Art and the Icarus Syndrome

Scandals and transgressions are what the media feed on. We all know this, but when it involves the arts, it takes on a different tinge. Why is it that people are so upset when artists fuck up? Why is it a movie or rock star gets splattered across the front page for something that ordinary people (for better or for worse) fall into all the time? Partly it’s because normal people want to see artists fall, and fail. Famous artists often seem to have it all: looks, power, money, talent. These are all things that average people either don’t have, or have little of. So there’s a level of revenge going on. There’s also a level of genuine resentment, even against artists who aren’t that famous, because people associate the arts with freedom, with having a wild, exciting, unpredictable life. This is not necessarily the case either, but preconceptions are difficult to dislodge. Ultimately, it adds up to what I call “The Icarus Syndrome”: we, artists, fly (or are perceived to fly) too close to the sun. We live too hard and too fast. Thus, it is more likely that our wings are going to get burned off. This is a variant of the Live Fast, Die Young theme, except here it involves not death but scandal and transgression. Lots of artists do think they’re above the law. That’s usually the cue for the law to move right in and inflict justice. And this applies to artists across the board.

Sid Vicious was, by all accounts, a very difficult person, and none too bright. It was by pure luck that he wound up in the Sex Pistols, by Machiavellian manipulations. Once he got there, it became obvious quickly that he couldn’t handle it. He hooked up with Nancy Spungeon (raised in Jenkintown, incidentally), and the rest, as they say, is history. He murdered her and eventually killed himself. It was a pathetic spectacle and the media had a field day. There’s another rock scandal much more fascinating— the Rolling Stones free concert at Altamont in San Fran in December ’69, at which several people were killed. This concert was freighted with portentous “end of an era” symbolism, but really it boils down to one complex mistake. The Stones had hired the British Hell’s Angel’s to do security at their free concert in July ’69, Hyde Park, London. The British Angels were exemplary. Mick and Keith just assumed the American Angels were also exemplary. They trusted what the San Fran bands told them. Several people paid with their lives; the Stones got out scot free. Trust and idealism, those hallmarks of the 60s, had betrayed the Stones and their audience badly, and you can see it all in the movie Gimme Shelter. How convenient: the Stones got others to be Icarus for them.

Allen Ginsberg’s major scandal, over Howl, actually pushed him more into the limelight than forcing him down. Suddenly, an unknown poet was front-page news, the only time in the last hundred years that’s happened (unless you count songwriter Dylan). The trial ensured that Howl will always remain as a cultural artifact of century XX. Ginsberg and his cronies were, in fact, perhaps the most important precursors to the youth sensibility generated in the 1960s. In any case, the powers that be did Ginsberg a huge favor, and he was famous for the rest of his life. When transgressions and scandals happen within a work of art, it demonstrates a different kind and level of attention. This was visible, also, in what happened to Robert Mapplethorpe. The poor guy got lambasted by Jesse Helms who was trying to take down the NEA, and the whole thing was very tawdry, far more tawdry than what was actually in the photographs. They did the same thing to Andres Serrano for Piss Christ, which many people (including myself) find to be a valuable and striking work of modern art. It’s always the artists versus the bureaucrats and the demagogues, and it’s been this way for a few hundred years. But we all deserve (I think) unlimited freedom.

Both what Woody Allen did and what happened to him as a result remind me very much of what was done to Oscar Wilde in Victorian England. I don’t think Wilde legitimately transgressed; you could make a valid argument that Woody did. But the media’s invasion into Woody’s private life was motivated by plain prurience, and on a level that was painful to watch. The press went nuts noting how Allen lived in this super-sleek, super-protected world of luxury and corruption. This, the master narrative goes, led to his downfall. He’s still with Soon Yi today, and I think that’s worth something. A harder issue to face is one of recovery. Wilde never recovered from his trial; he was out of jail, and dead within three years. Has Woody recovered? He has continued making movies at the rate he always has. Some of them are very good. I would even go so far as to say that Woody is strong enough to have done what so many other scandal-ridden celebs have not been able to do; to fix things so that his name is not merely a password for transgression. It seems to be his work-ethic that has saved him. That might ultimately be the most important thing about transgression and scandal in the arts; if you keep working, and working well, eventually the scandals will be effaced and you’ll just be an artist again, although the process can be long and painstaking.

Demystifications

It takes a certain amount of gumption to take on the role of “house-cleaner,” where the arts are concerned. If you claim the ability to clean the house, you have to know the house thoroughly. I’ve had my own experiences of different art businesses, but would in no way claim myself qualified to play either house-cleaner or avenging angel. I do feel, however, that it’s productive at certain points to see to what extent demystifications are possible. This post is meant to be a “demystification test,” that cuts two ways. I want to see to what extent I can demystify certain things about these art forms (and the superstructures that issue or emanate from them) while the process itself demystifies me as a commentator. In other words, seeing what’s full of shit in art may help to demonstrate the ways that I’m full of shit. It’s a little project that reeks of the deconstructionist impulse, and if this comes off as a radically simplified attempt get deconstructive, so be it. I will work from the presupposition that each art-form has its own illusions, and that we’d all be better off without them. Not all of us want to live an examined life (G-d knows there are advantages to withholding self-examination), but for those of us who do, the impulse to demystify is always compelling, even if in the process you stumble.

We all know what the standard image of the rock star is: male, young, wild, irresponsible, and devil-may-care. It seems like this image is a carefully crafted illusion. How about the image of the rock star as this: responsible, game-playing, hand-shaking, glad-handing, corporate professional? Think about it; do you think Iggy Pop doesn’t get to his sound-checks on time? Does Jack White snub every record exec that ever gave him a helping hand? Does Conor Oberst refuse many interview requests? The guys and gals that make it are the ones that play the game in the most careful, professional way. I’ve known many rock dudes who are legitimately wild, irresponsible, and devil-may-care, and you know what? You’ll never hear of them, nor will anyone else. If you don’t play the game, the game plays you, and you wind up empty-handed. In their heyday, the Who were (arguably) the biggest, boldest rock band on the planet. They were notorious for trashing hotel rooms, wrecking equipment, starting fights, and generally being louts. But were their gigs regularly cancelled because they couldn’t get their shit together? Of course not; they were louts until they got onstage, and then they became massively professional, and a superior commodity. The idea of rock stars as anything but professionals is the result of a press dying for tales of debauchery. But, in high level music ‘biz contexts, the debauchery seems usually to happen between gigs.

There’s one essential, dirty little secret to po’ biz, that I’ve discovered the hard way: much of the time, writing good poetry doesn’t matter. First of all, who gets to say what “good poetry” is? Every faction has a different definition, and they’re all equally insecure. In this biz in 2009, it’s strength of personality that matters most. In many contexts, it’s either steam-roll or get steam-rolled. The most prominent poets are frequently the shrillest or the biggest bullies (Ashbery being a notable exception). Poetry, supposedly ethereal and ideal, is actually every bit as crass as rock and roll. So, you look around, perpetually startled by the people everyone recommends. You see their work, and wonder, what am I missing here? You realize after a certain point that what you’re missing is that it’s a trick, an in, a con. You can be forgiven mediocrity if you happen to be a good snake-oil salesman. Or if you scare everyone with kamikaze rages so that no one has the guts to confront you (and there are many kamikazes on both sides). I knew at a certain point that I had to get tough or get out, so get tough I did. But it doesn’t change the fact that all the screeching weasels, prima donnas, degenerates, and dead-beats will have accomplished nothing but to perpetuate the image of poetry as an outdated, outmoded, irrelevant art-form, as it is widely perceived to be. And there could be a Dickinson or a Hopkins out there somewhere who blows most of us away, and will lay us in our graves. The steam-rollers may be pushed into the Grand Canyon, as the world will goes on indifferently, as it always has.

It’s become a theme here that I treat film gently, even as I ravage music and poetry. I’m besotted and inexperienced, where film is concerned, and it makes objectivity difficult. None of this would I deny. But I will say this: there’s a common perception in American society that movie stars lead effortless lives. Good images look effortless: think of Marilyn Monroe, standing in the subway, her skirt blown up around her waist. Seems simple, easy, natural: but even I can tell that it isn’t. All you have to do is look at tabloids to see that movie stars attract much closer scrutiny than even rock stars do. Rock stars stay (generally) in the music mags; movie stars are all over the place. Do big-name movie stars deserve 25 million dollars for each film they make? That’s another question. But the process of making movies is grueling; often boring, even soul-destroying, and actors can wind up at the mercy of tyrannical directors and bad scripts. And those are the actors who actually make it; for the majority of actors, it’s bit-parts, commercials, voice-overs, Off-Broadway, Off-Off Broadway (which I actually do know something about), and years of waiting tables and tending bars, always waiting for that elusive moment when all the pieces come together in a big break. In the end, people who get involved in this biz better love the process itself, because there ain’t much room at the top, and how many times you roll the dice doesn’t seem to matter. Make no mistake: actors, everywhere from the very top to the very bottom, do not just ride waves of glory and success. Hit or miss seems to be the name of the game.

Frozen Images

It’s certainly distasteful, but also hard to argue against: in the arts, dying can be a smart career move. In some ways, stasis for artists is preferable to change: it brings focus and exactitude to what (in long careers) may otherwise become fuzzy and amorphous. That’s why many artists do the same things over and over again. They know who they are, they’ll tell you, which means they have a secret for appearing to know who they are. The secret is, repetition is good for creating and sustaining communities, and bad for creating and sustaining artists. Genuine artists and genuine communities have always made uneasy bedfellows. Death solves this problem in a major way— once an artist is dead, scholars can create communities over their ashes, fan zines can gleefully rehash favorite moments, and everything an artist creates can be given form and function. Death also permanently affixes artists and their oeuvres to particular Zeitgeists— these artists stand for the 60s, these for the 80s, etc. Death is an “iconic enabler,” whereby the things that make artists unique raise them up and hang them as festoons on a cultural ceiling. It’s very possible, in art, to generate “death mystiques,” and that’s what I want to address in this post.

Sylvia Plath represents not only a Zeitgeist but a very particular type of American sensibility— the tortured, too-sensitive suburban female adolescent. That’s why Plath’s work straddles the line between iconicity and cliché— she is overly identified with bookish adolescent girls. Had she not committed suicide, had she produced an extensive body of work, her status could not be as fixed and as recognizable as it is now. The whole edifice of her celebrity rides on the fact that in her best poems (Daddy, Lady Lazarus), Plath seems to “become” her suicidal protagonists; this “seeming” transparency is directly related to the fact of her suicide, a few months after these poems were written. Together, the poems and the suicide form a “Sylvia myth,” that Hollywood has recognized. Plath herself, in her final months, seemed to be on fire with mythologies, both personal and general, and this informed the Ariel poems. Now, she is fixed, immobile; there she stands, the apotheosis of tortured suburbia. But this kind of iconicity is (ultimately) mobile; it will be interesting to see if in twenty years, Plath still fills the same niche she fills now, or if some other charismatic, self-destructive Lady Lazarus will take her place. Her position as cultural artifact is assured; her position as artist is not.

I remember the day, in April 1994, when word came out that Kurt Cobain had committed suicide. It was a defining moment for me, and he instantly became my Holden Caulfield, my Catcher in the Rye. He called everyone a phony and was martyred by the commercial realities of a mercenary business. The moment was also interesting in that Cobain had joined the “27 Club,” which started in the Flower Power age with Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin, and Brian Jones, all of whom died at twenty-seven. Cobain even quoted Neil Young in his suicide note: it’s better to burn out than to fade away. Kurt will never become the caricature that the Jaggers and Townshends have become; he is safe in the role of the post-adolescent who invented alternative rock. The tragedy of the situation is that Cobain was a very gifted songwriter who could’ve actually grown into the stature of a Neil Young, rather than just quoting him. Cobain was far more mainstream famous than Sylvia Plath; his own myth has to do with the unreasonable levels of pressure that are put on celebrities. The truth is that Cobain courted danger from day one, doing outrageous amounts of hard drugs and marrying an extreme exhibitionist. But I won’t pronounce judgment.

The film first choice is obvious but useful: James Dean. This really is where “Live Fast Die Young” started. Oh, and “leave a good-looking corpse.” However, on close inspection the comparison to Cobain and Plath isn’t obvious at all: Dean died accidentally. He wanted to live. Live Fast Die Young is only fair if that’s what your intention is. It’s not clear to me that this was, in fact, Dean’s intention. From what I’ve read, he did live fast, but so did Brando. Brando lucked out and lived; Dean didn’t. But because he was pretty, and because all three major roles he played were rebels and outlaws, Dean got typecast as a “general rebel,” a signifier of youth and alienated angst. This archetype was especially noticeable in the homogenized 1950s. I see Dean’s story as more tragic than Cobain’s and Plath’s, because he wasn’t complicit in it. Everything that’s been made of him was out of roles he played; he didn’t go out of his way to mythologize himself, nor did he spend years whining about how terrible the movie business was. Dean is innocent, as Cobain and Plath are not. I’m not saying specifically that Cobain and Plath engineered their deaths to ensure their own immortality; but I am saying that Dean showed little evidence of self-destructiveness on the level that those two did. He drove a sports car, but he didn’t do massive amounts of heroin or stick his head in an oven. And the three movies he made are excellent. It’s hard to feel robbed when someone who wants to die dies; but when some dies accidentally, that was as gifted as Dean, all the mythologizing that goes on can come to seem like a tragedy, in and of itself. Thankfully, the movies remain.

What to Use

What are the talents that different kinds of artists need to “make it” in different disciplines? It seems like there’s always a hierarchy of necessities— you need this, you really need this, you kind of need this. With popular art forms, looks count very much. Let’s face it— if Elvis looked like Ned Flanders, he wouldn’t be Elvis. Forms that aren’t based as much around body image (and which some like to flatter themselves are “higher” forms) often require an intellectual image: the cerebral version of a hip-swivel. But all art forms depend on time and context and what got you in the door in 1969 won’t get you in the door in 2009 and what works now won’t work in another forty years. For every art-form at every-time, some talents are expendable, others aren’t. Some things are constant— if you don’t know how to hype, it’s very hard to play the game. You have to be aggressive to make up for the numbers you may or may not have. Actual talent, as has been previously noted, is not always necessary, either to make it or to last. Whole generations get duped into believing that posers are real artists and vice versa. The other big argument is form vs. feeling. There are great artists who don’t have much formal talent, but can put a lot of passion into their work that people respond to. On the other side are the technicians with no feeling but all the formal tricks in the book. I thought it could be interesting to look at how some of these issues are playing out today.

Sometimes I wonder if playing good lead guitar is an outdated skill. The 60s were the great decade of the guitar star (think Hendrix); 70s rock was all guitar bombast; but, Eddie Van Halen and lots of hair metal aside, the 80s saw a decline in guitar relevance. When grunge brought guitars back, it did so in a context that encouraged passion over technical competence. Now, it seems that lead guitar ability isn’t that useful. It certainly didn’t help me in my forays into the music business. All it did was create alienation, because I was surrounded by people who couldn’t do it while I could. There are guys in rock that are cocky because they know four chords; if they know the right people, they might also make it. There are also questions about music and fashion. Madonna proved that dressing provocatively (and dancing) could count for as much as music. When rock is good, all these factors convergence into a harmonious whole: someone like Hendrix, who looked good, played well, and wrote well, too. But these factors don’t converge too often, and the vast majority of rock musicians who make it (though some of them are great songwriters) can’t “play” in a way that demonstrates the kind of technical proficiency jazz musicians have.

Formal knowledge in poetry is sort of a ghost in the machine: some have it, some don’t, but you don’t hear poets talking about it too much. Come to think of it, most poets don’t talk about poetry that much, either. They talk about outward, “business” things: who’s publishing who, who won what prize; or “personal” things: who’s sleeping with whom, who said what to whom at what reading. They also like to claw at those they can’t reach; but serious discourse about form and function in poetry? Unless they’re getting paid by a university to do it, probably not. That’s been my experience. In short: poetry is (on both sides) easily faked. Imitate some successful people, kiss the right tuckuses, and you may get the (no-money, no-fame) prize of poetry notoriety. Ezra Pound (that kid from Cheltenham) used his extensive knowledge of form to club people into submission, and it worked. Did Pound ever write great poetry on a level with Wordsworth or Keats? I’m not convinced. But Pound did know this one great secret: if you shout loud enough long enough, everyone will pay attention to you. My own “shout” is this: I feel that poetic form deserves an ethos of rejuvenation. You can Make It New without Making It Tepid. The New Formalists suck; but who knows? Maybe my generation will create a New New Formalism. And some of us may wind up becoming better poets than Pound in the process.

In movies, it always looks like there’s a fine line between actors who can act and those who can’t. My own proficiency is limited here, and I’m speaking more as an observer than as a participant. Like rock, lots of movie successes hinge on looks. From what I’ve heard, successful movie actors have a kind of “screen magic,” a way of relating to the camera, that constitutes a special relationship. You can say, “the camera loves them.” And it’s often impossible to tell until someone is actually filmed who has the magic and who doesn’t. Since the whole thing is inexplicable (even uncanny), it becomes difficult to place much emphasis on talent, because there are so many stage actors (brilliant ones) who just don’t translate onto the screen. But as I know (personally) so many talented actors and filmmakers who have migrated to the City of Angels, I know that this ‘biz is as difficult to crack as any other in the history of art. The most useful talent for an actress or actor to have (from what I’ve seen) is hustle. Not hype, which involves saying how great you are; hustle is the groundwork just to get your foot in the door. Not everyone that goes to L.A. is prepared for L.A.— I had a friend who moved there two months ago, without a car or the ability to get a car. As Al Pacino said in Carlito’s Way, bad start, Jack. But film is an art that I’ve just recently fallen in love with, and you can’t talk about something or someone you’re in love with objectively. And I know that hustle doesn’t always work because in art nothing’s ever reliable except (for most of us) eventual obscurity. You just keep the fires lit and go on because you want to, and out of curiosity.

Fights

Most artists are in a precarious position most of the time. Even the ones who have the good fortune to make a lot of money will lose their position if they start to take things for granted. That’s why in art, fights happen as regularly as in any other arena. There’s the fight for legitimacy (and no matter how good you are, someone’s going to say you’re not legitimate), the fight to achieve wider recognition (this is the way in which artists, as Jim Morrison said, are “erotic politicians”), the awful squabbles about aesthetic centrality (in other words, the fight to make your style the most popular and the most respected), prize money, contracts, and that little devil called individual reputation, which keeps most artists from pulling any gutsy moves. It’s all a tightrope act, and it keeps right on going after you kick the bucket. Byron’s work didn’t start to decline in popularity until about eighty years after he died. Now, having been dead for 185 years, he’s making a comeback. Not only does art offer no guarantees and no stable rewards, half the time no one knows what’s going on in the first place. Every little posse tells a different story about the way things have gone, are going, and will continue to go. After a certain point (and this is unfortunate), it’s easy to wind up trusting no one. Emersonian self-reliance is the only thing that saves the day. I thought it would be interesting to go through some of these squabbles, to show (to the best of my abilities) how the game works and who’s playing.

Where American poetry is concerned, the fight is on right now. In this corner, the experimentalists, whether they happen to be conceptual, flarf, post-avant, or lang-po (the four essential branches); this group gets less societal recognition, fewer cash prizes, but the consolation of knowing (and it’s a historical fact) that most work that lasts comes out of an experimental context. In this corner, the mainstreamers; they’ve got societal recognition, cash prizes, print journals, but have a hard time claiming they’re doing anything new (or, often, interesting). The fight happens on blogs (including this one), in print and online journals, and (people being people) behind closed doors like a sonuvabitch. Much of this fight is hidden because the two groups rarely comingle. I did my MFA with the mainstreamers and my MA/PhD with the experimentalists, which puts me in a unique position. It’s exacerbated because the dogmatism on both sides is intense. It’s probably more intense (as I’ve said here) on the experimental side, where I’m situated. So what do I do? I go my own way, do my own thing, and am grateful for the audience I have. I’m not going to be anyone’s foot-soldier, or a poetry bounty hunter like Boba-Fett. And my own dogmatism (and I’ll cop to it) runs like this— a reputation based on being gutless (as most poetry reputations are) is not worth having. Having seen both sides, this is what I’ve gleaned, because the gutlessness on either side runs equally deep, and (to use a little jargon) disjunction and epiphany are equally easy to fake.

The best rock fight of the last twenty years is undoubtedly the Oasis vs. Blur Britpop battle of the mid 1990s. It was a battle of epic proportions that, for some reason, few in the States noticed. Maybe it’s because the battle was so clearly tied to issues of class that were (and are) pertinent to Brits. Oasis, the noble savages, represented the proletariat; Blur, the educated aesthetes, represented the middle and upper classes. Where popularity was concerned, Oasis won hands down. However, with fifteen years hindsight, the battle looks like a tempest in a teacup. While it was happening, Radiohead (who were unceremoniously left out of the Britpop party) were quietly building a massive fan-base in the States. One day, Britpop’s number was up, and Radiohead were at the top of the heap everywhere, including the UK. With everything Radiohead have achieved, they cast a long shadow over Britpop, and the once huge clash of the Titans now looks small. It demonstrates that the Britpop bands all made one critical mistake— not taking US audiences and tastes seriously, not recognizing the key position that US audiences hold in maintaining long-term success. I would hesitate to call Oasis and Blur “also-rans,” but in the States, that’s exactly what they are. And Radiohead are the last band left standing.

There are so many movie fights to choose from (from Fight Club to Raging Bull) that it’s hard even to know where to start; and that’s just fights in movies. Hollywood feuds happen all the time. So, I’ll just go with the last great film fight I saw. It was in Bad Boys, a 1983 film starring Sean Penn as a thug named O’Brien. It fit Penn’s “bad boy” rep at the time, and it’s an excellent performance. There’s something compelling to me about the world this movie shows— a completely macho, physical world, in which demonstrations of physical prowess take the place of books, blogs, articles, etc. Those of us who by profession live in our heads don’t see worlds like this too often. It makes me think of being a kid, and fist fights I got into. I haven’t gotten into a fist-fight since I was fourteen, at Camp Shohola in the Poconos (though I came mighty close once, my senior year of high school). I wonder sometimes if I could fist-fight now. Many male artists dabble in machismo (probably to compensate), and I’m no exception. Anyway, Penn prevails in the last knock-down, drag-out battle, and it ends the film. And I’ll let it end this post, too, and arm myself for the next inevitable round, whenever it comes a-knocking.

No Explanations

Every good work of art involves an “X Factor,” a goodness (or greatness) that no one can put their finger on. You can call it charisma, magnetism, flair, or vibe; but you never really know what it is or how it functions. That’s why we can’t explain why we like all the things we like. Some things we like “just because.” The parts of our taste for which we have no explanation don’t necessarily involve our “comfort foods”: it’s often easy to say why we find certain things comforting (like me with my Clapton licks). It’s also not the same as what we might call guilty pleasures, things that for whatever reason (usually niche prejudices) we “shouldn’t” like. “No explanation” tastes are simply tastes for which (pardon my tautology) we have no explanations. I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit over the last few days, and I came up with some things that I like without ostensible reason. It would be over analytical to try to pick things apart and find some “essence,” but I am over analytical so that’s what I’m going to do here. My justification is that I might find a thread running through these things that will yield revelations about my own psychology, where art is concerned. But, for this blog’s sake, I’ll skip the psychology and just go right for the meat of the matter.

Every time I watch a movie with her in it, I’m simply blown away by Natalie Wood. It’s not just that she’s beautiful and sexy; there are always beautiful, sexy actresses in movies; there’s something about her I can’t define, which compels me to keep watching. No one else, from Marilyn Monroe to Scarlett Johansson, has quite this effect on me. If you wanted to place Natalie Wood, you could say she’s the precursor to Katie Holmes: the All-American girl next door. But there’s something haunting about the ways she uses her eyes and her body that makes her image linger in my head. Intelligence and imagination constitute part of her sex appeal, and that’s unusual in Hollywood, especially among leading ladies. She’s smarter and classier than most leading ladies; that must be what it is. But if you watch her in This Property Is Condemned, Splendor in the Grass, Rebel Without a Cause, or Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, you may see that she is unusually capable of acting from the inside out, giving the impression of hidden depths. Or maybe for some reason I’m capable of seeing this in her. This nagging sense of an underlying presence is what makes me interrogate myself about what makes Wood so special. Then I give up and admit that I don’t know.

There are a good number of serious rock fans who like the first Boston album, which came out in 1976, the year I was born. It’s the biggest selling debut album of all time. When I was growing up, it got insane amounts of airplay on classic rock radio, but I didn’t pay much attention. I bought the CD several years back and it’s become integral to my view of rock guitar history. Tom Schulz is at the magical halfway point between Jimmy Page and Billy Corgan, where guitar usage (especially production wise) is concerned. This is corporate rock at its finest; but it is, nevertheless, corporate rock— bland, faceless, manufactured, lacking particularity and character. I know these things, but I keep listening. One big reason is More Than A Feeling, the smash single off the album. It’s an arena rock anthem, with an interesting lyrical conceit: a song about listening to another song and having it make you see something (in this case, a woman named Marianne). It’s a kind of meta-song, that brings us back to Charles Swann and Proust again; strange, but true. When I weigh the ups and downs in my head, it doesn’t seem rational for me to keep listening, but I do.

Anne Sexton, along with Allen Ginsberg, was the first poetry rock star (unless you want to count Byron). To me, she represents a particular kind of blue-blooded reaction to the Zeitgeist of the 1960s, wherein suburbs suddenly meant confession, dangerous sexuality, and transgressive rage rather than just blah homogeneity. It was the 1960s, and the pill was new: Eden could be anywhere. Anne’s work has been devalued by experimentalists who find the things hokey that I enjoy: the self-dramatizing, sexuality, directness, and somewhat primitive engagement with forms. This stuff moves me for many of the same reason the Rolling Stones move me: it creates climaxes and crescendos, especially if you listen to Sexton reading her poetry out loud. Yet, as a self-avowed experimentalist, all the confessional levels of her work, unmediated by investigations into language itself and its limitations, seem overcooked and underdone at the same time. So I find myself picking her up and reading her, and I often feel motivated by a mysterious force to do so. It must be that, subconsciously, I recognize that she has something I need. It’s something without a name.

Swann In Us

How is it that certain works of art get bound in our head to specific spots of time? Why does this song bring back this moment, this poem bring back this feeling? It’s a question everyone has to answer for themselves. In the first volume of Proust’s epic, the character Charles Swann has a bit of music that he hears in the process of courting the woman who becomes his wife. This bit sticks in his head permanently and always has the capability of bringing him back to the tortures and pleasures of courtship. The interesting thing, for those of us who are serious about art, is how few things take on this kind of significance for us. When you read hundreds of books a year (poetry books generally being short or short-ish, certainly in comparison to Proust), hear hundreds of songs, watch hundreds of films, it’s axiomatic that not everything’s going to make an impression. Sometimes, even stuff we love doesn’t bring back any particular memories. But we all have a handful of things (at least) that, for better or for worse, take us right back to the first moment we encountered them. It’s like a form of virtual time-travel. At the risk of being self-indulgent, I thought I’d throw out there some of my Swann-by-proxy moments. As with the “do overs”, I hope some others come out with theirs’ as well.

I spent the summer of 1992 in Pittsburgh, studying drama (acting rather than writing) at Carnegie Mellon (in what was called a “Pre-College” program). Carnegie Mellon is set in a funky neighborhood called Oakland, which is like South Street in Philly, St. Marks Place in NYC, and Wicker Park in Chicago. One of the main attractions of Oakland was a hangout joint called the Beehive. I have no idea if its still there. It was a restaurant, coffeehouse, and movie theater. While I was in Pittsburgh, I formed a band with other drama guys called Elmo and the Zoots. The first week I was there, we went to see Blue Velvet at the Beehive. It isn’t so much the movie I remember (though it is one of my favorite movies), it’s the feeling of being really young and having a new world open up in front of you. You only get to be 16 once; you can never be that open or that vulnerable again. Somehow, when I watch this, just for the duration of the movie I can locate that open, vulnerable space in me. It’s a precious feeling, once the splendor is conclusively out of the grass (pun intended).

When I encountered John Donne for the first time, I was finishing my degree at Penn. It was the spring of 2002, and it was a wet, grey spring. The poem that got me, The Ecstasy, is one of the great love poems of all time; the circumstances I was involved in you can probably guess. What wasn’t predictable is that one night, I was reading the poem out loud, and it created a mind-blowing meta-moment for me. In other words, it took me on a (metaphysical) trip. I felt that I was literally living (and writing) the poem as I read it out loud. I was channeling John Donne. The feeling was so intense that I used to compare this episode to what the protagonist feels in Poe’s House of Usher. The sense of being echoed from a higher level, which in Poe is Gothic and spooky, was there, but beneficent. This is one of the few poems that really has taken out of normal circumstances and realms of reality and into some ekstasis, out-of-body life. Importantly, it did this for both of us. Thus, every time I stumble across the poem I get a flashback sensation.

More “drama”: spring of ’95, State College, Pennsylvania. More rain, this place is called “Happy Valley,” God knows why. There are weeks on end of these intensely moody, chilly days, rain dripping everywhere. This is the moment I fall in love (forever) with Smashing Pumpkins. Why was the music so necessary to me then? Let’s just say I was being tested by certain circumstances. No worse than average 19-year-old troubles, but particularly intense for me because at that time I was more emotionally “charged” than I am now. Everything was life or death all the time, I lived every moment of every day with complete intensity, and Billy Corgan’s songs had all these beautiful riffs and these aching melodies that articulated in a very thorough way everything I felt. They’ve stuck, too; I still listen to the Pumpkins all the time. And I have to say, with all fairness to John Donne and David Lynch, that it’s Corgan’s music, more than anything else in any discipline, that brings me back to a specific place in time. What Donne did for me once, Corgan does for me over and over again. And the spring of 95 is still alive in me, to this day. Too bad Proust died before the Pumpkins.

The Do-Over Project

All of us who study the arts have works, parts of works, or even entire oeuvres that we’d like to change. Works of art are as imperfect as any other of man’s creations. We’ve all seen something we’ve loved, but that would be just a little bit better if this or that were changed. I thought it might be interesting to throw out some “do-overs” I think about on a regular basis. I don’t mean to be presumptuous, and would hasten to add that my own creative work is as or more flawed than anything I’m about to mention. I’m also doing this because I’m curious what other people’s “do-overs” are, the parts of their favorite pieces that drive them crazy, irritate them, and make them wish that just for a second they could transubstantiate themselves into the artist’s body to prevent the offending fuck ups, jack offs, and wankings. If you’ve got books, records, or films, your own work counts too. I (like many others) have published things I hope never see the light of day again…

Regular readers of this blog know that I am a massive Kurt Cobain fan. Still, one thing about the Nirvana records drives me nuts: why does Kurt never write a third verse? With Teen Spirit being the most obvious exception, almost every Nirvana cut, from Bleach right through to In Utero (which does feature exceptions like Serve the Servants) features two verses, the first of which is repeated twice. C’mon, Kurt, you want to say, you’re the Lennon of your generation; would it be too much to ask to come up with four more decent lines? Pop songs that could have the epic Dylan quality remain mere pop songs. Where lyrics are concerned, there are worse offenders then Kurt. Noel Gallagher is a very, very rich man. Can’t he hire someone to write decent lyrics for him? Every Oasis song ever written has more in common with Doctor Seuss than with Dylan. Gallagher has written great melodies, but after a certain point it’s hard to appreciate them.

I know far less about film than I do about music and poetry, so my film do-overs are tentative and subject to intervention. A few have to do with Kubrick. I’ve wondered (publicly here about a month ago), whether that first hour of 2001 is really necessary. For me, it drags. Where Shining is concerned, I’ve also wondered how the movie would look like if the Scatman Crothers character, Dick Halloran, were allowed to do what he does in the Stephen King book on which the movie is based— save Danny and Wendy, rather than get axed. Halloran’s arrival in the Kubrick movie is effectual in getting Jack’s attention so that Wendy can escape; but it’s a do-over that haunts me when I watch the film. Woody Allen, like Kubrick, is one of my favorite directors; Hannah and Her Sisters is undoubtedly one of his masterpieces; but the cuddly ending has always bothered me, to the extent that I usually turn the movie off before its done playing. There’s some hard-edged stuff in the movie; Michael Caine as Woody-by-way-of-Prince Charles is fantastic; but it gets negated when the ribbons are tied into an immaculate bow. For endings, I’ll take Crimes and Misdemeanors over this.

Here’s the big whammy (for those of you who like Romantic poetry): how about John Keats Grecian Urn ode without the last two stanzas? Not to cow-tip a sacred cow; but I’ve always thought that you can take the last two stanzas out without making much of a difference. The truth/beauty thing got Keats in trouble with Eliot; I’ve never particularly understood “Cold Pastoral”; and I feel the poem can live without the altar, the priest, and the heifer as well. So, poetry nerd’s alert: try reading the first three stanzas of Grecian Urn as though it were a whole poem, and see what you think. Moving into century XX, another sacred cow-tip: Stevens, Emperor of Ice Cream, “let be be finale of seem”…what the hell does that mean? I’m most of the way through a PhD, I have an MA and an MFA and I still don’t know what the fuck Stevens is talking about. Maybe I’m dense, or, as Kurt would say, “I think I’m dumb, or maybe just happy.” In any case, it’s a baffling line in a wonderful poem. Those baffling lines are what separate Stevens fans from non-Stevens fans; you either get them or you don’t. I respect Stevens but I don’t always get him. That (I suppose) makes me a semi-fan. More recently, I like Buk, most of my peers and colleagues do not, but even I think he should’ve thrown away two-thirds of his poems and just published the really sharp ones. Bukowski is as overexposed in poetry as Springsteen is in rock. Who needs another 400 page book with 50 pages of good poetry?

So, that’s it: the “do-over project.” I hope others are willing to share theirs.

To Todd Swift

When a poet falls seriously ill, it is left to his or her fellow poets to “keep the flame lit.” We could all use better circulation, where our work is concerned, and this is especially true when circumstances conspire against us. Todd Swift has, over a period of several years, become one of my favorite poets. A native Canadian currently residing in London, Swift writes poignant poems that straddle several contradictions: post-modern irony and traditional affect, brazen sexuality and intellectual scrupulousness, formal discipline and free-verse expansiveness. Swift also has an influential blog, Eyewear, which I read regularly. Eyewear, along with Ron Silliman’s blog, has been a prefiguring influence on Stoning the Devil. Swift has a wide variety of cultural influences, from rock music to film to novels, and, even within poetry, exercises a very catholic sensibility. He writes about these interests in a voice neither naïve nor jaded; his engagement is always complete, his candor admirable. Todd has been ill of late, and Simon Gladdish left a comment here reminding me of this. I thought it would be an amiable and apropos gesture to include a portion of a Swift poem in a new post. Luckily, Todd just had two poems come out in Tears in the Fence 50, and I will post some stanzas from one of them, The Fuss and the Bother, here (thanks to David Caddy, ed).

There’s fuss and there’s bother
 There’s the Word and then Light
My sweet Lord, Pro Patri
 Mori and man overboard
There’s catch and catch can
 There’s husband and wife
There’s boyhood then man
 There’s thin then there’s knife

There’s seen and then seeing—
 He’s laying a wreath
For a man underground
 She’s sitting down peeing
There’s music then dance
 There’s dance to the sound
There’s very much mainstream
 Or radio’s black transmission

She’s lost control
 He is working for Chaos
She’s in short supply
 He knows who the boss is
And kicking the can
 There’s that and there’s this
Solid state marital bliss
 There is power and the glory

Then the Casablanca story
 A plane and some fog
A man gone to the dogs
 Heidegger’s saw and a log
A canoe and a lake
 Tom Thompson in chains
A sweet sixteen cake
 Missing in action

Actions not words
 There’s a bird and a wire
Then there’s The Birds
 A bird in her hair
Tippi’s tipping point now
 There is a hairpiece askew
Is there any Justice I ask you?!
 There’s death row in Texas

The grinding of axes
 Then death and high taxes
The evil the axis in theory
 And praxis, Agnew
And Zbigniew, the Old
 And the New— she’s laughing
He’s sad she misses Mum
 He mourns the Dad

There’s set the controls
 For the heart of the sun
Then, yes, set your lasers to stun
 Rain that wets her dark
Hair that glistens
 He never listens
She shouldn’t care
 The Devil makes us do it 

Get well, Todd.

Get Yer Ya-Yas Out: Live in Brooklyn

This video was shot by Amy King on August 1. I was reading for the Stain series that Amy and Ana have going in Bushwick, Brooklyn. I look forward to attending more Stain readings soon. Now my Big Star obsession is public knowledge; the poems I'm reading are sonnets from When You Bit....

THREE SETS OF TEETH

Three sets of teeth: who
can check for cavities?
A three-way circuit: who
will start the striptease?
Three lovers in three ways:
how merrily the dance
begins. We spin, we spin,
we forget our instincts,
anima, the part of teeth
that cuts. We are sluts.
There is an “I” here that
stands for all of us, but
its eyes are shut. Sleep
lulls it to rest, not think. Or speak.

BIG BLACK CAR

Your middle: tongue
(hers), man (me), riding
together, I bitch (middle’s
middle). I tongue man
you, her, spacious, it, of
you, all of us, can’t feel
a nothing, I can’t. Not
of this, of you, of her,
of all of this riding, in
what looks big, black,
has tongue-room. I
can’t feel a thing. I feel
nothing of bigness, black
fur interior her you. Ride.

BACK OF A CAR

Asinine, as is, this ass is:
ass I zip down into zero:
anal, a null, a void, this is.
I’m behind a behind that
sits smoking, rubbing, pink-
tipped, tender, butt, button.
She watches me watching as
I go brown-nose in another.
Only her car-ness, averted by
eyes to a wall, seems happy.
Only she can stomach rubs
of the kind that want plugs.
Sparked tank, here comes
no come, & aggravation.

COCAINE GUMS

I ache: dull, sharp,
in a heap of paper.
All paper: picture,
bright, bold, dark.
I have nailed you
to a piece: black.
I darken touched
things: I’m used.
I write you, you,
you, as if kissed
by a fresh body,
rose-petal bliss.
I drowse: numb
as cocaine gums.

FRAMED

Nailed, two, across— I
have been glimpsing me
from above, as a camera
would, I am a still, this
is a film, this has to be
framed, no, don’t hold,
I can’t, it’s an offstage
arm, both you & you
speak like I’m (so) not
here, I’m celluloid, I’m
varicose, vein-soft, fake-
bloody, cut, I can’t move,
you & you & I minted,
taped, uncensored, dead.

DARK LADY

You’re more of a Dark Lady
than I have ever hoped for,
especially because when you
betray me, it’s with someone
I love: me.
You’re more of
everything, actually, & you’re
also a pain in the ass. That’s
why I haven’t let you off the
hook. I’ll wind up in my own
hands again tonight, sans
metaphors, like your full
moon in my face, but you’ll
never know there’s a man in you.

SPLAT!

What greatness thrust upon
me? Solitary Saturday night
fever, jive talking to myself,
doing lines of Advil, falling
off imaginary bridges: splat!
The familiar trope of falling
endlessly, this is how I stay
alive. All because you are, I
affirm, more than a woman,
but, unfortunately, not just
to me, but to many generally.
I suppose I could blazon you:
rhubarb thighs, persimmon
twat, etc, but not productively,
& what would Travolta say?

DEODERANT REDOLENCE

Rage is senseless, I rage
in a cloud of senselessness
against the confines of a
first layer of rage against
the confines of a region
of loneliness buttressed
by a feeling that deodorant
is an insult against redolence
that I haven’t guts to embrace.
I shower every morning, I
even bathe after I shower,
what this has to do with
anything is beyond me,
except that I like your dirt.


c. Adam Fieled 2008

There is a review of this book, done by Jeffrey Side, in Jacket #37.

It has also been blogged about nicely here and here.

Sex Again

Certainly conflations of the erotic impulse with aesthetic impulses have been done to death. What I want to know is this: what art most closely replicates what it’s like to have sex? When I look, with an honest eye, through two centuries worth of books, every example I find is a cliché. Molly Bloom’s final monologue in Ulysses; Dylan Thomas’s villanelle; some even find the death of Anna Karenina to be kind of orgasmic. Orgasm is, after all, the “little death.” So I’ll have to look elsewhere, since nouveau experimental poetry tends to be (with some exceptions) bone-dry, and mainstream representations of sex in poetry are about as appetizing as soggy bread. To be frank, I know where I’m going with this but I’m a little scared to get there. Call it cold feet. But here I am, about to step into the déclassé, but incredibly orgasmic universe of those Baby Boomer patriarchs of madness, badness, and knowing danger, the Rolling Stones.

Over the last twenty years, the Stones music has brought me as much unmitigated pleasure as any other work in any discipline. Here’s the reason: the Stones good stuff replicates the sensations associated with sexual intercourse with greater intensity than any other artist this side of Picasso. Almost every great Stones song comes, one way or another. Talk about tension and release: Let’s Spend the Night Together is an incredibly direct sexual statement, released in January 1967, b/w Ruby Tuesday. It was a major hit. But the way the Stones play with dynamics sets the song apart from most Top 40 fare. The song starts off at a brisk, martial pace, and maintains it until 1:39. Then, they pull the kind of wildly inventive move that sets them apart from the not déclassé but also not very compelling works of someone like Cole Porter. The drums drop out, everything drops out except for the voices of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, along with Brian Jones on organ. It is a fourteen second break that would not be out of place in a medieval madrigal. It doesn’t involve a key change, but it does create an incredible tension, and bursts into a spontaneous overflow with the re-entry of Mick’s lead vocal and Charlie’s drums. What had been martial but “in-check” culminates in an incredible crescendo, which goes far beyond what the opening of the song promised. This fourteen second break, and the minute that follows it, are the song “coming.” Lyrically, the song is a blatant sexual invitation; but the music already delivers what the lyrics merely suggest. Brian’s churchy organ even adds a stately air of the non-secular, which seems incongruous but adds depth to the sound, makes it more layered.

The lyrics themselves are wonderful. Not only do they go far beyond standard “moon-in-June” pop music tripe, Jagger restrains himself from objectifying the woman he is propositioning. His stance is libidinous without being macho. He doesn’t talk down to this woman; in fact, he not only directly addresses her individual needs, her autonomy, but promises reciprocity: “I’ll satisfy your every need/ and now I know you’ll satisfy me.” Bluntness is precisely Jagger’s forte as a lyricist, but this is a song that would not have been possible in 1964, three years before it was released. The sexual freedoms of the 1960s engendered a new honesty in popular music lyrics; Dylan was obviously at the helm of the ship, but Jagger was up there too. It’s important to note that all the tension and release stuff here is really not in the Beatles and Dylan like it is in the Stones. Certain Beatles songs climax (Day Tripper and Dear Prudence come to mind, both Lennon songs), but Beatles songs don’t address sexuality in the direct way that the Stones do (Why Don’t We Do It In the Road notwithstanding), and so the climaxes are comparatively Platonic, and don’t invite the orgasmic metaphor. Dylan “comes” even less than the Beatles; he’s more of a mind-fuck. As I was planning this post, I realized that the Stones particular brand of sexualized art is unique to them. Their good stuff, up to and including Exile on Main Street, evinces this orgasmic quality often enough, and distinctively enough, so that it becomes (to me anyway) irreplaceable. And it’s hard for me to think that others don’t feel the same way, and that this kind of popular art, that’s so uniquely powerful, must necessarily be ephemeral.

No Recess...

Truth be told, how many people read for pleasure anymore? For those of us who write seriously, it's a pertinent question. The second pertinent question is hidden within the first: what exactly is "reading for pleasure"? What counts? What people mostly do on the Net is read (and write). Fortunately or unfortunately, most of what they read is not what could reasonably called "art." I don't flatter myself that this blog is necessarily a work of art, though I'd like it to be. Blogs, web-sites, Wiki entries, sports sites, fan sites for bands, movie stars, movies; that seems to be mostly what people are looking at. If there were more "art texts" on the Net, would people be reading them? It all goes back to something fundamental about Western society, as it exists in 2009; most people learn early that serious reading is done in school. People associate literature with high school, college, and graduate school classrooms. It isn't just that literature is thought of as "school"; the layers of staid veneration with which these texts are treated in the classroom make the vibe much more like "Sunday School." Depending who you ask, this could be considered a problem (and a societal liability) or not. I, personally, wish novels and poems were much more than an "academic religion," indoctrinated into students who soon forget what they've learned.

It would be nice if the Net could engender a new breed of serious reader, capable of appreciation and analysis away from the classroom. Part of the problem (as I see it) is that many professors themselves believe in the religious conflation of literature and academia. Where literature is concerned, is school necessarily a "real" place? Privileging academia, where literature is concerned, is putting the cart before the horse. Writers write to give people enjoyment, not to have their work force-fed to unwilling victims. All art is meant to restore the liveliness to life, not to restore material to a professor who needs fodder for a survey course. But the situation is really chicken or the egg: are people not reading because they're tired of being force-fed, or are they being force-fed because they're unwilling (even unable) to read on their own? The answer, I'm sure, is somewhere in the middle. But academics get so deeply involved in academia that the notion of a Reading Public (not just groveling students) leaves the picture altogether. It also neatly avoids the issue of relevance. If most people don't read literature, it's because they don't find literature relevant to their lives. Once this is registered, all this academic squabbling looks like tempests in a tea-cup. Nonetheless, I don't just let the general public off the hook: I think the decision not to read is a lazy one, and, without back-peddling into sterile pessimism, it seems like a kind of cultural degeneration is going on. Two hundred years ago, there was little to do but read; now, we have more amusements then any one person has time for. Still, I'd argue that for general enrichment, on the greatest number of possible levels, it's hard to beat reading. Maybe people being force-fed literature is not such a bad thing. But I sure would be gratified if that "luxuriant misgrowth," a Reading Public, would declare itself to the world. That way, literature will again become a general pasttime, and not just a pasttime and a shibboleth for academics.

Sex, Lies, and Videotape

It’s a classic match-up; it’s been around since George Eliot put a guy named Ladislaw in an old scholar’s way. Here it is: a bourgeois challenged by an artist. Commerce vs. erudition, capital vs. cultural capital, bucks vs. taste, acquisition vs. creation. I had forgotten about Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, but I saw it for the third time last night. The first time I saw it was in London in 1990; not the most obvious choice for a day-tripping fourteen-year-old, but what the hell. I was too young then to understand its complexities or anything about it at all. The second time I saw it, I think I was smashed on something. No memories. So really, I felt last night like I was seeing the movie for the first time. Oh what a movie it is.

What intrigues me most about SLV, watching it as an adult, is the way it affirms that artists have magical powers to affect reality that plain bourgeoisie do not. The James Spader character (Graham Dalton) enacts an aesthetic of total voyeurism, and his art manifests as a privately held collection of sexual curios. As harmless as he seems, he rips apart a marriage, shakes up a family, and gets the girl in the end. Spader is dynamite. The diffidence and passivity of his performance is what draws you in. Also, I wonder whatever happened to Andie MacDowell? Another nuanced performance. Whether or not Spader is heroic or anti-heroic here is open to conjecture. The film is quiet, slow, and deliberate; heroism here doesn’t mean action or thrills. It’s the spirituality of not-doing, not-acting, withholding one’s self. It is the artist-as-saint. And the comparatively vulgar bourgeois (an unctuous Peter Gallagher) just can’t handle it.

I’m happy today because I’ve found a way to incorporate a Depeche Mode reference into my academic work. Has anyone posited Wordsworth as a “personal Jesus” before?

Personality Cults

Another argument, of a different kind: what about artists that initiate personality cults around themselves? This kind of artist develops a distinctive personality, that is consistent across time, and from project to project (whether it be film, album, or book). The appeal of a "personality cult artist" is, specifically, this consistency. With this person, you know both what you want and what you’re going to get. Change and development is less important than maintenance of distinctive, idiosyncratic traits that are peculiar enough to the artist as to be trademarks. One person I think of along these lines is Jack Nicholson. It’s hard for me to say whether or not Nicholson is a great actor (though G-d knows he’s made some brilliant films), because so often, Jack is Jack: a crazed, volatile, sensual, slightly (sometimes blatantly) evil mischief maker, with a face the camera loves. Where Nicholson is concerned, I would be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt (for whatever my opinion is worth) and call him a great actor. The Shining is one of my favorite films, and, as much as Stanley Kubrick’s incredible talents as a film-maker are in evidence, could anyone have played Jack Torrance as memorably as Nicholson did? It seems impossible to see anyone but Nicholson in the role. He has such intense magnetism that the whole film seems to gravitate around him (even all of Kubrick’s visual tricks). That magnetism is in Cuckoos Nest, Chinatown, Carnal Knowledge, all the way back to Easy Rider and up to As Good As It Gets. Yet, I would imagine for serious actors/actresses there are issues of range that need to be dealt with, that could complicate the matter. But who could argue with Jack’s "Jack-ness"?

Poetry: how about Frank O’ Hara? Who could deny that, from the major O’Hara poems to the minor ones, Frank is always Frank? He has come to be a signifier for a certain kind of urban cool: his gayness matters less than his archness, his cosmopolitan snobbishness matters less than his happy-go-lucky charm. Those, of course, are my value judgments, but that all four things (gayness, archness, snobbishness, charm) are part of a consistent narrative persona that is developed in his Lunch Poems and in the Collected would seem hard to dispute. Maybe snobbishness, you could argue against: you could say he never sets himself above other people in the poems, embraces Pop culture, and you would be right. I’m talking more about his interest in painting (specifically the Abstract Expressionists, who were very Mod during the years O’Hara was writing), his assumption of cultural currency, capital. So, if we put Frank through the same grinder we put Jack through, what do we come up with? Or, as certain teachers of mine like to query, major or minor? For me, Frank O’Hara is a major poet. He is as authentically himself as any character in American poetry, including Walt Whitman. Ginsberg tried to be representatively Whitmanic: I think O’Hara succeeded where Ginsberg failed. But, of course, the two were friends, and Frank would probably object to being placed in opposition to Ginsberg. Oh well.

Where popular music is concerned, there are a bunch of possibilities: Dylan again, Springsteen again, Madonna, even Michael Jackson. However, I don’t think anyone fits this particular bill more than Morrissey does. Morrissey’s classic stance: precious, literary, self-pitying, ridiculously self-dramatizing (but able to take the piss nonetheless) has barely changed since The Smiths emerged from Manchester in the early 1980s. Morrissey calls out to the bookish adolescent in all of us (or, at least, those of us who were bookish adolescents), the part of us that is forever caught in our own dramas of selfhood (often in relation to a cold, cruel world). As such, Morrissey inspires fanatical devotion in his fans, largely because that persona is so fervently held and maintained by him, so closely guarded. To some, that very sense of fixation is a turn off; Morrissey is the kind of artist that allows no middle response. You either get him or you don’t. But there is one, central persona to get or not get, unlike Bowie or Madonna, who have each developed a plethora of personas. In Morrissey’s case, I am on the fence where issues of greatness (or major/minor) are concerned. If we measure him in the devotion he inspires, he’s certainly great. As an artist, he seems limited to me, narrowly confined to his own terrain. I get him, but I have to be in a certain mood to listen to him. I’ve also found him to be bad luck before dates…not that that’s relevant. So I’ll defer here, and leave Morrissey blank on the scorecard.

Blogs as Priceless Commodities

Can we, in fact, call blogs "priceless commodities"? Can we call them commodities at all? It requires some juggling. "Commodities" are almost always involved with money, or "capital." The commodity form, as it was handed down (representationally) from Marx, is a kind of ghost: mass-produced, infinitely reproducible, always replaceable. Blogs are a different kind of ghost: you can't touch them, they inhabit a screen, and they are infinitely reproducible only in the sense that their spectral presence manifests wherever and whenever the correct code is placed into digital machinery. Art blogs are not involved with capital, but they are involved with cultural capital. I wrote about this at some length in the spring, but I bring it up for a few reasons: I have changed my mind about Bourdieu (who initiated the term cultural capital), and I have begun to think of blogs (my own and others) in commercialized terms, as though they were commodities.

The criticisms I posited against Bourdieu had their basis in a feeling that Bourdieu's critique of industrial capitalism capitulated too much. It seemed to me, on first encountering Bourdieu's ideas, that terms like cultural capital were an attempt to mirror bourgeois standards of value rather than supplant them. Bourdieu seemed to want to compete directly rather than subvert. I see now that my criticisms were naive: I did not then appreciate the power of the capitalist juggernaut that has dominated Western society time out of mind. Where this is concerned, intellectuals and artists have neither the material skills nor the resources needed to supplant or subvert. Moreover, we have inherited ideologies that are difficult to dislodge. The minute we put our work into any kind of marketplace (including a digital one, as I am doing here), the commercial lexicon becomes natural to us. The acquisition, dissemination, and consolidation of cultural capital is a real process, and (at times) a troubling one. Cultural commodities resist the assignation of fixed values; fluctuations are normative.

On this blog, I (and those that comment) decide what is worth what. There is a kind of Cultural Capital Chain being forged here: I attain cultural capital from acquiring readers, and the more cultural capital I acquire the more I can disseminate (i.e. the more respected/well-known the blog becomes, the more readers will feel they are gaining cultural capital from reading it.) There is genuine reciprocity going on here, and at a more intimate level than almost any other context could create. I am not writing for the New York Times or Harpers; I am writing directly to my audience. The commercial exchange is a direct transmission. It is almost a kind of barter: your hits for my knowledge, impressions, critiques, musings, etc. It's a fair deal. I am selling you a commodity, you respond with an affirmation or "coin" that registers on my hit counter. But, of course, in directly commercial terms, the exchange is negligible, a kind of "ghost exchange": there is nothing material behind it. Blogs (and online journals) are liminal entities, so completely tied up with a Bourdieu-ian model that the original, Marx-derived formulations recede into the distance. If I think about this blog as a commodity, am I right or wrong? Is this post a commercial venture? Who decides if the "coins" you give in return mean anything? For those of us that work seriously on the Net, these things need to be thought through. And Bourdieu needs to be given credit as a seminal theorist for us.