JUST ANOTHER BAND FROM L.A.?

As I went out one morning a few weeks ago, there was a package at my door. It contained Inherent Vice, the new Thomas Pynchon novel due in stores next Tuesday. The book came my way because I sought the opportunity to review it soon after hearing, not that long ago, that a new Pynchon novel was scheduled for release this summer. As followers of Pynchon no doubt know, his previous novel appeared in November 2006, less than three years ago. Sure, there was only three years between his first novel V. (1963) and his shortest novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), but it’s been some time since any Pynchon opus was followed so quickly by a new work. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) was seven years after Lot 49, and then there was no new work until a funny, friendly intro to his old short stories, ten years after his National Book Award in 1974. Finally, in 1990, Vineland, a new novel appeared, seventeen years after GR. Then, a mere seven years later, the massive Mason & Dixon in 1997. Almost another decade would pass before Against the Day, formidable at over 1,000 pages, arrived. So, by any estimation, the new novel, at 369 pages, is a quick turn-around for the Reclusive One.

It should be noted too, going in, that TP’s short novels are set in California, predominantly. Lot 49, Vineland, and now Inherent Vice. We can think 'California trilogy' if we’re so inclined. And I must add that I’m both inclined and not inclined. I’m inclined because, yes, all three, besides taking CA as their location, also all take a certain 'California State of Mind' as their main theme. When the smoke clears -- and need I tell you what kind of smoke it is? -- what the three novels share is TP’s penchant for both basking in and gently needling the predominant culture of California in the era from the mid-sixties to the early seventies. Indeed, Lot 49 was set only a few years before the year of its publication, lending it an immediacy of setting not common in Pynchon’s works. Vineland, set in 1984, looked back both at the era of Reagan’s re-election and of Nixon’s first term and suggested that, bummer-wise, they had a lot in common, though the Reagan years were worse due to all the ‘karmic adjustments’ that had to be made because of how the Sixties went down. Now, we’re back in Nixonland again, summer of 1970, a year after the Manson murders, about to go to trial, a recurring reference point à la Joan Didion’s take on the Californian ramifications of that event in her essay 'The White Album.'

Why I’m not inclined? No particular reason, I suppose, other than a certain Imp of the Perverse which makes me want to read each of the three CA novels more in terms of what they mean in their particular moments rather than what they mean yoked together as a connect-the-dots of California culture as presented by everyone’s favorite Paranoid Author. In other words, each of the three CA novels feels to me motivated by a completely different ‘trip.’ In Lot 49, the novel is ahead of the curve, satirizing aspects of the day -- who can forget DJ Mucho Maas explaining the effects of LSD -- that hadn’t quite become common currency in 1966, to say nothing of its glance at the Berkeley Free Speech Movement as something simply in the air, though major protests at non-Californian universities were yet to come.

In Vineland, the task was to remind all those who might like to bury their memories of those days, as they rode whatever conservative and generally more lucrative bandwagon through the soulless hype of the Reagan years. But it should be said that the narrative voice of Vineland was more complex than many of its initial reviewers gave it credit for. It wasn’t simply a ‘nostalgia’ trip in which TP, suffering from Tubal Addiction and jonesing for the heady days of tie-dye and patchouli, tried to reignite synapses long grown dormant. The attitude was wiser, sympathetic, but ultimately skeptical, though not snide. A bit like Frank Zappa’s attitude to hippiedom in its heyday, but more affectionate toward those ‘hungry freaks, daddy.’

Then too, both Lot 49 and Vineland treat different aspects of CA: for Lot 49 it’s the area around SF with forays to the fictional San Narciso, closer to L.A. For Vineland, it’s northern CA, Humboldt County, in 1984, with the College of the Surf shenanigans of the Sixties set between San Diego and San Clemente. And this time, in Inherent Vice, it’s L.A. all the way. The prose, enacted through the viewpoint of a Private Eye named Doc Sportello, reads like Raymond Chandler meets Hunter Thompson, and each finds the other simpatico: ‘hard-boiled’ becomes ‘head-fried.’ But one senses the book had to get into print fast, while the ‘groovy vibes’ of Obama-mania are still in the popular consciousness, and that whole Ding-Dong-The-Witch-Is-Dead thing might support cranking back into a simpler time and place where Chinatown’s Jay Gittes and Easy Rider’s Billy are, like, one.

I haven't finished reading it yet, but it’s easily TP’s lightest novel, his most simply entertaining. It might even become one of his most popular if its target audience can stop watching Nick at Nite broadcasts of the TV shows of the era and/or replays of The Big Lebowski long enough to get on board. And I wish we all could be California PIs ...

I HATE MY GENERATION

I hate my generation, I offer no apologies
I hate my generation, yeah–Cracker

My recent visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s show 'The Pictures Generation, 1974-84' made this song, from 1996, leap to mind. Interestingly, in her review of the show for the Village Voice, Martha Schwendener bookended her take on the show with two generational markers: a comment from a seventy-something viewer (‘I have no appreciation for this’) and an anecdote by Robert Longo (one of the artists in the show) in which a 15-year-old asked if he got the idea for his Men in the Cities drawings from an iPod ad. Schwendener uses these bookends to talk about how art is generational, marked by what’s in the air at a given time; art can be distanced from us by the convictions we’ve spent a lifetime acquiring (the seventy-year-old), or as immediate as our own ignorance (the 15-year-old).

I appropriate Schwendener’s opening as my opening because I’m supposedly ‘of’ the ‘generation’ being represented in this show. Which is to say that the artists represented, born from the mid-40s to the mid-50s for the most part, are from fifteen to five years older than I am. In 1977, when the Pictures show was up at Artists Space, that seminal event from which this exhibit, curated by Douglas Eklund, takes its name, I graduated from high school. So these artists are my elders in the way that older siblings and such can be: which is to say: annoying in their know-it-all cool, their endgame of art as no longer having ‘aesthetic’ quality, no longer being something specifically made as an ‘art object,’ but rather something concocted from images and existing only as commentary on the ubiquity of image, both as something we look at everywhere, as spectators and voyeurs, and as something that shows us ourselves, as reflection and simulacrum.

This, as almost every commentator on the show has underscored, is the first generation to come of age with TVs in the home. And that, we’re made to think, has made all the difference. Though why television should spell the death of the aesthetic object is another one of those mysterious givens of art history, as for instance when it became clear, to use Wallace Stevens line, that ‘it must be abstract.’ We can rehearse the reasons why — point to Abstraction, point to Conceptualism and Minimalism, point to Pop Art — and then sum up why the only self-respecting response to the ubiquity of Madison Avenue, as the moneyed little brat it is, is: to appropriate it, thus making images of its images. Only this time with irony.

Fine. I can accept that. It was 1977, after all. Disco … Punk … New Wave, you get the idea. And, what’s worse, these people were all recently in art school. Let them have fun, let it rip … never mind the bollocks. But howevermuch one might have been sympathetic to the stance at the time, something rankles when these brittle disquistions on the staging of objecthood and send-ups of the mechanisms of attention, generally known as The Tube, get appropriated by The Museum and then hoisted onto walls where formerly masters of their medium had hung.

Is there a sense in which these artists — Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Sherrie Levine, David Salle, Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger, to name but a few — are masters? Yes, if we mean ‘masters of an idiom,’ ‘masters of manipulation,’ for how else explain the manner by which these largely ephemeral works have become ‘permanent’ as art objects? Where once these artists might have protested The Tube’s appropriation of virtually every image, The Artworld’s appropriation of every possible style, The Museum’s appropriation of every ‘aesthetic object’ so-called (da Vinci to Duchamp, etc.), offering their appropriations as flick-offs of the Pop Art/Minimalist aesthetic that, to quote Saint Andy, was all surface or mere object, they have now, via this show, appropriated The Museum, appropriately enough. Because this day had to come. But as with the idea of exhibits in The Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame, I can’t help feeling that everything about the art that gave it charm and brio has become a casualty of its enshrinement.

And what’s maybe even worse than that is the fact that the note-cards in the show play back to us the tired tale of epic struggle, not against the Artworld, or even against the bourgeoisie, but against The Image, and yet one is left wondering in whose name such struggle takes place. If it’s artist decrying advertising, such an idea is not new at the time and certainly not accurate to the world of the artist after Pop Art; if it’s the more thinky pleasure of deconstructing the Image, it’s not clear who can really receive this message. For there’s no evidence, in all this surfacedom, that anyone here can think outside the Image or that they would want to. When Sherrie Levine takes pictures of Walker Evans pictures she trades on the fact that those photographs are already known images. And her images of those photos become objects, but objects whose only purpose is the ancillary role of objectifying imagehood. When we watch clips of the TV show Wonder Woman we might hear an internal voice asking us: why was this televised, what does it say about the medium, and about the advertisers who aired to support it, and about those who tuned in — or at least we might in an exhibit cataloguing eras of broadcast television — but the question I ask myself here is what makes this objectification of an Image salient, provocative … enduring?

The big gun of the show, we’re told by everyone, including Barry Schwabsky, whose critical take on the show for The Nation I’m mostly in agreement with, is Cindy Sherman, and it’s true that, in rooms of forgettable stuff, her images of herself as ‘forgotten film stills’ are already ‘unforgettable.’ But is that because they really do look like images of movies we may have seen once upon a time, or is it because we have seen these images before — in the aggrandizing use of Sherman as the poster child of self-exploitative manipulation of gender signals in which every ‘look’ is aimed to see/show a cliché? Striking as these photographs might have been in their day, they now seem already to be like Walker Evans’ photos chez Levine, now objectified by the curatorial effort to tell a story in which the Image of the object (here ‘woman,’ the great absent signifié) reigns. And Sherman’s sad one-shot psychodramas are the best way to ‘reflect’ that.

The reason the seventy-year-old has no appreciation for this, we may say, is because a good part of her life was lived before The Tube changed forever the meanings of looking and watching and being seen … enviable woman, she existed before The Image was everything. But the reason I have no appreciation for this is that I don’t see why The Museum has to capitulate to The Tube, nor why my looking at things and beings (odd that I should think such may be found in the world I live in, independent of images of them) has to be inflected by ersatz renderings of more commercial mediums (TV, magazine ads, pop music) for the sake of art history, and po-mo art history at that. For if the grand narrative was already kaput when this stuff first surfaced — and these artists were cool with that in their glib image-happy heyday — then the deflating irony comes in when we realize that, without those art-critic gestures to the narratives of Pop Art and Objectivism, these particular images mean — to borrow another line from a song — less than zero.

Turn up the TV, no one listening will suspect
Even your mother won't detect it, so your father won't know
They think that I've got no respect but
Everything means less than zero
--Elvis Costello, "Less Than Zero" (1977)

NEW HAVENIN’

As of May, I’ve been posting biweekly -- every other Wednesday -- at the online site for The New Haven Review, which is a lit mag published locally. The editors Mark Oppenheimer, Bennett Lovett-Graff, and Brian Slattery are working now to produce the 5th print issue. And they also post on the online site.

My first few posts were shortened versions of things I first posted on blogocentrism (I try to keep the NHR posts to 800 words max). But my most recent post, on July 1st, was specifically for NHR, I guess. In any case, I didn’t see the point in posting it separately on blogocentrism, but here’s the link for it: Whither Home? It consists of my thoughts about living in New Haven, after spending three weeks away among people and in environs that in some ways feel more like my home and in some ways don’t.

Meanwhile, there are some other topics I have in mind ‘exclusively’ for blogocentrism, and others that might be on both sites. I recently saw the show called "The Pictures Generation" at the Met, and of course I have to keep the world informed on my progress through War and Peace. But I’m a bit distanced from extended prose at present: it seems the only thing I can write are fourteen line poems ending in a couplet.

I wrote a couple back in February, then a couple in March, then April saw three. At the end of that month I read all those, but for one, at a reading featuring six, including me, of the ten people now blogging on NHR, plus other local poets. And now I’m up to twenty-three 14-liners, when I thought, initially, I’d end up with maybe twenty-four for the year. In fact, I just produced another eight of them, but I consider them not part of that sequence because they’re spoken by a particular fictional character of my acquaintance. Be that as it may, it still makes for a total of thirty-one, and the year’s not quite half over yet.

But prose will out. I’m sure there’s more I want to say about books I read, and maybe even about music (though I have to confess I’m starting to realize that everyone writes about music on blogs, and some people much better than I can ... as in: actually understanding how music is made, not just its effect on them), and also about movies. Movies, remember them? I did see a couple things in the theater, I’m pretty sure. But to tell you the truth, I’m not so eager to talk about whatever is being thrown up on the screen these days. Or it could be that the sheer volume of blogs, review mags (I seem actually to be subscribing to print media again these days), and so on has, at least for the time being, made me less bloggy.

But I really think it has to do with those 14-liners. That concision is so satisfying, like a meal where the serving is just enough. But, to alter the old saying from Frito Lay's potato chip commercials: 'bet you can't write just one.'

WAR AND PEACE, PIECEMEAL (2)

I got through the next 300 pages, or up to the end of Vol II, of War and Peace while at the shore in June. My reading has languished a bit since, so this is an effort to get back to where I left it.

In this phase of the book, it’s possible to begin fixing on a favorite character, or at least to see who is likely to emerge as the major focus. Andrei Bolkonsky’s experiences in the war are compelling, particularly the scene where he contemplates the freedom of the open sky. It’s right before he loses consciousness after being nearly killed; he goes missing for a while afterwards, so it’s clearly a moment when something happens to him, something which a later language would allow us to recognize as existential. For a moment Andrei sees himself as utterly detached from whatever Andrei Bolkonsky is. For a moment he’s part of a picture that simply includes him, but is not about him. The sky becomes the center of the universe, or at least its most telling expression.

Much as Andrei comes forward as a figure of greater interest -- shortly after he accepts the notion that ‘our life is over . . . he had to live his life without doing evil, without anxiety, and without wishing for anything,’ he becomes engaged, but with no betrothal announced, to Natasha Rostov. Indeed, Natasha emerges as the major female character; in her mid teens, she’s becoming the woman who must find a marriage partner, a task that will drive much of the plot of Volume II from Part Three onward. The Andrei-Natasha romance is odd in its detachment; Andrei’s father insists he wait a year and so he does; this culminates in Natasha finding herself swept off her feet by the novel’s foremost no-goodnik, Anatole Kuragin (we last saw him flirting outrageously with Marya Bolkonsky’s French female companion while ostensibly courting Marya). This little dalliance of Natasha gives us the kind of melodramatic flight of emotional hijinxs that is the stuff of much lesser novels, and which Tolstoy handles with his characteristic ability to make everything seem just so. He doesn’t play it up for big effects; he doesn’t go all purple. He doesn’t get sly and snarky as our writers today do, as if emotional depths are a thing of the past and everyone knows they’re just trying to be in a movie. For Tolstoy there are no movies, just opera and drama. And even if Natasha feels as if she’s in a play, she is anyway.

Part of my lack of complete involvement with this novel has to do not with the usual concern with the ongoing quest for a suitable partner in a young lady’s life, but with the lack of anything of a more involving nature to set against that. It becomes clear that we’re supposed to take an interest in Pierre: he inherited all that wealth, made a bad match to a supreme beauty who is unfaithful to him, gets caught up for a time with the Masons, only to see that most are simply play-acting when it comes to the more metaphysical significance of the sect, that for most it's simply an exclusive club they want to be admitted to. Pierre is a ditherer; he behaves well in trying to foil the dastardly (but very hot, presumably) Anatole (Pierre’s brother-in-law, which is to say, the brother of Pierre’s steely, selfish, preening wife), but that seems to be the next plot point. Will Pierre too fall under the spell of the ever eligible Natasha? Tune in next week to see.

To give the Count his due: Volume II ends with Pierre, having comforted the distraught Natasha, seeing the comet of the year 1812 above in (again) the sky: 'It seemed to Pierre that this star answered fully to what was in his softened and encouraged soul, now blossoming into new life.' The passage snaps into place with magisterial surety. It rounds out the long Volume with a feeling of the powers that be, but also with a sense that the characters are deluding themselves at every stage when they act as if they can see what’s coming and what it will mean.

I'm not sure I know what's coming either, but one thing for sure, it's not gonna be all good times for Napoleon.