the American dream: the places where acquisitiveness becomes perversion, sex becomes transgression, suburbia becomes Hades, and bright facades hide absolute darkness. In Lynch’s films, there is no innocence beneath the surface. Even the quirkiness that is Lynch’s trademark is not the quirkiness you’d see in, say, a Wes Anderson movie; with Lynch quirk has more to do with kinkiness than with lovability or even likability. We watch Nicolas Cage play Sailor Ripley, and as much as we like and enjoy the character, it’s hard to forget that he’s capable of murder. Or with Kyle MacLachlan as Jeffrey Beaumont, the coming-of-age that happens is so ridiculously atypical that it’s hard to feel about Jeffrey, at the film’s end, the way we do about the various characters in American Graffiti. It’s almost a kind of Alice in Wonderland, but with so much real violence and perversity thrown in that it’s difficult to have a normal negative or positive response. Once you’ve accepted Lynch’s vision, then you decide if you like it, but acceptance comes first. And it’s this uncompromising edge to Lynch that gives his films their unique power, and one that may translate over a long period of time, so that a cult blossoms into something huge.

Severed Alliances

Art, like politics, is a realm full of severed alliances. Art-partnerships are very common, because many artists thrive on certain kinds of relationships. We all have people who give us ideas, who inspire things, who make us think things we haven’t thought before. It’s also not uncommon (unfortunately) for artists to use each other. Artists are notoriously amoral (or even immoral) where their work is concerned. Many of us have a drive to create, by any means necessary. That means that if you see someone or something that will help with your work, it’s difficult to avoid wanting to use them. The best art-partnerships involve genuine reciprocity, two sensibilities that genuinely mesh and produce distinct products that each individual would be incapable of producing alone. However, the dark side of this is very striking. When art-partnerships end, all kinds of carnage can result. This is especially true of highly successful collaborations involving large amounts of capital (and not merely cultural capital). Severed alliances can mean broken careers and broken hearts; sometimes, even worse. But it is worth looking at broken alliances because they are key to understanding the humanity of artists, all of whom have a good end in mind (to create) but many of whom are led to bad places by all the contingencies that attend a life in art. No one that’s been through an intense art-alliance can deny the exquisite ecstasy and agony of the process, as creation turns to destruction and back again.

Brian Jones founded the Rolling Stones. He was their original auteur, and the architect of their early sound. He left the group in June 1969, and died four weeks later. Brian’s severance from the Stones is unique in rock history. Brian had enough charisma to generate a feature film (Stoned) and any number of biographies, but his status in the Stones’ history remains misunderstood. At the heart of the mystery lies Brian’s relationship with Keith Richards, the other guitarist and principle songwriter of the band; they started very close, and grew very much apart. In many ways, Brian was outmatched. You can make an argument that, as a guitar player, Keith Richards simply demolished Brian Jones. You can also say that, as a songwriter, Keith demolished Brian. But I (and many others) believe that Brian added something definite to the Stones equation. Brian had a class and an intelligence that the other Stones didn’t. All you have to do is watch an early Stones interview to see that Brian was singularly articulate; Mick Jagger and Keith look (frankly) like louts in comparison. In Swinging London, Brian was easily as popular as Mick was. But it does seem that in many ways, the Stones success was the worst thing that ever happened to Brian. He was a delicate (if oversexed) lad thrown into a cage (the rock biz) with jealous animals, and never recovered.

This must be the first time in history that anyone has compared Brian Jones with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but there are parallels. Coleridge and William Wordsworth started off as best friends, very much partners in crime. Lyrical Ballads was a joint endeavor that initiated British Romanticism. Only, after a certain point, it became quite clear that Coleridge could not keep up with Wordsworth. Wordsworth was more focused, more practical, more materially ambitious, and more prolific. So, as the project evolved, Wordsworth commandeered it away from Coleridge, and the most famous art-partnership in the history of British literature was severed. Unlike Brian Jones, Coleridge did achieve an amount of revenge; when he published his Biographia, he made clear in no uncertain terms that he felt that the ideas that Wordsworth had generated alone (presented in the 1802 Preface) were a bunch of bullshit. Coleridge criticized Wordsworth for attempting to tell the world what the “real language of men” was. At that point, Wordsworth was still struggling to find an audience (a fact that gave Byron massive amusement), and the last thing he needed was for his erstwhile partner to drown him in criticism. Still, it is worth noting that though time effaced the bond between Wordsworth and Coleridge, a few centuries have restored it. Their names are always linked in anthologies, academic texts, and they are often taught (as they were taught to me at Penn) side by side. Just like those early, ageless pictures of the Stones may, in fact, define them for the ages.

From the sublimity of goyim-life to the neurotic: I think it would be an exaggeration to say that Woody Allen made all his best movies with Diane Keaton, but who can argue with Sleeper, Annie Hall, and Manhattan? Woody was enumerating, with great precision, the exoticism of the shikse, and Diane Keaton was as “uber-shikse” as you can get. She also had her own kind of neuroticism, which acted as a foil to Woody’s: those tics! These two personified one part of the 1970s Zeitgeist: the emergence of psychoanalytic bourgeois culture. Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk about their problems, and doing this was no longer self-indulgence. Woody and Diane were a perfect “therapy couple”: each with their own issues, mostly related to (what else?) sex and death. Woody became a “thinking woman’s sex symbol,” and Diane Keaton a thinking man’s. This severance seems far more amicable than the other two: Woody and Diane are still alive and working today; but their partnership could only produce what it produced, and have the kind of relevance it had, at a certain moment in time. The moment ended, but the movies (as always) remain, and both are assured of a place in cinematic history.