THE PURR OF PLEASURE

Friday night the WHC showed Cat People (1942), the Val Lewton (prod.) and Jacques Tourneur (dir.) film that the gay inmate Molina memorably narrates early in Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman (a title reminiscent of the kind of noirish, uncanny melodramas Lewton and Tourneur specialized in). At the screening, the film provoked many collective belly-laughs of glee, particularly from the female spectators. The film's kitsch features, its love-triangle manipulations, its memorably corny lines -- like "These things are simple for a psychiatrist" -- seemed to beg for arch commentary and combined to override any darker sense the film possessed.

In his opening remarks, Art History professor Alexander Nemerov spoke of his admiration of the film's beauty, but without any mention of its camp appeal, and without going into detail about the visual features that give the film its lasting appeal (it was a big grossing film for little RKO during the war): the opening shot of the panther in the cage with the shadows of the bars stretching across the cement, Alice's tense walk through light and dark, from street lamp to street lamp, in the pursuit scene, the lyrical rain then snow falling backlit in the windows, the fog into which Irena departs at the end, and always the shadows: the balustrades, the bannisters, the jalousies, the rippling water on the wall in the pool scene, and the silhouettes on walls -- the "cat" itself that Irena becomes is more often than not a shadow on a wall rather than a shape -- that seem, in German Expressionist fashion, to enact the story in dark mime. All created atmosphere galore and, as I noticed with an atmospheric film like The Others, that tension sometimes provokes nervous giggles and laughs. I remember how a group of teens began watching that film with the glee of superior derision that became less and less sustainable as they were drawn into the story and, finally, frightened. But no one was frightened at Cat People, its dialogue and acting were too firmly entrenched in the B moviedom that we enjoy, but never take seriously.

So what of the pleasure one finds in the film? Does it make it art, or not? To cite my friend Andrew, citing Louis Menand: "Art and literature are a means of providing a particular and complex kind of pleasure—and nothing more." One could say that, while CP provides pleasure, it does not provide "a particular and complex kind of pleasure." The pleasure, in part, derives from our superiority to the material, a superiority tempered by admiration at times -- how much they did with so little: the artistry of film, of image, lighting, pacing, but not of an artistic whole that truly challenges us.

But that dismissal of CP's pleasure as "not complex," may itself not be complex enough. The film can never quite lose its aura of generic product -- and so, while it never strikes us as wholly unique and original (our hero is simply too bland in the tried-and-true manner of so many wooden B-movie leads, and his realist gal Friday and ultimate paramour Alice just too breezily familiar), it does ask for a more complex response than it may have had in its own day. If only because our distance from the '40s is palpable, and its generic products, if they still have something to offer us (besides the easy nostalgia for an era we never lived through), conjure a cultural nexis we want to participate in. As one grandfatherly gent said to the youngsters seated against the wall in the back (during an impromptu intermission afforded by the film breaking -- how matinee-like!), "this was scarier in the '40s."

Yes, and like many movies that caught my attention when I was a child, CP can claim a residual suspense recalled from some early viewing when creepiness lurked simply in the threat of what horror might yet be revealed. But if so, then it couldn't have been art, however "good" as a viewing experience. Joyce's Stephen says that art cannot inspire fear -- a kinetic emotion, inimical to aesthetic contemplation. True enough, and because CP is no longer scary, then that means our admiration must be aesthetic. Yes, but it's a suitably postmodern admiration which finds its pleasure afforded by a pastiche of generic kitschy melodrama and generic kitschy horror story (one imagines Ed Wood looking on in ecstasy) transformed by truly artistic mise-en-scène, the glory of so many '40s films.

DELIGHT ME

The real basis of art, I've decided, is delight. Some might say it has more to do with profundity and point to some grand moral achievement, but I think that where art goes wrong, when it tries to be "heart-breaking" or "passionate" or "moving" or to "provoke thought" or proclaim "a message," is that it mistakes the reason we turn to art. It isn't to be shaken by the pain and suffering of the human condition -- for God's sake, the human condition itself displays quite enough of THAT. Look at Katrina, look at Iraq, look at Dafur... No, the news can show us a world that is heart-breaking and moving, if we care enough to be moved. What art shows us is the human capacity to rise above not only suffering (after all, it's life and life only), but above all the bullshit of what, supposedly, it means to be human and moral and fallible and fallen and in need of saving. Art shows us a world controlled by human skill, wit, resourcefulness, resilience -- yes of course that includes pain and suffering, but no one admires Van Gogh paintings because a suffering human made them, but because a supremely gifted draftsman made them. Vincent's talent simply over-rode the mess that was Vincent. That's what inspires us.

And think about the great tragedies for a moment: I'm in complete agreement with the glib and oily Alan Alda character in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors when he says that Oedipus' situation in Oedipus Rex is hilarious. The irony of it is truly Olympian, and the dialogue between Oedipus and Tiresias is vastly entertaining. It's only terrifying if you, the viewer, wish to walk away with a moral about fate, a "do" or "don't" so as to escape Oedipus' tragedy. As the factotum in Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa says to Isak Dinensen (Meryl Streep): "God is happy, sabu, he plays with us." That is the Olympian outlook and it's what you find in Hamlet -- the playwright devises a mousetrap in which everyone is caught, in which everyone dies, and the delight of the language lets us know that what's at stake is a theatrical response to life. Only the groundlings worried about whether ghosts really walk and whether or not there's a purgatory need to take seriously the metaphysics of the story. And, as I was made aware for the first time while watching Peter Brook's gloomy 1970 version with Paul Scofield in the lead, the Olympian touch in King Lear is the irony -- the delight -- in making a British audience have to root for Cordelia and FRANCE! Such are the digs in the side from a great artist, such is his knowing wink at all we hold dear.

The idea of delight occurred to me while watching two films recently: Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog (1949) and Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006). Neither is a great film, but both manipulate their material so much that you are forced to consider what the film-maker is doing to you -- and the answer is: toying. In Kurosawa there are touches that made me laugh aloud, a short gasp of delight, as when he slows down everything in getting the girl to the phone while the detective hangs by a thread on the other end of the line, or when he has the woman stop playing the piano at the sound of a gunshot, look out the window at the antagonists, then resume playing, or when he displays the fortuitous construction that brings about the detective's shooting. We're in the hands of a master making the most of the material, maintaining its taut suspense but at the same time winking at us, inviting us to enjoy our own fear and unease. Many find this kind of thing in Hitchcock, I rarely do. Hitch is much too hammer-handed for the subtlety that delights me in these moments.

In Scorsese's film I found little delight in anything the characters did or said. All that testosterone-heavy, homophobic banter which "plays" with homoeroticism (as when Jack says, "give him a whiff of my ass and he'll crawl right up it," only to have his girlfriend point out that it might be such metaphors and not herself that is giving Jack a hard-on) gets tedious, if only because there's nothing new in it. And that both "snitches" (the cop as criminal and the criminal as cop) should have sex with the same girl is so manipulative as to be funny unintentionally (I suppose) -- though I think it's meant to show that, in love as in war, we never really know which side the other is on and all of us are out for ourselves. Indeed, there is an Olympian playfulness along the lines of Hamlet in the fact that all "the rats" end up dead, but it felt a bit too deus ex machina and not nearly nimble enough. No, where I found the Olympian touch was in Marty's use of music: "Gimme Shelter" playing when Jack comes into the diner where he will begin the process of taking Matt Damon's character under his wing; "Let It Loose" playing when Jack and Leo DiCaprio first meet in a bar ("who's that woman at the bar/all dressed up to do me harm?"), a brief shot of Badfinger's "Baby Blue" (I forget exactly where in the film, but it drilled me). Like the use of Donovan's "Atlantis" or the "Layla" coda or "Can't You Hear Me Knockin'" or "Jump into the Fire" in Goodfellas, the choice of soundtrack was more than inspired, it was a wink, a point made.

The musical moment that scored most heavily for me, in The Departed, was the scene when Leo seduces Matt's girl -- the song is Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb," but it's not Pink Floyd. As I listened I realized it could only be Van Morrison singing -- the moment brought tears to my eyes like the time, first hearing "E-Bow the Letter," I realized that the voice accompanying Michael Stipe's was Patti Smith's. The emotion comes no doubt from "the recognition," but also from the intrusion of an unexpected emotion into music, Pink Floyd's, R.E.M.'s, I thought I knew. Don't get me wrong, the Olympian touch can sometimes be touching ("in the very temple of delight/ Dame Melancholy hath her sov'reign shrine" after all) -- but even then it has a lurking "gotcha" element like the look on Jack's face when he sneaks up behind a jittery Leo to get a light from Ray Winstone.

Ay, "the play's the thing, wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king" -- every viewer/reader is the king in that phrase, every artist the "I" -- and it's all about the delight in play.

THE CULT OF CLIO

Our historical being is part of our present. It is that part of our present--namely, the part that belongs to history--that we cannot fully understand, since it requires us to understand ourselves not only as objects of historical forces but as subjects of our own historical understanding.--J. M. Coetzee, "What is a Classic?"

Anthony Grafton's second Tanner lecture Thursday was more closely focused on history, his own field, rather than the humanities more generally. The upshot of it was that his generation of historians have done a pretty good job of training historians with a grasp of the value of archival research. But the aside that had most relevance to me was when he spoke of two kinds of historical writing: the large sweeping accounts for a general readership, and the fine-tuning and solving of more minute historical issues for specialists in the field.

No matter how amusing Grafton's snipes at public discourse, and regardless of how warranted his statement that the misuse and abuse of history in various forms of journalism constitutes a willed ignorance of the past, it was at every moment clear that he was an academic speaking to academics, that his professional standing has nothing to do with public accountability because the public, gratifyingly -- particularly in private institutions -- has no voice in the classroom, its simplifications no place in the curriculum, and that most pundits would likely fail a course in the subjects they so glibly summarize for "public knowledge" -- a phrase that strikes one as having a kind of oxymoronic ring to it. Grafton stood before us as one who has scaled the ivied walls of serious scholarship -- writing a book on the footnote that sold well, as academic books go, is no mean feat -- but he seemed frustrated at not having a scheme for how to make history more generally relevant to the world at large.

A student in the audience, in the question section, posed the idea that, as the physical sciences have found a bogeyman in intelligent design that gives them a ready-made soapbox to expound upon, so must the historians find a cause célèbre to give them more cultural clout. Grafton suggested as bogeyman a statement that the U.S. must "bring the Reformation" to Iraq. For Grafton the unintelligibility of the statement was linked to some ill-formulated idea of what the Reformation actually was and what it did. It struck me that there was more common cause with the creationist outlook than might immediately appear. On the one hand, a fundamentalism that the West finds outmoded (Islam) must be "reformed" in the interest of progressive Protestant values that lead to a more secular and intellectual approach to the world -- our Germanic values, in other words, out of which the modern university and its seminar system evolves -- but on the other hand, we see a limit to that secular investigation of the world when a virulent Protestant fundamentalism asserts one ancient text above every previous and subsequent event.

The point for Grafton's lectures, it seems to me, arrives there: by losing touch with larger public discourse, the academicians miss the chance to provide the overarching narratives by which the world at large -- or at least its reasonably educated portion -- understands itself. Wisely, the historians of the day refrain from the kind of speculative history that at least one German -- Oswald Spengler -- was famous for, but I can't help wondering if Grafton's repeated point that only historians from Britain or trained in Britain seem to have the scope for the large epic account of history has something to do with a last vestige of Imperial British thought finding expression in explaining the world it has ceased to direct. Perhaps it could be only a chastened U.S. that would care enough about history to learn from it.

The lines from Coetzee leapt at me from an essay I read Friday. He lucidly presents the problem that Grafton was grappling with: it's hard enough for a historian to convince readers that we are the objects of historical forces because the job of delineating those forces is so difficult and complex (and our media rejects complexity and refuses to remember more than twenty years back). But the task of showing how we are the subjects of our historical understandings is even more vexed, and so even more crucial. Because without some sense of history we have no idea of what we are, and so we have no coherence or consistency, and if the task of a certain kind of critical history has been to show us that our historical understanding is shallow, specious or false, that gives some an incentive to do without historical understanding or to make what little we know the be-all and end-all of the question.

Even those gifted in the cult of Clio like Grafton may find themselves at a loss when they have to account for themselves as historical subjects so distantly on the sidelines of a U.S. war, unlike that generation of historians Grafton cited for whom WWII was an education and an occasion to educate. No doubt certain historical forces might be found to explain that difference.

PAUVRE ARTHUR

Tantalizing as the fugitive odor
of flowers you smell but don't see,
he stuck his tongue out at you up ahead
on the road you only get to run once.

Already you've forgotten the readymade shack
where you found him, laundered his clothes
while he slept, touched him gently
and he didn't even notice, the dunce!

He was always too drunk to assay
the walls shielding your desire, hands
propping head on a table-top, his pout
a caress to put serving-girls at ease.

You know you'll never make him out:
a gifted idiot enchanted by vocabulary,
eyes of cornflower blue, wide and dazed,
wiry hair waving like a flame in the breeze.

A providential haywagon's coming your way,
shambling through the Provençal fields,
dew radiant at dawn. You start, amazed
he's beside you, crumpled like a spent rind.

It's your chance to escape, to shrug off
a few clinging images: his bloody razor,
dirty nails, open mouth oozing purple drool,
the savage glance that lacerates the heart.

Go through his pockets before you depart,
regard the curios he saved from hell: paper boat,
ocarina, dead louse, the scarf of mauve,
chartreuse and indigo that surged at his throat.

The time has come to leave him behind,
his shadow will overtake you if you tarry,
though you know the magic spite of all he said
binds you to him like the briar to the rose.

It's no use. You must carry him upon your back
like a farmer shouldering autumn's yield,
trudging roads hot as the Inferno's harsh sands,
knave and duke, magistrate and fool.
--DB, 1997

For Rimbaud's birthday (Oct. 20, 1854)

THE IVORY BUNKER

Today Anthony Grafton, a scholar from Princeton -- a "Renaissance man" in the sense of a specialist in the Renaissance, but also in the sense of a humanist of the old school, the kind of mind that one has in mind when one uses the word "scholar" -- gave the first of his two Tanner Lectures at Yale. The upshot of the talk -- and he had graphs to prove it -- was that the humanities have greatly declined in numbers and importance from 1915 to 1995 (the years of the graphs), and that is due not so much to the importance placed on the hard sciences in our tech-happy world, but rather to the fact that the "social sciences" have taken over as the "new humanities." This is all too true and is reflected in the fact that linguistics, the study of speech as spoken and used, is the real basis of any anthropological sense of language, not literature which has always been specialized and in some sense elite. Add to this, as Grafton pointed out, that "the arts" pick up the slack of the creative side of things -- creative writing grows as literary studies doth shrink -- and you have no perceived need for those fussy antiquarians so fetishistic about the past, and, at that, not even the past of how people conducted themselves, did business and fought and loved and begat, but rather the past of how people controlled language in texts, creating fictional analogs of the world we are all so busily concerned with -- replicas, emblems, allegories, fictions, fables, mere words, words, words -- never facts, never things, barely even commodities!

Interesting though was the major focus of Grafton's talk: the '40s and Erich Auerbach holding a seminar at Princeton at the invitation of R. P. Blackmur, to an assembled body of 30 that included the likes of Irwin Panofsky, Ernst Curtius, Christian Gauss, Robert Fitzgerald, John Berryman, and Delmore Schwartz. In other words, the cream of a certain humanist sense of the value of discussing texts as Literature, as representative expressions in a tradition made coherent not by any inner law but by the hindsight of a present that claims it as formative, necessary, conditional, inspiring, worth mastering. As was clear from Grafton's remarks (if it isn't clear from your own exposure to the contemporary world and the college curriculum), that sense of the tradition is gone, maintained only by that shrinking posse of scholars for whom the past is the basis of what we are, in any age.

But how many of those assembled humanists listening to him "gave a fig" (to use Grafton's antiquated expression) for Auerbach, Blackmur and "the good old days"? I don't just mean were they concerned as scholars, were they challenged as intellectuals -- I mean, did the scene that Grafton recreated, only a little tongue-in-cheek, engage them as a reality? The point of the question, it seems to me, is that the undercurrent of much of Grafton's comments suggests that the humanities can only exist as a viable field if its reality can still engage minds and inspire imaginations. To vary Van Morrison's "did ye get healed": did they get inspired?

Granted, Grafton's example was one that would speak to me: Blackmur had no educational degrees whatsoever and yet got tenure at Princeton. He simply immersed himself in literature and to hell with schooling as such. A man after my own heart and, indeed, when I was in my early twenties, not yet a college student, reading a memoir of Berryman written by his first wife, I was certainly inspired by the sense of he and Blackmur as creative figures in a world of pedantry, as men who took literature seriously not as "a field of study," but as a way of life. Perhaps that promoted Princeton as my own destination in graduate school -- a sense of those glory days when such colloquy was possible. Of course I never encountered it during my time there, but that was due no doubt to the "professionalization" that was so much a part of what we were supposed to be doing, what we should become. But my question here is: was Grafton today articulating anything more than a fond dream of what once was -- and can such a nostalgia trip be received today in any way other than politically, as a way of wanting to go back to the tower where only white men -- preferably of Germanic or Anglo-Saxon or Celtic origin -- were admitted (though, as Grafton reminded us, Blackmur did also bring Jews to Princeton such as Schwartz and Saul Bellow)?

In his talk, Grafton took a potshot at literary theory as a knife sharpened on both ends that was wielded to, in effect, cut off the branch its practitioners were sitting on. Indeed, that insight occurred to me in Princeton when I perceived that the academic job market cared little for such niceties and was only desperately trying to meet the new need for multicultural plurality as, in fact, the last, best new field for the humanities: literature of "peoples" rather than literature of displaced exiles who can only find common ground in the ivory bunker that keeps the chaotic modern world at bay.

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could sit simply in that room again
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I'd give it all gladly, if our lives could be like that--Bob Dylan, 1962

DRINKING WITH NIETZSCHE

He always brought along his own wine.
Only his own vine could provide
the wine he would drink. "Fred,"
I said, "your values are so old, yet
you're always jawing about 'we moderns.'
I smell a fault." His laughter, so
joyful when he let it go, golden and free,
reproached me for seeing paradox
as inconsistency. "Truly," he said,
eyes moist, "I am greeker than the Greeks.
Who was it who treated wine in so
antithetic a manner that, since him,
it has become undrinkable?" Raising
his glass, half toast, half consecration,
he drained it to the dregs. "Ahh,"
he said, wiping with a wrist those wide
and famous walrus whiskers, "then too,
I am still too German, drinking
the finest delicacies as though so much
bürgerliches Bier. We moderns," now
eyeing me closely, "what do we care
for French aesthetics, English manners
and sensitive souls? We are barbarians
inside and out." He coughed, clearing
his throat of excess phlegm. I smiled.
Already his comments were almost drowned
under the tide of amplified sound
emanating from the jukebox. "Even popular
music is art to us," he added, face pensive,
eyes distant and clear, "Dionysus has
many avatars, not all of them Epigoni."
--DB, 1996

For Nietzsche's Birthday (Oct. 15, 1844)

SUMMER MUMMERS

Today had the flair of Indian Summer, a mildness that set aside all the woodsmoke, cider, carved pumpkin associations that were starting to assert themselves with those heavier skies and colder mornings of October. It was a day for parading, hard to stay indoors. Everything conspired to wrench even inveterate misanthropes from their melancholic dispositions. Wander out the last days of the long summer, the sun said, go. "And I'll start back at the world's end" -- the final line on Bobby D's latest -- echoed with the beguiling possibility of no reason to tarry, no stay to the trek.

What I wandered to was a reading on campus. An unusual event featuring some of the writers who teach in the Writing Concentration at Yale: John Crowley (fiction), Anne Fadiman (personal essay), Louise Glück (poetry), John Hollander (poetry), J. D. McClatchy (poetry), Fred Strebeigh (non-fiction). Diverse as was the assembled array, there were some similarities in approach -- both Crowley and Strebeigh wrote of down-home types: Crowley's a strangely gnomic would-be author who mainly writes for the company newsletter, but finds himself launched on a precarious tale in the voice of a more high-flown, and possibly female, persona called Pax; Strebeigh's a real Batman/Robin-like team who free stranded whales trapped in the lines of laconic fishermen. The poets and Fadiman all tended to delineate a persona that each piece assumed and then articulated in the writer's characteristic voice: in Fadiman, a self-aware version of herself, characterizing her owl nature, a tendency to stay up all hours in search of le mot just enough; in Glück, a meditative voice, not necessarily the poet herself (she claimed the voice was more discursive than her norm), but still tuned to the brittle whine of her cadence and anchored to her deft images -- the one that stayed with me most was of the moon appearing as if it might cause things to grow (which complimented nicely the celebration of the writer's nocturnal habitus in Fadiman); in McClatchy, as ever, a suave, prehensile line that seizes on bits of playful phrasing to weave an errant charm (a phrase playfully aimed to recall his evocation of "er" -- as hesitation, as character in Plato, as mortal would-be metamorphosed into an er-rand bird), and in Hollander, who I usually fine irascibly pompous, with an erudition more facile than fastidious (he knows his stuff but all that stuff, in his readings, glimmers and clamours, overwhelming any keener, wiser, less exhibitionistic voice his verse could manifest) the personal blended seamlessly into a "prosaic translation" of du Bellay's great and famous sonnet of Odysseus and Jason returned from fabled haunts to a prosaic nostos -- in Hollander, the prosaicness -- of Amsterdam and Broadway, of Central Park, of the Palisades, all in the time of the poet's boyhood -- rose perhaps too magisterially in over-extended comparison to other real places made fabled by long association (Cézanne's Mont St.-Victoire for instance), but evoked so nostalgically the sense of the seen forever though never to be seen again that I was thoroughly convinced by, for once then, something.

As Buck said of Kinch: the loveliest mummer of them all.

BILL THE BARD

One of my tasks, most Autumns, is the grading of exams and essays on Shakespeare's plays. In fact, it's become so much a part of fall that it seems somehow fitting. I realize why that is. While grading I tend to listen to the music of my middle school and HS years, the years when I first read and re-read the major tragedies while otherwise inundated by Brit prog rock -- that I later excerpted on tapes for my daughter in her middle school and HS years, tapes called "Miscellanies" and designed, basically, to celebrate the rock music that I associate with fall and British folk influence -- Jethro Tull, Procol Harum, Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, King Crimson, Yes -- twisted and wigged-out as some of that music may be through classical posturings. But that's ok too, because sometimes while grading I have recourse to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mussorgsky's "Pictures," music that I also soaked up (in small doses) during my teen years. Shakespeare, after all, has always been a British folk influence for me and a "classical" taste, as well as, like the shrinking days of fall and the changing leaves, an atmosphere that is the very essence of poetry, at least as conceived by my adolescence.

Even in the halting, lax, dull, awkward and occasionally effective prose of these kids, the greatness that is Shakespeare shines through. The majesty of the language, certainly, but also the nimbleness of all his stage business and busy plots. What an arrant knave it is. Reading the students' essays and answers I recall 11th grade and practically memorizing Macbeth through repeated listenings to an audio tape I'd made of a TV production (with Eric Porter and Janet Suzman--the best Lady Macbeth I've ever seen) and my own enactments of the soliloquies. I also recall my effort to do justice to the sublime tragedies in a 12th grade essay (strange to say, I never wrote a word on the Bard in college). And trying as the task of correcting, commenting, evaluating and assigning a grade is, I feel somehow that it is indeed most meet that the collegiates of the 21st century should have to bend their respective wits upon honest Will's verbiage, for what else have we got but his spell, his way of asserting, as gloomy Bloom hath said, the very quick of what humanity is in its wit and trials and words that must give voice to despair and outrage or else conjure it away.

But soft, 'tis done, the regal strains of "Grand Hotel" have left the air again a deprived silence and the pen of comment has dropped, its task complete. Let there be more light.

WHAT I READ ON MY SUMMER VACATION, 3

Everybody's Bohemia

During the summer I read two books whose central arguments combined to illuminate to some degree "the current situation." The first, Malcolm Cowley's The Exile's Return (first published in 1934, then a revised edition in 1951), is an account of his generation -- famously called, by Gertrude Stein, the "lost generation" -- who were born in the 1890s and 1900s. As Cowley describes them, they went to college and then served in WWI; many of his friends, literary types, were, like Hemingway and Cummings, ambulance drivers or served in non-combative capacities. After the war, they soaked up Parisian bohemia, a long-standing tradition of cultivated people living in reduced straits for the sake of a romantic dream of the creative life, then went back to New York and found work reviewing books and writing books and working in advertising. What he makes clear is that the kind of intelligentsia his crew represented was a newer Grub Street -- they were making their way as professionals of printed copy -- but they had, thanks to their glimpse of bohemia, developed avant-garde pretensions. One of the more amusing moments in the book is when Cowley lays out the history of bohemia as an ethos with very specific "rules" for belonging: one of the most enduring being the sense of a willful separation from the mainstream. But as Cowley points out, while bohemians might claim they're slumming for the sake of art, most are just hangers-on in search of the thrill of the unusual. Those like him in "the new Grub Street" might believe in their ability to make art, but they're actually too busy being the time's equivalent of yuppies. They set a smart-set intellectual tone, but they don't -- but for the extremely gifted oddballs among them (Hart Crane gets a chapter to himself: "The Roaring Boy") -- ever get around to producing that elusive masterpiece.

The book that in some ways furthered this idea for me was Stuart Hobbs's historical account of The End of the American Avant-Garde (1997), a book which looks at the situation that pertains after WWII because for a brief time New York was able to sustain not just a colorful bohemia of "alternate lifestyles" and creative behavior, but an actual artistic avant-garde that had its roots in the period Cowley was knocking around in (the time when some Dadaists fled the Europe of WWI and took up in New York) and continued through the WPA and into twin apotheoses in 1) the abstract expressionist painters who for a time defined modern art, and 2) the "beat" (or what Mailer calls "the hipster") fulfillment of the long-standing bohemian strain of literature -- and its other versions as well: Black Mountain, the New York school, and so on. In other words, the late '40s-late '50s achieved a certain status for "the outsider" as a mainstay of whatever art in America could or would be. And there was still a New York intelligentsia of sorts to sustain it through praise and rebuke. Something to go up against, in other words.

What kills the avant-garde? The same thing that kills bohemia. Success. The proliferation of bohemias and avant-gardes through the lens of the various kinds of media attention they receive, not the least of which is the academic media. Think only of someone like Dylan who ambles in as the "great unwashed" arriviste in the folk-purist bohemia that still exists in early '60s NYC (as if the Depression and the FDR liberal dream that might almost become socialism were still the latest thing), conquers it and, in a matter of years, becomes an electrified hipster riding the currents of youth culture adulation into big bucks and media overkill and "the future of rock" post-Beatles.

Whither goeth bohemia and grub street and the avant-garde after its last flourishing in the "drop-out culture" of communal free love apostles, hawkers of Zen, and psychedelic savants? Into academia, where the barely ekeing a living professionals are now found in the interminable Grub Street of graduate school and adjunct faculty posts, while the avant-garde are the various hot property academic stars dispensing their idiosyncratic forms of theory and cultural crit within an ivory tower consecrated to what modernism hath wrought and postmodernism hath brought, and where the bohemian is bound to be found in one of the "programs of study" -- women studies, regional studies, marxists studies, hyphenated-american studies, media studies, creative writing -- that have proliferated en academe since the '90s the way New Age bookstores and headshops proliferated in the gently gentrified "ethnic" quarters of many cities in the '70s.

But what of the "real avant-garde"? Most of their most prominent denizens have at least one foot in the educational system or in mainstream media. In the world of the merger and conglomerate everyone's more or less getting their funding from those sources that fund "that sort of thing" -- supported by "patrons" who have collective identities like AT&T or Getty or Mobil -- where avant-garde starts to mean: celebrated, but doesn't sell (or won't "sell out," but...). And "the real bohemians" are simply the youth underclass (and those perennially young at heart) working dead-end jobs -- with irony! -- while sporting a tonsorial or sartorial style that has yet to make the walkways. Living not for art so much as for the freedom to be a cult of one. And where -- Grub Streeter, avant-gardist, bohemian -- do we meet? In the cyber café on the internet, and it's like, y'know, totally global.

STONED

I been Rolling Stoned and Beatled till I'm blind--Paul Simon, 1968

Sitting in Book Trader, my favorite lunch-time haunt, consuming a Jane Rare (rare roast beef with feta/horseradish sauce and arugula on a ciabatta roll--them's good eatin'), I heard a coffee jockey behind the counter complain that all the radio stations play The Rolling Stones. Whoa, hold on there, jr., what the hell's wrong with that?

Let me just go on the record: if it weren't for The Rolling Stones (the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world, 1968-78), I wouldn't even know what rock'n'roll IS. I don't just mean the musical genre, I mean rock and roll. It's thanks to Mick and de Boyz that shy ex-Catholic boys from the insipid suburbs (comme moi) have at least a clue as to what rock is for! And it ain't the Pony or the Stroll or the Twist or the Frug, kids! It's for, to give it the most politically correct omnisex valiance, the mutual friction of reciprocal body parts. And the Stones kept the rhythm and blues in the music they stole away from all those black belters and bluesmen, they kept the funk and the juice and the balls and the strut and the butt and the whole randy, raunchy allure of gutter-trash with attitude.

It's been said of course every imaginable way that the Other Major Band of the Brit Invasion were the nice guys -- which is to say, earnest peddlers of ditties with harmonies -- but the Stones alone kept rock in touch with its roots. The closest The Beatles ever got to such grit was in songs like "Helter Skelter" and "Why Don't We Do It In the Road" (not exactly their best known stuff), and Ray Davies -- "not the world's most physical guy" -- never, after the brash horniness of "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All Night," even comes close to a romp. Ditto Townshend, who was too cerebral, and didn't mind the other guys dancin' with his girl. And the Lizard King just didn't have the wit, though he sure had the mojo. And frankly I've never been able to accept Plant's banshee wail as the proper mating call, and, for all my awed admiration of Bonzo Bonham's galloping rhino beat, it's not exactly the pace I'm likely to go, no and not even, God rest him in sainted majesty above, the incomparable lunatic fills of the mighty Moon -- no, for my money it's Charlie Watts "with a backbeat narrow and hard to master" (as Jimbo himself coined the phrase -- want to hear what I mean? check out "Street Fightin' Man" on Ya Ya's) that gives it the groove that proves something.

And no other worthies have delivered so much that puts us in touch with that sweet mystery -- none of them give us the feel of the hots ("I salivate like a Pavlov's dog"), the glums ("have to turn my head until my darkness goes"), the flirting ("she liked the way I held the microphone"), the coo ("let's go home and draw the curtains"), the rut ("If you want to push and pull with me all night"), the thrill ("how come you taste so good"), the sweet ("she comes in colors"), the hurt ("when all your love's in vain"), the swagger ("she's under my thumb"), the need ("I am just livin' to be lyin' by your side"), the brag ("bet your mother never heard you scream like that") and the release ("come all over me"). And Jagger isn't without his lyricism and vulnerability -- "Wild Horses," "As Tears Go By," "Angie," "I Got the Blues" and don't miss his repeated "I ain't in love"s on "Let It Loose" -- even Keith can get in the act in what is one of my favorite pining "for a little mo'" songs, "You Got the Silver."

I'll admit that their era of saying something more than I'm horny was short-lived, but they were no slouches there either, for it produced "Satisfaction," "Get Off My Cloud," "Mother's Little Helper," "2000 Man," "Sympathy for the Devil," "Street Fighting Man," "You Can't Always Get What You Want," and -- which I regard as the pinnacle -- "Moonlight Mile." These guys should never vanish from the airwaves, in fact no day should go by on a so-called rock station when they aren't played -- it's just that the erstwhile programmers should dip a bit deeper into the bag and pull out and dust off the gems long unplayed. Give 'em a dose of "Monkey Man" I say, and the devil (pleased to meet you) take the hindmost. Please, drive him home.

URBAN VISIONS

The weekend began with a viewing at the WHC of Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967), a film that satirizes modernity but which now plays like a valentine to the modernist city as envisioned by the '60s. Remember Kubrick's "futuristic" 2001 sets -- how they now simply look like the '60s at its most "mod"? The same is happening here -- structures are all glass, which lets Tati have much fun with "inside/outside" bits, featuring as well the tableau nature of life behind picture windows. There are many purely visual jokes -- like the glass door that, shattered, leaves only a knob for the doorman to operate, swinging it "open" for guests at the posh restaurant where the majority of the film takes place, and where "all hell" breaks loose in various ways, but no amount of delineating the hi-jinx will help you get a handle on it, because the raison d'être of this film is the amazing overlapping choreography of countless 'background' players, of layers of action happening in any given scene, none of which adds up to much except a series of sight gags and visual double entendres ("double voires"? -- seen in more than one way?) as when a man washing a window moves it thus causing the ladies in the bus reflected in it to swivel and ooooh as if in a amusement park ride. Or when glass doors for a moment "reflect" famous Parisian sights (the Tour Eiffel) and then, just to make sure we're awake, the Taj Mahal.

In the midst of all this, some times, is Tati's Mr. Hulot, a tall, rambling middle-aged gent who moves with an odd locomotion that would be at home in an animated film. Indeed, most of his scenes play like cartoon "black-outs," as when Hulot, in a case of mistaken identity, gets ragged on by the campy Germanic manager of the "Slam Doors in Golden Silence" display (the segments of "market fair" -- displays of innovative commodities -- is just generally hilarious), or when Hulot tries to track down a peripatetic employee in an office space that seems like Kafka meets Chaplin -- and if that suggests something truly striking to you, then you're getting the idea. That segment of officedom was to me worth much of the restaurant routine but the latter ultimately convinces like any shaggy-dog story, "where's this going" doesn't matter any more. We're there and there we stay.

The graceful, clean, chaotic but choreographed world of Tati came to mind during my other weekend encounter: me, Mr. Hulot-like, in the modern metropolis, in this case NYC, trying to get to Brooklyn and back -- a task occurring in the midst of more chaotic comings-and-goings and not arrivings (the 4 or 5 train f'r instance) than Tati's hero ever faced. And the setting! Tati has the restaurant ceiling begin to fall in at one point, permitting the laughable Fatty Arbuncle-like character to maitre d' his own "private bistro" behind the lattice-work wood that has dropped down, but what would he do with the Gotterdammerung that is the NYC subway system? I'm constantly, out-of-town rube that I am, amazed at the sheer variety of denizen of the underground where we all crawl about as if a species of rodent spared by some apocalyptic Armageddon in the world above. The gleaming surfaces of Tati's futuristic fantasy of Paris have been smashed by the abused and begrimed urban overload of our day where, even when it puts forward its 21st century élan, any number of overlays of earlier urban construction clash and roister and rarely harmonize -- except to say "shop" "eat" "drink" "go" "don't go."

The concert I braved all this to attend (Elf Power at Union Hall in Park Slope) was energetic with the casual bravado of 6 or 7 musicians squeezed together in a space that looked about the size of my bedroom to play to a group of fans crammed into a space not quite double my living room. Under such circumstances, a rousing "20th Century Boy" was appreciated by this aging listener (I was in middle school in T. Rex's heyday and graduated HS the year both Elvis and Marc Bolan ceased to walk--though they might still float upon--the earth) as a tribute to the '70s era prog-glam rock from which EP takes its dominant impetus. (I realized later--it was Bolan's birthday!)

And Union Hall itself, with those floor-to-ceiling bookshelves upfront, giving a passerby the impression that grad-student anarchy has overwhelmed the Reading Room, is not so much an anachronism as it is a kind of 21st century version of the genteel past (the '30s or '40s maybe? when culture was the enclave of white guys who drank, smoked and caroused with other white guys in smoky, paneled libraries), in other words an inversion of the '60's vision of the 21st century. But you'll have to talk on that cell phone further down the block, buddy. Ok, doorman, give me my hat, raincoat and umbrella, it's time for me to lurch to the next stop on the line... a "tiki bar" in Manhattan?