The Bee Gees: Satan's Henchmen?

Why Saturday Night Fever, both the movie and the soundtrack album, have held an irresistible fascination for me for my entire life is something I’m only now beginning to understand. When I saw the movie as a child, it “creeped me out” completely; in particular, the scene in which one of the characters falls to his death from the Verrazano Bridge in Brooklyn gave me nightmares. This was unusual; I’ve always been a fan of horror movies. But, for some reason, that scene was so desperate, so haunting, and so vivid that I still can’t escape chills when I think about it. Looking objectively, as an adult artist, at Saturday Night Fever, I think I understand why the movie gives me so much discomfort. The lives of the characters in the movie are pitiful and pointless, and are thusly more frightening than anything Dario Argento could dream up. Lives lived for nothing, tossed away at the drop the hat, and passions become thin gauze to hide terrible, black spiritual emptiness; that’s why the movie gives me chills. That the movie, as a pop culture phenomenon, seems so innocuous (people think of John Travolta’s ridiculous dance moves, the schmaltz of the soundtrack album, which we’ll get to shortly) is part of the reason it’s so creepy. This is a movie that was a huge popular success, yet everyone in the movie but Travolta has been relegated to near-complete obscurity. Without being unduly romantic and/or fatalistic, I think this has to do with the fact that the vibe of the movie is so horrendous, so chilling, and much more insidious than anyone’s ever come out and said. The spiritual emptiness of this movie isn’t just creepy; it’s evil.

I know the way this post is titled skirts the ridiculous. Yet, I will insist upon this: if you listen to those famous Bee Gees songs from the soundtrack album (Night Fever, You Should Be Dancing, More Than a Woman, How Deep Is Your Love), and you listen intently for the sound of the dreadful spiritual emptiness I’ve been describing, you’ll hear it. Is it jaw-dropping to think that songs which everyone laughs at could actually be, for want of a better word, Satanic? It is. But remember (and this is half tongue-in-cheek); it’s the Devil’s best trick to make you believe he doesn’t exist. Actually, the creepiest song on the album for me is Yvonne Elliman’s If I Can’t Have You. This is the song I associate with the guy-falling-off-a-bridge scene. If you pay attention to the lyrics, they present obsession-bordering-on-psychosis. That, combined with the kitchen-sink production and a few great hooks, makes the song heartbreakingly bleak but completely unaware of its own bleakness. It’s a mean, nasty, brittle little piece of Hell, disguised as an upbeat disco pot-boiler. There’s also a cocaine vibe to the whole album which reeks of the 1970s, and of the fact that coke is often used to disguise awful spiritual emptiness. “Night fever, night fever; we know how to do it,” is the coke ethos in a nut-shell. But that this ethos is infernal is not something the Bee Gees wanted you to know, because on the surface it’s enormously seductive, as evil always is. The album didn’t sell 25 million copies for nothing.

That both the album and the movie are schmaltz, “not-art,” is also interesting. There’s a level on which any work of art that knows itself to be art is wholesome and comforting. The artist is trying, in however bleak a fashion, to do something noble, to create something worthwhile. When garbage is put out just to rake in bucks, you can get levels of creepiness that art doesn’t offer. Crassness, especially the raw crassness of this movie and these songs, is more deeply creepy than the darkest Goya or the most abject moments of Sartre. This stuff wasn’t put out for a noble reason, and its’ darkness is partly that it was meant only to seduce people into spending their money on it, which they did. But the blackness that was captured here was captured by accident, and it’s a specific level of “lowness” which art can’t get to, which only schmaltz can reach. This makes the whole thing even more horrendous, and more fascinating. Are there lots of Tony Maneros in the world? There are, but an artist will always try to show something redemptive, either about Tony, or about the lessons that can be learned from Tony. The movie just throws him out, into a vapid world, where he lives a vapid life in which even the exciting bits are tinged with lust, destruction, death, and carelessness. The Bee Gees songs are laughable specifically because they represent this emptiness so well. But that they lead straight into a grave is not something you find out until the gang hits the Verrazano Bridge.

So, this is conclusive: specifically because it couldn’t care less about anything but money, schmaltz can actually reach levels that art can’t reach. A dark movie, made by dark people, for dark reasons, could still be art; a movie that couldn’t care less about its own darkness can be nothing but schmaltz. If you laugh at the Bee Gees, remember how many people bought this album, and absorbed the vibes this stuff was putting out. Without getting moralistic about it, the whole phenomenon of Saturday Night Fever is terrifying, from back to front, and that everyone thinks its funny only makes it more evil. But I, being an artist, see something redemptive; that this kind of schmaltz can teach us lessons about places we can never get to, can never reach. Would we want to or not is another question.

Four New Apps

#572

On the bus to fifth
grade, eleven years
old, I couldn’t breathe,
they had to call an
ambulance, put me
on oxygen. My father
arrived, shaking and
crying; “First my mother,
now my son.” I loved
him so much, it didn’t
seem strange that, upon
leaving the hospital,
he returned me to school
in time for math class.


#577


You can only transcribe by dying,
the things you transcribe are dying,

the way you transcribe is dying
by the time you transcribe,

so if you must transcribe,
you must die, or die trying


#1288

Times you get bored
with the process, but

worse are times when
words are little deaths,

wrung out like sheets,
draped over hangers,

out in a damp yard on
a cold autumn day, as

wind rises to pin them
to your hopeless breast.


#1281

You can take for granted
lots of God-awful garbage
in places deemed important
by fools; this goes for every
thing, including poetry. Why?
Because the world runs (has,
will always) on mediocrity, so
safe, so comforting, like a mug
of hot cocoa on a winter’s night,
or a mediocre simile, people want
others to be mediocre, to be fools,
that’s just the way things go, people
are nothing to write home about, or
(if you are writing to God) nothing to
write about at all, the world is no mystery,
all the mystery is in the night sky, looking up.

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.

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 the anthology at the Northwestern University Press website and on Amazon 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.

First Time Charms

It really only happens once in a while: you see or hear something, and your life changes instantly. Some angle, some form of light, some way of being-in-the-world has been released to you, and all the wonder and the joy that goes unnoticed is alive again, and in your face. I’m talking about works of art that you don’t need to sit with, that you don’t have to digest, that don’t “grow on you,” but become a part of you immediately. It hasn’t happened to me in a long time (honestly), but it’s nice to remember these epiphanies because they are so unusual, and because the dust never really settles from them. So, three epiphanies, but I must preface here that when I look at what I’ve chosen, they are uniformly “dark” works of art. These are not “you light up my life” experiences; for whatever reason, the stuff that usually grasps me is tinged with darkness. Perhaps it’s my Scorpio Ascendant. Whatever it is, these three works put a permanent dent in my consciousness, and they are the “darker than darker” that has the power to seduce me over and over again.

I’ve chundered on about Big Star quite a bit here, but the first time I heard them really was an epiphany. It was the summer of 1995: I was living in a dorm room in State College. A friend of mine, who now writes for the New York Times, came up to stay with me for a few days. My diet at the time consisted of sugar cookies (which I filched from the Dining Commons where I worked) and water. I was always a little bit “out there.” Anyway, he came up, and he brought a copy of Sister Lovers/Third with him. We listened to it one night before we went to some party, it was about 90 degrees and the floor was uncarpeted, and the minute I heard Holocaust, I was pitched headlong into my own future. It was everything I ever wanted to hear: otherworldly, Beatles-esque, morbidly depressing but beautifully melodic and intimate. It was, in short, like finding the fifth side of the White Album. It was also like watching Faces of Death or some snuff flick, experiencing Chinese water torture, or seeing blood drip from a wound. What can I say? I’m a Scorpio. I like this stuff. And Sister Lovers became a large section of one of my books and a reference point that will never grow old for me, as long as the White Album still needs a fifth side.

Sometimes I wrestle with the feeling that British Romanticism was the peak of English language poetry in the last 500 years, and that nothing I (or anyone else this century) can do will measure up. Certainly no poet of the last 100 years has ever done to me what John Keats’s Nightingale did the first time I read it. I don’t know if words can adequately convey how there I was when I read this for the first time. I saw the whole thing: flowers, birds, trees, a dark forest, nightfall, and all with stunning immediacy that had no connection to any sentiment you could call “flowery.” It was (and is), in fact, all very muscular, very potent, very present. The funny thing about the situation was how banal the actual circumstances of this reading were. I was working on the third floor of the Barnes and Noble in Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, late 2000. It was about 9 pm (only an hour to go!), I was bored shitless (as usual), and I picked up the Keats in a desultory attempt to find something interesting to browse (I was already well into poetry, but for some reason had never given the British Romantics a fair shake). I stood by the poetry shelves and had to snap myself back to reality. But the damage had been done, Keats led to all the others and I’ve never been the same since.

It’s become a rite of passage in American society for young, male, middle-class, suburban adolescents to go through a Jim Morrison phase. I went through mine rather early, but while I did it led me to Apocalypse Now, which remains my favorite movie. For some reason, it made sense even to my 12 year old brain. I knew there was a sense to the madness of Kurtz, I understood that sometimes madness is sense, and it still makes me shiver to what lengths this madness can be taken. That Morrison’s music is actually in the Coppola masterpiece is merely the icing on the cake, let alone that Brando is a pivot point in the movie too. This movie is one of those magical works of art where everything comes together for me, everything works, I don’t have lingering questions or qualms with anything, “everything’s in its right place.” It is also a generally regarded masterpiece, undeniably one of the great movies of the late twentieth century, and the fact that the Doors and the Stones are in it points to the ascendency of rock and roll out of the cultural minor league. If there is one great lesson to be learned from this movie, it’s this: extremity is magnetic, both in people and in works of art. People want to see extremity because it reminds them of sex and death, the extremities everyone touches. This movie is a case in point.

You're Under Arrest...

Though this is at a tangent to the new positivity I’ve been espousing: we all know the Culture Police. We find them standing behind us in movie lines, serving us coffee, plunking themselves down in the front row at readings. These guys and girls know everything, or think they do. The most important thing they know is this: what we should like and what we should not. The old “what’s in, what’s out” routine, except applied to a few centuries worth of art. I’ve found that the standards of the Culture Police are just too high, and I keep getting arrested. If for every night I spent in Culture Jail I had a dollar, I’d be a rich man. Here’s a good ten-cent academic word: “reified.” When something becomes reified, it becomes hardened into deadness, into immovability. Certain works of art do, in fact, become reified as classics, and then we have no choice but to love them. But there’s a certain value to truth-telling and I thought it might be fun, for once, to “Incarcerate the Culture Police”. This is No Explanations in Reverse: works of art or artists that I’m supposed to like but don’t, and without even having a good reason. All this will happen while the Culture Police are chained in the basement, eating the Doritos I have thrown down to them. For once, I can admit that I find some classics baffling, distasteful, or mediocre. Then I’ll decide whether to take the handcuffs off.

There’s no self-respecting indie rock guy or gal who doesn’t love Talking Heads. They introduced (with a handful of others) post-modernity into rock, disjuncture into lyric writing, and surrealism to MTV. They epitomized a certain kind of cool: urban, artsy, edgy, very New York (like the Velvets before them). The truth is this: I’ve never been moved by a Talking Heads song. I feel like a 17 year old admitting virginity, but that’s the truth. It could be any number of things holding me back: the iciness of David Byrne’s songwriting approach, the condescension towards those less artsy or (G-d forbid) not from New York, the sense that this is all a little too clever, a little too inhuman, at too much of a distance from any kind of relationship to human emotions. Or, maybe I’m just deficient. I served a two week sentence for this a few years back, and had to watch Burnin’ Down the House and Up All Night play endlessly on a battered old TV. Those videos did bring something unique to Middle America, but somehow I feel nothing. A good deal of post-modern poetry has the same kind of effect on me. I admire the technique but it’s just too far away from feeling, and we are what we feel. So, loving Lou and the Velvets will have to be enough, and they can’t throw me in the tank for this twice. No double jeopardy in Culture Land.

Along with T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens is probably the most elegant Modernist poet. His aphorisms pack a mighty punch, he was one step on the road to the experimental poetry I am involved in now, and he has gained incredible literary credibility over the last fifty years. But what is he, really: elegant or incomprehensible? If you look at Stevens closely, it’s easy to see that he often keels over into nonsense. But, of course, with the Culture Police hanging around, you’re not supposed to notice this. The elegance of Williams’ short poems is more enjoyable to me, because they seem less like mind games and more like exquisite vignettes. Stevens’ impenetrable surfaces make you feel like you’re looking at a hunk of ice. The crystalline beauty of his lines does not, for me, redeem all that’s glacial in the poems. Stevens is very much the kind of artist you either get or you don’t. If you’re a mainstreamer, you can admit to disliking Stevens without getting locked up; but a hard-core experimentalist that doesn’t like Stevens? I’ve been charged with apostasy! Now that I’ve actually gone public with this, I’ll expect to be locked in solitary confinement with his Collected until I get it (or say I do).

Citizen Kane is probably the most acclaimed movie of all time. Thus, it’s a huge cultural transgression to either not get it or not like it. Orson Welles is an American cultural demi-god, up there with Jackson Pollock and Walt Whitman. Yet, you can guess what comes next; I saw the movie, found it heavy-handed and joyless. I was depressed without being edified. I didn’t feel any affective connection to Kane. I did appreciate all the levels of allegory at work: America’s national sickness as a country of back-breaking commodity fetishists. Protestant work-ethics, greed, corruption, wealth, celebrity, “no second acts in American lives.” All that jazz came through, but I didn’t see much to enjoy. It was like being fed a meal of string-beans and broccoli. Whenever a work of art is hyped through the roof (especially when it’s been hyped for decades), an impossible situation arises when contexts change, tastes change, audiences change, and the work of art in question can’t mean the same thing. I think that, in its time, CK touched a nerve, connected on a lot of levels, but I think it might be possible that some of those levels are broken down. Or, maybe I’m the one that’s broken down. But you won’t find me asking the Culture Police for a diagnosis…

Consolations

Much of what I’ve been writing here recently has a negative tinge. It would be a bit much if I didn’t try to break things up once in a while with some positive reflections. I don’t know if this post will inaugurate a “new positivity,” but it is worth looking at the consolations art offers to its practitioners. Every art-form has its own consolations and so every artist has a different set of balances, of weights and measurements to see what’s working and what’s not, as art and life conflate, then separate, and then conflate again. These consolations are the reasons why different artists choose different mediums. Some of us like instant gratification, some like patient exertion. Some like a little bit of both. There are things that I think everyone wants: an audience, respect, acknowledgement, a sense of adventure/discovery, and to be on some kind of cutting edge. But different contexts make different demands and we all have to compromise sometimes too. So, here’s the round-up of the consolations of the different art-forms I’ve been addressing here lately, as they appear to me (up close or from a distance), and as they might encourage or discourage participation.

I’ve been ragging on poetry quite a bit, but I will say this for it: it has the richest history of any art-form I know of, literally thousands of years. There may not be much of an audience for poetry left, but it is assured that there will always be some kind of audience for it. For those who like to live slowly, poetry can offer quite a bit of consolation: poets remain “young” until they hit their forties, and expectations for younger poets (like me) are pretty low. It’s the “silence/slow time” thing about poetry that makes it attractive (though it hinges on avoiding the “public” arenas of poetry), and the fact that obscurity, for an artist, can be a blessing. Obscurity is (sometimes) a guarantee of freedom; no one telling you what to do or when to do it, no one demanding anything, no public with wants and needs all its’ own. Not everyone wants to do the “public artist” bit; the cautious, deliberate artist plodding away in his/her garden is not an unattractive archetype. Plus, the “production costs” with poetry are non-existent. There is no “business business” to attend to (or very little), few material considerations, and all the viciousness doesn’t have to burn or even exist, depending on where you live and who you pay attention to. Poets can keep writing good poetry until they are very old, and the poetry game does not hinge on youth or physical appearances.

The consolations of rock: there is a depth of exchange between great rock bands and their audiences which I don’t think any other art-forms can come close to. For moving people emotionally, really affecting their day-to-day lives, music is the most expedient art-form imaginable. People listen to their favorite songs and albums over and over and over again, in a way that is more fixated and more personal than any other art-form. With music, when it’s good, nothing cuts deeper or reaches more people. Plus, bands that really function as bands can create genuinely responsive communal atmospheres, where other art-forms offer only competitive games and redundant fractiousness. There is also the bonus (which may not last forever) that music (specifically rock) is not yet bound up in academia, so the potentially inhibiting weight of academic thought (at its worst) cannot reach the musicians who forge definite affective connections with their audiences. From fans, successful bands and musicians receive a kind of unconditional love that an artist like me can only imagine. To have a wide public who love you no matter what (thanks, Badfinger) could be construed as a blessing or a curse, but I think the blessings outweigh the curses of the situation. And playing music live is simply much more fun than doing poetry readings, and there’s no way around it. More fun not only for the performers, but for the audience as well.

In 2009, there seems to be no question that movies bring in the biggest numbers. At this point, it’s not even close. So, to reach absolutely the widest possible audience, acting, directing, or writing movies is the way to go. When people choose favorite actors and actresses, it seems to me that some slack is cut; there has never been a great actor or actress who didn’t make at least a few duds. Plus, people who work in movies get to live with the dynamics of group interplay all the time; I imagine that it’s always fascinating, whether it works or it doesn’t. Acting, like poetry, can be done for an entire life-time, especially for actors/actresses who have derived their popularity not just from looks but from talent. And film has its own rich history, and a continuing future that looks more promising than any other art form I can see. The confession remains that I haven’t made yet: I do have a hope that at some point in my career as an artist I can do something with film; anything, from doing a soundtrack, helping with a script, or even acting. It’s not that I’m bored or jaded with what I’m doing; just that I can’t help but wonder what different contexts are actually like from the inside, and hope some day to find out.