FEBRUARY 2ND

Today is Groundhog Day. In Harold Ramis’ film Groundhog Day (1993), there’s a scene I’ve always had great affection for: it shows Phil Conners, the caustic weatherman (Bill Murray), sitting at a table in a coffee shop early in the day, reading. One of the books on the table is Ulysses. Phil looks up from his reading, looks around him, and a feeling of bliss passes over his face.

Phil has to keep reliving the same day, February 2nd, as a kind of Purgatory, until he significantly changes its outcome (he finally gets Rita, played by Andie MacDowell, to fall in love with him). In the course of the film, Phil goes through all kinds of self-serving uses of the day -- to get money, to break the law without future consequence, to finagle affection from Rita -- and, driven to despair by a real love he has begun to feel that he can’t convince her of, killed himself numerous times. He always returns miraculously unscathed to the same day.

The scene of reading takes place when he at last begins to enjoy the ‘eternity’ that the day has become, eventually performing many acts of kindness so that others avoid injury or inconvenience on that day.

But what I love about that reading scene is that the atmosphere in which he reads -- the sunlight, the classical music playing, the sense of freedom for the luxury of reading -- brought back to me similar moments in college and in grad school when the only task was to read, and sometimes one would seem to wake briefly from a dream of words and see oneself in the act of reading, buoyed by a quotidian sense of time as simply present, but not pressing. And it was good.

It seems to me no accident that Ulysses is there on the table, a book that requires, indeed fosters, just such a removal from the rhythm of one’s own time in favor of the rhythm of its long, unfolding day. And it’s a day -- the endless February 2nd -- that is also the birthday of James Joyce, and also commemorates Candlemas, the presentation of Christ in the temple, also known as the Purification of the Virgin, and -- or more properly February 1st -- the feast of Imbolc, the beginning of winter’s end, and St. Brigid’s day.

2-2-2010 for JJ

No rest for the demon, no retreat.
He keeps before me a tranced space

Where fables of compunction elicit laughs,
And all that sacred poetry, born

Of tearful entreaty and fear of illicit
Conjunction, inspires a manic dance,

Spidery, fiery, flung over an abyss
We’re forever reading, forever waiting

For that glimmer of shared sense we need.
Knowledge -- take a bite, and flaunt glad

Ignorance of all injunction to freedom,
Cautioned by purifying candles’ witness.

Praise the joyous apostate, St. Brigid,
Close Epiphany for a season less frigid.

DISCS OF THE DECADE

And so another decade is over. Having entered this world in the last year of the Fifties, I always pay attention to transitions from the tenth year of a decade to the year that adds a new number before the final digit. Do I really believe in ‘decades’ as an assemblage of years that are in some way united? Not really. Time seems more coherent in groupings of four to five years, and what comes either ‘before’ or ‘after’ those years is equally meaningful, if you want it to be.

That said, it’s easy enough to view ‘the aughts’ as dominated by one’s distaste for W. -- from the election of 2000, to the start of the war in 2003, to the re-election in 2004 and the torture photos, to the botch of Katrina in 2005, to the attempt to pass the torch in 2008, with the Bimbo Mom from Hell foisted upon the public. And then, of course, Obama’s victory, and the tanking economy in 2009, and the great hopes showered upon Obama as he took office, and the supposed backlash as the new decade begins -- we'd like to believe the ‘low, dishonest decade’ (to appropriate Auden’s useful phrase for the Thirties) ended with Obama’s Inauguration in 2009, but there’s too much hangover to say that, and 2010 simply continues ‘the situation.’

The years of the past decade are not notable to me as being distinct entities, much less so than decades from earlier in my own history. In fact, during the decade itself, I could be heard to say I’ll start paying attention again when we get to the ‘teens. And there’s more than a little truth in that. I’m ready to start paying attention now, I swear.

So here goes an attempt to stretch my brain by actually trying to ascribe something memorable to the output of the individual ‘00 years, in my listening. It’s quite easy for me to ignore whatever is high on the charts, and simply pick up new stuff from oldsters, or new stuff from whoever among the young(er than me) catches my attention. The decade ends with me listening to more classical music than ever before, so ... who knows, in another decade I might not be rocking at all.

Ok, enough preamble: let the listing begin!

2000:
Steve Earle’s Transcendental Blues arrived as a follow-up to the excellent El Corazón of 1997, but with more variety to the production, more muscle. It was, in hindsight, Earle’s peak album and blends a contemporary rock sound with country (which was a genre I was indulging more than ever in the closing years of the ‘90s, what with Johnny Cash’s renaissance, and with me finally listening to Townes Van Zandt, The Flying Burrito Bros., Gram Parsons in the early years of this decade). Speaking of Johnny, his Solitary Man from this year may be his all-around strongest album, or, in any case, it showed that the Rick Rubin-produced sessions were still going strong.

But the album that came to dominate all others from that year, eventually, was Modest Mouse’s The Moon and Antarctica, which I didn’t really get to know till 2001. It had the power of a, for me, new discovery (being the first entire album I heard by this oddly abrasive band), and features extended songs, short visceral punches, and a host of memorable lines and deliveries. 'Tiny Cities Made of Ashes' was a song for the time, much as a song like Talking Heads’ 'Life During Wartime' was in its day.

My song of the year: 'I’m the Man Who Murdered Love' by XTC: a catchy, mordant, irresistibly tongue-in-cheek account of how to overcome romantic longings.

2001:
Bob Dylan’s Love & Theft was released on 9/11/2001, a day everyone old enough to have memory on that day will always remember. Even though I didn’t buy it on that day, I did wander by a record store to contemplate its existence in the long daze that the day became. And that’s the album that will always be the album for the year, not only because getting to know it happened in the wake of the World Trade Center attack, but because, with two other Dylan albums of new material released this decade, it holds up the best. I’m ready to say it’s one of the top ten albums of his career and might even accept it in the top five. It brought back home a Dylan who could rock and softshoe and croon and caterwaul, and everything else he’d always done, including throwing out memorable lines and others that played with cliché and borrowings -- including a knock-knock joke -- in a refreshingly loose, at times almost zany, way. Not as prettily produced as Time Out of Mind (1997), nor ever as menacing or menaced, the album presents a Dylan for the new decade, a bit of old weird Americana with a vengeance. It actually reminded me of Self-Portrait at times in its ‘take it or leave it’ insouciance.

A big album of this year for me, in hindsight (didn’t get to know it till 2003) was Jay Farrar’s Sebastopol; even more than Earle’s album, this is country-tinged rock able to disassemble both genres in the name of something else, feeling almost at times experimental, and at other times quite ‘classic’ the way an album by The Band feels. Nick Cave’s album No More Shall We Part is a strong, lyrical, melancholy, and at times hilarious, edgy and uneasy follow-up to The Boatman’s Call (1997), which I regarded as a career peak, though others saw it as Nick calming down. No More, in its audacity, is more like classic Nick, but with greater musical maturity than he’d shown up to this point.

My song of the year: 'Mississippi' by Bob Dylan: a survivor’s wistfulness pervades the song, neither too dark nor too light -- rueful but unrepentant.

2002:
There was some good stuff this year: two albums by Tom Waits, though neither was as good as his previous album; a bit of a return to form for Elvis Costello, the best David Bowie album in a long time; the last George Harrison album, which is one of his best; a strong, but lesser, follow-up to their 2000 album by The Mekons, and, though I didn’t hear it till 2006, the best album I’ve heard by The Decemberists, Castaways and Cutouts; but the real contenders, for me, at the time were: 3) the debut album by a brash punk band, The Libertines, Up the Bracket, by turns melodic and almost thrashy; 2) Johnny Cash’s The Man Comes Around (his final album of his lifetime), featuring his version of 'Hurt,' powerfully uncompromising and naked, and some other standouts, like the title track and a somber reading of Sting’s 'I Hung My Head'; but the album I hear as the soundtrack for the year is 1) Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. It was the first album I heard by them, which means I started, I’d say, with their career peak, at least so far. It’s a pop album with a bad conscience, so while it can give you that happy-go-lucky air of good vibes that pop is supposed to deliver, it also works its hooks through layered deconstructions at times that make them have to fight to the surface, full of foreboding, and Jeff Tweedy’s voice can put you on edge the way the Neil Young of After the Gold Rush could.

My song of the year: 'The Good Old Days' by The Libertines: it’s a little dissatisfying, only because the huge adrenalin spike between 'things we said we’d do tomorrow' and 'the arcadian dream has fallen through' only occurs once, but the trailing off of the song makes that meaningful. These are the good old days, but they’re only as good as you believe them to be.

2003:
Things start to fray this year . . . or maybe it’s just one of those years -- every decade has them -- where not that much comes out to give the year a definite trajectory. Richard Thompson’s The Old Kit Bag sustains his position as a frontrunner of those remaining artists who began careers in the ‘60s and consolidated themselves (rather than burning out) in the ‘70s, and managed to survive the ‘80s without too much loss of taste, and on through a reassertion in the ‘90s as mature rockers; it, like Mock Tudor in 1999, is one of his most adept albums; Neil Young, also in that group, but more restless and uneven, delivered Greendale, a musical drama that is as inimitable as anything in his career, but the breakout album for me was by Chan Marshall, a young woman born in the ‘70s and hitting her stride with a stripped-down, hypnotic, haunting album, Cat Power’s You Are Free, which keeps up what seems to be my ear’s inner tendency in these days: strong hooks that are undermined rather than pushed in the usual pop-song manner; Marshall’s voice can be hard to take in its baleful unprettiness, but it registers a truth that no pop diva paraded on the radio has any inkling of.

My song of the year: 'Meet Me Down the Alley' by Paul Westerberg: speaking of truth, this song is so quaveringly plaintive, you’d probably have to shut it off if you aren’t in the mood to meet its gutsy vulnerability, but . . . it’s the song, by a guy more or less my age, that said what needed to be said, to whoever’s listening.

2004:
Another difficult year. It’s almost tempting to say it’s all over: longtime favorites R.E.M. release the worst album of their career, not bad so much as boring; albums by The Cure and Elvis Costello, both of whom had done some good work earlier in the decade, are mostly annoying, though featuring a few good tracks; Leonard Cohen puts out his slightest album ever, and Tom Waits puts out an album only intermittently interesting; but there are some new acts to catch: Franz Ferdinand’s eponymous debut is as hot and cool as rock is supposed to be, updating ‘80s club sounds; The Veils’ debut album, The Runaway Found, surfaced in the U.K. late in ‘03 and finally makes it stateside, giving us Finn Andrews, one of the most gripping, visceral vocalists of his generation; but this is Nick Cave’s year all the way. His double album disc: Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus crushes all that blocks its path; the arrangements, including great back-up singers and horns, kick ass and Nick is at his weirdly verbal best, riffing on basic premises that stem from a poetic approach to life threatening to go horribly wrong or, despite everything, able to affirm the value of personal vision.

My song of the year: 'There She Goes, My Beautiful World' by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: with its litany of artists and writers on the edge, evoked comically but feelingly; with its cri de coeur for some kind of inspiration; with its abasement that is utterly exhilerating; and with its relentless rhythm that seems to bowl over every possible hesitation or resistance, this is a crowning song in the Nick Cave canon of rave-ups. 'Send that stuff on down to me.'

To be continued.

RECENT STUFF

Not much has appeared on Blogocentrism of late, but here are some links to things I've written, posted elsewhere: First of all, there's a review of Katharine Weber's entertaining new novel, a take on candy manufacture and family business dynamics in a little town called New Haven, CT: True Confections; then a review of Tim Page's memoir on growing up with Asperger's Syndrome, in the '60s and '70s; then there's some looking back at the future as it appeared in two Terry Gilliam films recently screened at Yale: Brazil (1985) and 12 Monkeys (1995); then there's some thoughts on a challenging one-man show by Kevin Daniels, which kicked-off the new semester at the Yale Cabaret; then, going back pre-holidays, there's my shot at Wally Lamb's attempt to cash-in on the season with a lame holiday story set in a Catholic middle school in CT; and, finally, there's my essay over at Quarterly Conversation on Pynchon's three CA novels.

And I'd like to take this moment to personally thank Brett Favre and the Minnesota Vikings for kicking the Dallas Cowboys' collective ass last Sunday. Go Purple People!

THE LATE GREAT GORKY

One of the interesting experiences at a big retrospective of an artist’s work is walking from room to room, from beginning to end, tracing a line of development from the early fledging works, to the period of full maturity, to whatever comes after that. In most cases, there’s a point reached at which one feels quite satisfied that the artist has attained something truly distinctive, and one is more or less willing to reside in those peak galleries, looking at the undisputed masterpieces, for as long as one likes. Whether or not there is a precipitate falling off, or perhaps simply repetitions that don’t seem to go forward, there is a feeling that something glorious has occurred and that it won’t last forever.

In the case of remarkable artists, that sense that one has hit a peak can sometimes continue for room after room, as one keeps moving beyond what seemed to be the significant form the artist had been working toward to find new vistas constantly appearing.

That’s the sensation I had in walking through the retrospective of the work of the Armenian-born artist Arshile Gorky at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I went into the exhibit knowing at most a handful of Gorky’s canvases: the portrait of the artist and his mother; The Liver as Cockscomb, Agony, Dark Green Painting. I knew the basic story -- which the early paintings in the show depicted quite clearly -- of his antecedents in Cézanne, the Picasso of the 20s and 30s, and of his similarity to elements in the work of Joan Miró, André Masson, Robert Matta, and his influence on de Kooning, Pollock and others of that generation.

There’s also the story of his painful personal life -- from his mother’s death before her children were able to flee Turkish persecution in Armenia, to his cancer and declining health in the later Forties, to the fire that consumed some of his works in his studio, to the car accident that left him ailing and depressed, to his suicide at age 48 -- that the wallcards tended to play up as much as possible in an effort, I suppose, to give human meaning to the forms and figures that might otherwise elude the casual viewer, but which tended to make the art seem the melodramatic soundtrack to the ordeals of the artist’s life.

Perhaps that’s the best way to make meaning of Gorky’s canvases, but I don’t really think so. I don’t think it’s an act of inhumane formalism to look at the work as work and not as cries of passionate suffering. For some reason, beginning perhaps with Van Gogh, the fact of an artist’s suicide gets read into the work as though an artist paints to express an inner state that continues to elude viewers until, finally, the difficulty of the situation becomes unbearable and death becomes preferable to life and art. It’s a kind of cheap romanticism that places art always in the context of biography.

But what the retrospective itself shows is how art exists independent of biography, ultimately. In room after room, Gorky’s work creates a context in which the story on display is not a fight with depression or with the obstacles of life, but rather the refining and exercise of a unique talent for shapes and space. Gorky’s breakthrough is a signature style in which a background -- whether of paint or, in his drawings, charcoal -- creates a space upon which his precisely delineated but seemingly freehand shapes, or objects, are sketched.

In some cases, as with Garden in Sochi, there are three different versions, showing us how the painting functions when ‘background’ is rendered in paint so thick and undifferentiated that it overwhelms the objects and all space collapses into one ground; another, with a bright yellow background, makes the objects float in space, bold and cartoonish; the third, my preference, gives a washed white background that lets the pure line of the objects come to life. This manner gets further explored in canvas after canvas, but never simply as repetition. Gorky is always working on the relation of painting to drawing in interesting new ways.

In fact some early paintings are inferior to drawings to which they are akin. For a period in the ‘30s, Gorky seems too influenced by the monumental style of Picasso, showing the same tendency to overwhelm shapes with thickly built-up surfaces of paint in heavy colors. Gorky escapes this tendency by exploring landscapes in situ -- in Connecticut near the Housatonic River, and in Virginia. The gradual sense of painting and drawing in a struggle for dominance is what gives Cockscomb its menancing air: it’s as if both aspects of the work are taking on a life of their own and are held together in a riotous harmony only by the sheer vigor of the artist’s command of an idiosyncratic sense of shape and color.

Later, in that same impressive room, How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life shows the strong and fluent lines of Gorky’s drawing becoming wet on wet applications that drip down the canvas, giving a sense of a melting fusion of shape and color that seems to border on gesture painting. It’s also clearly a personal painting, reflecting on the loss of his mother and the meaning she continued to have in his life as an occasion for his art.

The power of distinct shapes -- from drawings that are laid upon the canvas after being worked out in proportional arrangements -- return in the series called The Plow and the Song, evoking rural life in Armenia. The pleasure of having all three paintings hung together so one could look at them all more or less at once was a bit like listening to different arrangements of the same basic melody.

In the last room, on what I considered the last wall, were hung together two paintings that Gorky had worked on over a period of time, listed on the wallcards as 1944-47 and 1944-48, so that these were works that take us through his peak period to within the year of his death. Both were stunning to look at after all that had come before. Here drawing had been submerged utterly in paint but the paint was not the thickly masking, unyielding surface/ground that could be found even in late, much praised works such as Agony or Dark Green Painting. Instead, the surface/ground was more translucent, seeming to let light (as canvas) through,and letting the objects float and appear as ghostly presences echoing Gorky's repertoire of biomorphic shapes.

The paintings in no way struck me as last gasps or as acts of despair. Rather I had the feeling that the man Vostanik Adoyan gave up on life for personal reasons, but that the artist Arshile Gorky was moving forward at that point and that greater canvases might have remained for him to produce. He seemed to have more to say. A pity he could no longer continue.

MILESTONES

At the end of the year, one can find many a ‘roll call of death’ on the internet. Passings which made quite a mark this year include, perhaps most famously, Michael Jackson (June 25), but also Ted Kennedy (Aug. 25), and his aunt Eunice (Aug. 11), notable passings for all of us for whom the Kennedy family were fixtures of our lives and times; then there were writers so prolific as to seem eternal, John Updike (Jan. 27), and J.G. Ballard (April 19); actresses, like Farrah Fawcett (June 25), whose death inspired nostalgic paeans of the ‘70s as culture and fashion, and Natasha Richardson (March 18), whose death inspired thoughts about how important it is to treat recreational injuries seriously; in academia, milestones were certainly marked by the passing of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (April 12), a major voice in the establishing of gender studies (oddly, she died on the same day as Marilyn Chambers, star of the first porn film I ever saw), and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the intellectual most responsible for structuralism and all that followed from it; an actor, Patrick McGoohan (Jan. 13), whose role as The Scarecrow for Disney’s TV show left a mark on my childhood and whose role as The Prisoner left a mark on my teens and twenties, when I finally got around to watching them all on PBS; a few more figures lost, who had some personal valence for me, were Andrew Wyeth (Jan. 16), the most famous artist from the region I hail from, and W.D. Snodgrass (Jan. 13), who was the grand old man of the writing program at Univ. of DE when I was there in the late '80s, and who I took a class with and shared a dinner with once at the home of an English prof and friend, the late Hans-Peter Breuer.

But of all the deaths of the year, the one that feels most like a loss to me is that of Vic Chesnutt, a singer and songwriter from Georgia who, paralyzed from the waist down since the age of 18, apparently took his own life at age 45 with an overdose of muscle relaxants, dying, after being in a coma a few days, on Christmas Day. Chesnutt’s breakout cd was 1996's About to Choke, which I first got around to hearing in 1999, and then got to know the 1998 album, The Salesman and Bernadette, which he made with the band Lambchop. More recent albums I’ve picked up as they were released were Left to His Own Devices (2001) and Ghetto Bells (2005), which featured not only Bill Frisell but also Van Dyke Parks. I saw Chesnutt play live twice, once in combination with Kristin Hersh in Baltimore, and once opening for Jay Farrar in Towson, MD. Of late, he seemed to be on a roll, with new albums featuring new musicians to collaborate with.

The thing about Chesnutt’s music, to me, is that I associate it with the decade now ending; those brittle melodies, that unadorned and unmistakable voice, bending words and notes in dialogue with his characteristic strum, and those literate, quizzical lyrics, many of which posit a life lived marginally, one might even say magisterially so, a kind of anatomy of the perilous nature of creativity on the edge -- where there’s nothing to keep the machine running except a claim on what it means to be human, musical, driven to find words and tunes. I can think of many, many lyrics from Chesnutt that gripped me on first hearing with the unfettered honesty of someone committed to a unique musical vision, able to convert the misery of his condition into beautiful acts of legerdemain, even of levitation. 'Supernatural,' 'Maiden,' 'Parade,' 'Myrtle,' 'Ladle,' 'Swelters,' 'Degenerate,' 'Very Friendly Lighthouses,' 'Hermitage,' 'We Should Be So Brave,' 'To Be With You,' 'Vesuvius,' and no doubt many others I’ve still to discover. Rest in Peace, Vic, and thanks, man.

Christian charity is a doily over my death boner
–Vic Chesnutt, 'Vesuvius' (2005)

RECENT BOOKS

Much as I'm really getting into recounting my early reading of '15 books that stayed with me,' I'm also still reading books published in 2009. Here are some recent comments over at The New Haven Review on Philip Roth's The Humbling, and on Paul Auster's Invisible.