THE NAIVE NOVELIST

By chance I happened to pick up, in the Bass Library, Jonathan Franzen's How To Be Alone (2002). The essays contained therein were all published or written before Franzen's big breakthrough with his third novel The Corrections (2001). It struck me that part of "the buzz" that surrounded that novel may in fact have been due to the kind of gauntlet thrown down in these essays, one of which, "Why Bother?", was published in Harper's in 1996 and took to task, in depressed terms, the state of fiction writing in late 20th century America. This passage, from another 1996 gripe called "Scavenging," gives you an idea of Franzen's long road to recovery:

"It's healthy to adjust to reality. It's healthy, recognizing that fiction such as Proust and Faulkner wrote is doomed, to interest yourself in the victorious technology, to fashion a niche for yourself in the new information order, to discard and then forget the values and methods of literary modernism which older readers are too distracted and demoralized to appreciate in your work and which younger readers, bred on television and educated in the new orthodoxy of identity politics and the reader's superiority to the text, are almost entirely deaf and blind to. It's healthy to stop giving yourself ulcers and migraines doing demanding work that may please a few harried peers but otherwise instills unease or outright resentment in would-be readers. It's healthy to cry uncle when your bone's about to break. Likewise healthy, almost by definition, to forget about death in order to live your life: healthy to settle for (and thereby participate in) your own marginalization as a writer, to accept as inevitable a shrinking audience, an ever-deteriorating relationship with the publishing conglomerates, a retreat into the special Protective Isolation Units that universities now provide for writers within the larger confines of their English departments (since otherwise the more numerous and ferocious lifers would eat the creative writers alive). Healthy to slacken your standards, to call 'great' what five years ago you might have called 'decent but nothing special.' Healthy, when you discover that your graduate writing students can't distinguish between 'lie' and 'lay' and have never read Jane Austen, not to rage and agitate but simply bite the bullet and do the necessary time-consuming teaching. Healthier yet not to worry about it -- to nod and smile in your workshop and let sleeping dogs lay, let the students discover Austen when Merchant and Ivory film her."

I'd be lying (laying?) if I said this passage didn't strike a chord. But even Franzen elsewhere allows that "confessions of doubt are widely referred to as 'whining'" -- and whine he does. And if that's not bad enough, the terms of the whining, in the Harper's piece, establish a degree of naïveté that's truly striking for someone with ambitions to write "the big social novel." Franzen's depression sends him off to seek therapeutic words from a sociologist who has studied people who read fiction and who makes him feel better when she tells him that "resistant readers" (who become readers without a parent mentoring their reading) often become writers because they need the kind of contact an imaginative world provides and which can't be found in the social world. Whew, Franzen more or less sighs, I thought it was just me! Could it be that there are other people who really need books more than they need television? Franzen's the kind of writer who makes a big deal about getting rid of his TV, so that he will start reading again. And now sociology has given him the grounds for seeing himself as "a socially isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world." And the live television audience applauds.

At times, you can sympathize with the guy: he clearly wants to be a "great writer" so bad, and, you know, our therapeutic society should have some kind of support group in place so he doesn't come down so hard. But since Franzen was born the same year as me, I have little patience with the degree of naïveté he's able to toss off as though a hard lesson learned after graduating college in 1981: "I hadn't heard the news about the social novel's death. I didn't know that Philip Roth had long ago [twenty years] performed the autopsy." Franzen's model, at the time, for an "uncompromising novel" that was a hit was also twenty years old: Catch-22. Ok, that would be bad enough, one thinks, lots of people graduate from college utterly clueless. But the essay in which this assessment appears, and which includes the food for thought provided by that sociologist, is published after Franzen has written and published novels that were supposedly, by his own estimation, on a par with Proust and Faulkner. Is such a thing possible? Is the problem here the flattened, trivial culture we've been living in since TV took over the world in the '60s, or is the problem that our writers are just as trivial as those non-readers? Could it be, Jonathan, to cite another of our contemporaries, Morrissey: "you just haven't earned it yet, baby"?

I haven't read Franzen's first two novels, but I did read his novel that "everyone" read. And it occurs to me that the reason everyone read it is because of the hype he had created for himself with these "woe-is-me, the serious novelist" essays. Everyone felt so bad for him, they read his next book. Finally he was recognized -- (does he desperately want "to communicate with a substantive imaginary world" or does he desperately want to be a famous part of a wider circle of imaginary worlds?) -- and even Oprah threw him a lifeline, just to show that even TV would recognize him (no hard feelings!), giving Franzen the supreme self-satisfaction of spurning the demon box!

The problem I have with these essays, besides how self-serving they are, is how little they seem to understand the history of the art form of which Franzen presumes himself to be a contemporary master. Nor, apparently, has he ever (before these essays, at least), given serious thought to the idea that "success" and "opposition" don't really go together, nor to the fact that most of the greatest practitioners of the novel in the twentieth century didn't exactly have a happy, celebrated, Harper's-enhanced time of it. But what galls me more, in the passage cited above, is the glib assessment of why serious readers aren't swarming all over his books to ferret out his meanings, wide-eyed and appreciative of his obvious cultural significance: "older readers are too distracted and demoralized to appreciate" the intricacies of his work -- and yet the academic appreciation, by those older and younger than Franzen, of truly great and complex works (many by people who didn't have televisions) continues apace: Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Proust, Faulkner... And though Franzen's grad students may not have read her, Austen has been known, in a given year, to outsell best-selling women's writers like Mary Higgins Clark. In other words, the great are not great until time has passed and they continue to be read and studied. Joyce, in his time, was mainly known by a coterie; when his book was deemed scandalous it attracted a larger readership (mostly disappointed, one suspects), and when it got canonized, it became the task of students to read and study and analyze it in perpetuity. Franzen wants it all: to be a celebrated modernist master in his own day, while reserving the right to gripe that his culture is too trivial to appreciate him.

Nothing in The Corrections convinces me that Franzen is someone to be read with the degree of attention he seems to feel is his due. Perhaps the point is that his first novels are more challenging than his third, that the success of The Corrections is due to the fact that he learned to "dumb down." Maybe so. If I get around to those other novels, I'll report back. But at this point I would simply offer this observation: a writer's agon is not with the non-readers of his own day. No one will ever convince someone not disposed to read a novel to read it. One can only "win" those who do read and it seems there are three strategies for this: One can enter a struggle with the greats who have marked the territory for serious accomplishment in one's chosen art and seek the same degree of esteem and respect. Or one can choose to ignore that challenge and write what the readers who buy and read books buy (according to Franzen, in 1994 John Grisham's The Chamber sold more than three million copies). Or one can write what one has to write, and the devil take the hindmost. Franzen seems to be groping, through the fogs of his own naïveté, ambition, disappointment, depression, and success to the third position. Good luck.

I hate my generation
I offer no apologies
I hate my generation, yeah
--Lowery/Hickman,"I Hate My Generation" (1996)

MARK, READER, MY CRY

Mark, Reader, my cry! Bend thy thoughts on the Sky,
And in midst of prosperity, know thou may'st die.
--Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

That passage, which appears on a tombstone in a Massachusetts graveyard in Pynchon's novel, came to mind whilst reading Philip Roth's novella Everyman (2006). The story of an aging man's perennial illnesses, unfolding after the initial scene of his burial, could be considered a downer, but, as ever with Roth, there's always something more. The pay-off, for me, is in how "every day" Everyman is: it could be anyone's story, given the Jewish New Jersey antecedents that are, as it were, the door by which most Roth characters enter the world. But because that local reality is reasonably clear to me to begin with -- as opposed, say, to Norwegians in Minnesota or Hispanics in California or Koreans in Illinois -- his books always seem familiar territory and, what's more, given how Jewish is New York intellectual life (if you came up in the '60s), there's always an enduring weight in the encounter with Roth. That fact might be what made me skeptical, no matter how much I admire the books themselves, of American Pastoral's Swede and The Human Stain's half-black passing for white. It's not that Roth can't "do" anything but Jewish, it's just that the baggage of that ethnicity in East Coast America is what he's saddled with and we expect him to heft it.

Which is all by way of saying that Everyman is not quite "everyman" if we meet that phrase with some sense of demographic ubiquity. Which is why, I think, the Pynchon lines are apropos: the real meaning behind the title is not that Roth's nameless everyman is an "everyman," so much that what befalls him will befall, mutatis mutandis, everyman. The book is a meditation on coming to the end of things. As the narrator observes at one point, as "everyman" watches his contemporaries succumb to death: "Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre."

So here's a passage that more or less sums up the main character's predicament. A point that, should we live long enough, we'll all get to:

"Even in his twenties, when he'd thought of himself as square, and on into his fifties, he'd had all the attention from women he could have wanted; from the time he entered art school it never stopped. It seemed as though he were destined for nothing else. But then something unforeseen happened, unforeseen and unpredictable: he had lived close to three quarters of a century, and the productive, active way of life was gone. He neither possessed the productive man's male allure nor was capable of germinating the masculine joys, and he tried not to long for them too much. On his own he had felt for a while that the missing component would somehow return to make him inviolable once again and reaffirm his mastery, that the entitlement mistakenly severed would be restored and he could resume where he'd left off only a few years before. But now it appeared that like any number of the elderly, he was in the process of becoming less and less and would have to see his aimless days through to the end as no more than what he was -- the aimless days and the uncertain nights and the impotently putting up with the physical deterioration and the terminal sadness and the waiting and waiting for nothing. This is how it works out, he thought, this is what you could not know."

Granted, this is definitely a prospect for everyman. And that too is as it should be, for Roth has ever been one to ruminate on those "masculine joys" and so, when those are gone, he's not likely to be one to offer the consolations of philosophy or religion -- his everyman does try to paint in old age, as he always wanted to but life got in the way, and though some are appreciative of his efforts, he himself realizes that the reason he didn't become an artist is that he isn't one. So, strike another consolation.

What then are the kind of joys that remain? Memory, mostly. But not of women, by and large, because the "serial husband" has too many regrets where those are concerned. And family, which he truly took joy in, becomes the parents already dead and the beloved older brother he allowed himself to envy, thus poisoning the relationship, on his side. His daughter is the one joy of his life, but even there the love is mainly pained by his worry for her, and by his guilt over the break with her mother. Even if it's not quite true that "hell is other people," it's certainly not true that heaven is. So, here's a glimpse of the masculine joy that stays with him:

"...it was still his beach and at the center of the circles in which his mind revolved when he remembered the best of boyhood. But how much time could a man spend remembering the best of boyhood? What about enjoying the best of old age? Or was the best of old age just that -- the longing for the best of boyhood, for the tubular sprout that was then his body and that rode the waves from way out where they began to build, rode them with his arms pointed like an arrowhead and the skinny rest of him following behind like the arrow's shaft, rode them all the way in to where his rib cage scraped against the tiny sharp pebbles and jagged clamshells and pulverized seashells at the edge of the shore and he hustled to his feet and hurriedly turned and went lurching through the low surf until it was knee high and deep enough for him to plunge in and begin swimming madly out to the rising breakers -- into the advancing, green Atlantic, rolling unstoppably toward him like the obstinate fact of the future -- and, if he was lucky, make it there in time to catch the next big wave and then the next and the next and the next until from the low slant of inland sunlight glittering across the water he knew it was time to go."

Here is not only a very real sense that "the best of boyhood" is when one had it best, but also the sense that having been there -- wherever "there" is for each of us -- is what matters most when we're insufferably tired of being here. The regrets of Roth's everyman aren't for a life unlived, but rather are grimmer: regardless of how one lives, the body has its own story to tell, so Roth presents us two brothers, one, the elder, is nothing but healthy, wealthy, and kind; the other, our everyman, has a body that constantly needs medical interventions to keep going. So that the existential power of the book is in that simple fact: as Hopkins phrases it, "it is the blight man was born for." The dimming of the powers, the loss of any joy in what the body is and does. Not uplifting, but to sum up the end of a life with such concision, that takes bekies.

U. S. BLUES

During the last debate I couldn't help being struck by how at ease Obama seemed, while McCain seemed off-kilter, grasping at loose ends. In fact, the impression I received several times, especially with that split screen effect, is that I was watching two U.S. senators trading shots, but one of them, the old guy, who was trying to appear more knowing and experienced than the younger senator, at one point seemed to realize that he should be taking notes: that this new guy knows what he's talking about and how to talk to people, and what's more, he's going to be president. If in the future I ever have to think back to when I recognized Obama as the legitimate president, it will be that debate. My feeling was: better take some notes, John, and if you want to fight this guy you better go back to the Senate to do it. This other fight is over. Or, put another way: recall how, after Ving Rhames in Pulp Fiction, everyone started using the phrase "getting medieval" on someone. I think, after Obama's performance, we can talk about "getting presidential." Back off, John, don't make me get presidential on yer ass.

Which is all fine as entertainment goes, but the question I've been thinking about recently is: what's wrong with a Democrat president? In my lifetime there have been four: JFK (elected once), LBJ (elected once), Carter (elected once), and Clinton (elected twice). Why is that, one might ask. The answer seems to be, as I've been looking more into what the conservatives in our country have to say about it, that the Democrats can't be trusted with power because that means government will run our lives. The socialist state will dictate everything from where we send our kids to school, to which doctors we can see, and it will also tax us shamelessly (especially the rich of us) in order to redistribute wealth to a hoi polloi of have-nots who won't even be grateful and obsequious for the handouts but will just mouth off louder about their "right" to everything under the sun. The only way to avoid this, it seems, is to give power to people who have no real interest in fair play and who don't think twice about shafting the general population for the sake of those at the top of the heap -- and the only way for them to stay at the top with something like impunity is by letting the market dictate everything under the sun, so that those with money can make more money and by such vigorous economic activity (hindered by no more tiresome regulations) those at the bottom will be better off too.

In general, the conservatives decry "big government" (except that many of them think the deficit can get as big as is necessary to "defend our interests abroad" which usually translates into a blank check to the military . . . for some reason I can't grasp, money to the military, even under Reagan, is not perceived as "spending," only money for social goods like health, education, welfare, and environment are "expenses"; also, some conservatives, those to whom the ways of God are clear, are apt to profess that, while it should get out of the way of business, the federal government should simply outlaw certain things -- like abortion and gays, or, at least gay marriage . . . for some reason I can't grasp, it's God's will that a child be born, once conceived, but it's not God's will for abortion technology to exist (that's all man's or the devil's doing, I guess), nor is it God's will for people to be gay (again God's loyal opposition must be involved, somehow). In other words, it seems that to "frustrate the ends of nature" is to go against God's will, but only in these two areas having to do with sexuality. The ends of nature are frustrated all over the place otherwise. Maybe God intended for all that crude oil to remain below ground forever. In which case we are all most assuredly damned eternally.

Anyway, I've never been one for explaining the ways of God to man. At this point I'm even too confused to explain the ways of man to myself, thank you. I do recognize one trend in American voting, which is to say that maybe there is some kind of collective will that has pretty good common sense: it's generally better, all things considered, to have a Republican president and a Democratic majority in the Congress. In other words, it's dangerous to give either part a full majority in Congress AND the presidency, and if you're going to have to split it, that's the best way to split it. In other words, keeping executive and legislative as separate as possible seems to be the way in which the founding fathers' vision is maintained.

In fact, it seems to me that the various Republican revolutions of my lifetime have been efforts to undo the time when Democrats controlled both the executive and the legislative branches. It was called The Great Society and when it didn't work, LBJ terminated his political career prematurely and left his party in a shambles from which it never really recovered. If you think it recovered because it managed to get Carter elected, well, that's pretty naive because his election was simply an expression of dissatisfaction with what Nixon had become -- a housecleaning of "the crook." Carter took it as a way of saying "new blood in Washington," but didn't work with Washington enough to be effective, and things were tanking too quickly for the kind of learning curve he apparently needed. The Reagan revolution was, for many of us, simply business as usual. Reagan being, in many ways, the negative of FDR, which, it was perceived, was best for the highly competitive Cold War world which, after all, FDR never had to deal with. Fine, but even Ronnie had to do his repeal of the Great Society with only a marginal majority in the Senate, and Bush the 1st had to deal with Democratic majority, as usual.

That situation changed with Clinton, which is when, one might say, the Democrats (in a much more moderate and chastened version when compared to the late '60s) came back with a vengeance, with control of executive and legislative. Yes, and that's one reason why Clinton was hounded mercilessly once the Republicans with their "contract with America" took over the Congress in 1996. That, it seems to me, is the second worst of all possible scenarios: Democrat president with Republican Congress. The worst is what we had with W., for most of his time: Republicans in control of both and, worse, a renegade Republican in the executive trying to wield absolute power. Because one of the problems with the "no big government" angle when it is wielded by our top executive is that it tends to equate "government" only with the legislature. So that leaves the executive to be as "big" as he wants. But because W. has been such a fiasco, it seems we might have to go back to Democrats in charge of both to sort of stanch the bleeding, try to get the body politic stat.

But there is still cause for concern, if we judge by former Democrats in that particular seat: LBJ and Clinton, especially. One might liken the situation of immigrant labor to both the labor and civil rights issues of the '60s, with the unpopular war of Iraq doubling Vietnam, in which case, suddenly we're back to 1964 or, worse, 1968. And, on that front, the "togetherness" of the Democratic party (even the Clintons have been contained!) is a good thing, seeing as how it might actually win this time.

So, speaking of Clinton: as the most conservative of Democrats, Clinton really wasn't to be feared by the conservatives of this country which is why, to my mind, his presidency exacerbated the naked battle for power of the two party system: it wasn't that the Republicans could strongly disagree with Clinton's politics because he was much like Ronnie, Phase II, but younger and thus able to talk "touchy feely" rhetoric rather than that paternalistic fireside chat stuff. So the animosity against Clinton was at his preempting the Republicans, keeping them out of office by not pissing off the public through some lame-brained Democrat stunt (like getting us into a military debacle -- as JFK and LBJ did). So they went after him with everything they had, kept him swatting flies all through his second term, then managed to saddle us with a Republican leader more lame-brained than the most lame-brained of Democratic leaders ... and the rest, as they say, is infamy.

I guess what all this is trying to say is: I've never been sympathetic with the Republicans because they just ain't my people, but I've never had as much to fault the party with as now, after giving us W. and making us take it. (My personal feeling is that if McCain was such a god-damned "maverick," he should've muscled up and taken the party and the executive away from Bush in '04. The part in the debate that made me chuckle was when McC snapped "If you wanted to run against George Bush you should've run in 2004" -- no, YOU should've run in 2004, John, and what's more you should've done what was needed to beat that little jerk for the nomination in 2000, but anyway . . . "lots of water under the bridge, lots of other stuff too," as Dylan sez.)

But the other thing I'm saying is that the amazing thing about Obama is that he actually makes me trust the Democrats. OK, I admit I voted for Clinton in '92, but that was simply a necessary attempt to end the twelve year sweep of a Republican president. Time to give the other side a chance and, what's more, Clinton was the first electable person they'd come up with (I don't care what kind of case pollsters made for Mondale or Dukakis, they never really had a chance, though I will say that it's hard to imagine an election with less interest than when your choice is Bush Sr or Dukakis. That's definitely one to sit out, and a good example of the notion that the person who should be president is whatever stiff you can saddle with the task.)

But Obama's different than all that stuff and I don't base this statement on his programs or his voting record in the Senate (which doesn't tell you much, given the way the Senate works), but simply on the fact that I've never heard a political candidate speak so intelligently. And without talking down, which was Gene McCarthy's problem -- he truly was speaking only to the East Coast elite. Obama speaks with clarity and authority but without condescension and without folksy blather. I mean, of course, for the most part (this is a politician we're talking about here).

It also occurred to me, hearing everyone talk about McCain/Palin and their appeal to Joe Sixpack and Joe the Plumber and Rosie the Rivetter and whoever, that times have changed. The most successful personality in the history of television is a well-dressed, well-spoken black woman named Oprah who clearly must appeal to lots of white middle America in order to have the clout she does. And she doesn't wink at you or act like a caricature of a "soccer mom" and yet apparently she does speak to such demographics, if not necessarily for them. I think McCain's folky "my friends" act misfired, sounding more like the snake oil salesman of so many films ("I've got the solution for you, my friends, right here in this little black bottle") than the trustworthy man of intelligent deliberation and well-chosen words and deliberate action we could use now.

Shine your shoes, light your fuse
Can you use them ol' U.S. Blues?
I'll drink your health, share your wealth
Run your life, steal your wife
--Robert Hunter/Jerry Garcia, "U.S. Blues" (1974)

MASTERS OF ROCK

Recently two consistently interesting directors released films of vintage rock acts in performance. Julian Schnabel's Lou Reed's Berlin (2008) showcases a couple nights in December 2006 when Lou Reed performed the entirety of his 1973 album Berlin at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. Martin Scorsese gives us Shine a Light (2008), a film of The Rolling Stones in concert at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan during their “a Bigger Bang” tour of 2006. Both films eschew rather viscerally the idiocy of the typical MTV format of lip-synched enactments of pre-recorded songs. If one needs to look at something while listening to music performed, nothing quite substitutes for seeing the musicians interacting with each other, the music, and the audience. Schnabel’s film does feature some visuals that are attempts to dramatize the narrative of Berlin’s song cycle, but they don’t add much to either a sense of what the songs are about nor do they really interest as visuals. For some reason, the idea that randomly conceived images can “accompany” the fluid narrative of song lyrics gained relentless currency in the MTV idiom, and it might be a worthwhile approach if so much of the visuals weren’t pretty much interchangeable and mostly unmemorable, if not unbearable.

Which is why these two films of performance are so striking. Certainly there has been plenty of lackluster taping of musicians playing and, here and there, some notable attainments of artistry -- two of the latter that spring to mind both involved Scorsese: he worked as a cameraman on Mike Wadleigh’s film of the original Woodstock concert in August 1969, and his film of The Band’s farewell concert in New York on Thanksgiving, 1977, has long been a nice bookend to the “woodstock era.” Those two concert films have few rivals in giving the viewer a sense of both epic grandeur and intimate participation. Epic because the crowd and the sound is large as life; intimate because Scorsese is a master at mixing his shots and lighting his subjects and getting moments that reveal, not the mask of celebrity we see in almost every MTV video, but the fascinating temporal fact of performance: once the song starts all the performers are committed to playing it till its over. It’s fun to watch them caught in the song, as it were.

That Scorsese delivers again with The Stones on film surprised me, to a certain extent. Granted, I remember the days when The Rolling Stones truly were “the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world,” but if asked about them these days I would probably just shrug and mumble something about their longevity, while noting that I haven’t purchased a release of new material by Mick and the boys since Steel Wheels in 1989. It’s easy to see The Stones as a band whose best was long ago. And yet, for all that, I’ve never written them off as some kind of nostalgia act, but would be hard-pressed to determine if there’s an attraction to their act beyond simple name-brand recognition. Do the people at their shows get what they paid for, or not?

Watching Scorsese’s film, we all do. The film looks great and The Stones have reached a point, into their 60s, where a certain kind of survivor’s majesty accrues to them. These guys lived the promise of rock’n’roll as the bond between a band of brothers if anyone has, and to watch them get off on each other getting off on the sound they lay down is delightful. Certainly it helps one’s enjoyment if one finds it easy to tap into the mythos of what The Stones were, if one can dredge up times when these songs -- a number of them from their pinnacle album Exile on Main Street (1972) and quite a few from their strongest subsequent album, Some Girls (1978) -- enlivened one’s daily life. But again, it’s not about reliving this music’s attraction so much as it’s a kind of participatory high that comes from seeing rock’n’roll as art and as lifestyle fully vindicated by these living relics, these geezers of rock. The Stones come off as aging guys who like a good time and giving others a good time, which, to be sure, isn’t what their mythos is really all about -- there aren’t too many forays in the film into the darker or more threatening version of what The Stones were about once upon a time (though “Sympathy for the Devil” still seems to make Jagger give his all in his search for the frenzy the song demands), even to the point that certain un-PC “racist” moments in the lyrics of “Some Girls” and “Brown Sugar” were laundered out. Well, what can you expect, Bill and Hillary Clinton were on-hand (Bill introduces the band and chats with them a bit), so this film is also about recognition of institutional status. It’s a monument to a band that is itself monumental of the rock of the ages.

Schnabel’s film of Lou Reed’s brilliant and challenging album is more personal, or deliberately “artsy” if only because Schnabel is a New York artist who claims he found in Berlin a story directly applicable to his own life. He says that for a long period he listened to the album at least once a day. He’s got me beat; even at my most enraptured with the record, I always treated it with gingerly respect. Background music it isn’t. To put it on is to be drawn into its world and it’s a world that I would only inhabit as occasion might dictate. I’ve never felt the album to be depressing or a downer, as many critics seem to (even those who admire it), but I would call it harrowing as it asks you to undertake a kind of imaginative sympathy that few rock songwriters have the guts to demand. Given my note by note familiarity with this record, it was great to hear it played so close to the original, but with a bit more looseness in the musical passages, and to watch and hear as Lou Reed delivers his oddly effective deadpan vocals that achieve so much with minimal inflections. I missed at times Jack Bruce’s bass (on the record) but it was great that Lou brought back Steve Hunter, the guitarist on the album, and has the horns and children’s choir and everything needed to bring it all back home. It’s simply satisfying in some epic “journey’s done” way to sit back and watch Lou inhabit songs like “The Kids” and “The Bed” for your viewing pleasure, part of which derives from watching Lou, around mid-60s at the time, having to relive the music of that earlier Lou Reed c. '73, a few years past the Velvets, with one bona fide “alternative” hit under his belt and a vision of rock that was more literary than most because more ironic and more given to mind-games that could be psychologically demanding than just about anyone else you’d care to name.

There’s an old Stones song which asserts “it’s the singer, not the song,” as if to say, if we’re really into the singer it doesn’t much matter what he or she sings. Put another way: if we’re really into the song, does it matter who sings it? Of course it does. These films are paeans to that fact. Some of these songs will doubtlessly last beyond the lifetimes of these musicians, some of them have already been covered numerous times, but to see them performed by their originators -- with their attenuated, “retirement age” bravura -- makes one feel, if nothing else, younger than that now.

Jenny said when she was just five years oldThere was nothin’ happenin’ at allEvery time she’d put on the radioThere was nothin’ happenin’ at allAnd then one fine morning she put on a New York station,Man, she didn’t believe what she heard at allShe started dancin’ to that fine, fine musicHer life was saved by rock’n’roll.–Lou Reed, “Rock’n’Roll” (1970)

RECENT EVENTS

Thursday, Oct. 2nd: Debate? You betcha!

First of all, there was that debate on Thursday night, which I don't really want to talk about much, except to say the entertainment value of Sarah Palin should not be discounted. I can't remember laughing so hard before at any supposedly serious political broadcast. If (as we can only hope at this point) she and McCain are defeated in November, I see a great career in her future: as commentator on a TV news program. It would be hilarious in the extreme to hear any event that might take place "filtered" through her particular version of bland, cutesy, folksy know-nothing-with-a-vengeance-isms.

To hear words spoken disconnected almost wholly from content, you say, has become commonplace under Bush? OK, I grant that, but I've avoided as best I could every actual utterance by our Commander-in-Chief, in part because he is Commander-in-Chief. Yes, that means living in a constant state of denial, which I'm happy is reaching its appointed end. And the only reason I can laugh at Palin, granted, is because she's only a "public servant" in a state very far away from me. Should that change, well, I won't go there... but there's a special circle of hell for people who let fools run their country. As to what else Palin is at present: it became remarkably clear in this debate that she is the shill, which Merriam-Webster defines as: "one who acts as a decoy (as for a pitchman or gambler)." Her entire manner is meant as a sop to Joe Sixpack and Dolores Soccer-mom, those staunch supporters of whatever they find most entertaining and appealing, never mind that if she actually believed in the principles she paid lip-service to (the middle class, new energy alternatives, a rational -- rather than knee-jerk -- approach to the war) she'd have to switch parties, or at least abandon McCain's ticket.

Here's Mike Taibbi, in Rolling Stone, putting it in proper perspective immediately after the Republican Convention, in terms almost worthy of HST:

Here's the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.

And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket. And if she's a good enough likeness of a loudmouthed middle-American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant-size bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the Sizzlin' Picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else's, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because the image on TV reminds him of the mean, brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she's a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power.

Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she's the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV -and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.

And, as Wick Allison notes in this piece, besides mourning the shambles that has been made of this country, it's also fair to mourn what has become of the "grand old party" in the wake of the Bush debacle. I mean, it was canny politics to get him elected in 2000, but after that . . . it was the worst of times in every way, not least in the degree to which the press honeymooned with the moron and kowtowed to his power, to the simple naked fact that he won. From that starting point, with all its bad faith backing of a bad "outcome," nothing good could come, and the record of lip service and ass-kissing in 2003 when the war got launched is one of the most galling facts of recent history. See for instance this review (Sept. 28), by Jill Abramson (former Washington bureau chief of the NYTimes, 2001-2003), of Bob Woodward's The War Within, the fourth installment of his Bush coverage; notice how positive the first book in the series was about Bush's efforts, notice how Abramson herself admits that she didn't work hard enough to publish a piece critical of the incentive for war at the time -- it's not that that piece, if published, would have made any difference in what happened, but it would allow us to look back at a news media that wasn't hidebound, gutless, and gung-ho. That degree of criticism didn't exist in the media at the time. And I submit that it wasn't due to fear of being wrong, it was due to fear of being right -- and of suffering the consequences of telling the emperor he's buck naked. No one with a stake in the system that let Bush take office -- which is to say, answerable to "the public" (i.e., politics) or "the public sector" (i.e., media) -- could risk it. And if the Repubs win again, you'll find, I'm sure, more supposed-to-know better pundits taking the tact of Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review. "I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, 'Hey, I think she just winked at me.' And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can’t be learned; it’s either something you have or you don’t, and man, she’s got it."

As a great, as-yet-unelected presidential candidate might put it: it's lipstick on a pig and this time (unlike when Obama said it) the "pig" is Palin, and it's not just lipstick, it's the full rhetorical make-over. Or, from Kathryn Jean Lopez, National Review Online:

"Conservatives are inclined to love Palin. Hard-working, all-American family men and women who don’t have their head full of left-wing theories about Republicans are frequently warm to her — if not outright excited."

"Left-wing theories about Republicans"???

Anyway, sorry for the soapbox, this is more amusing, it's the SNL take-off on the debate.

Friday, Oct. 3rd: I make poetry, and so can you!

Friday night I attended a poetry reading at Yale by Carson Cistulli. He brought along his parents and his sister (who spent most of the reading in shrieks of laughter) and regaled us with over 50 minutes of his poems which, while sometimes very amusing, had the feel of "high school wise-guy makes good." The diction was straight off the street -- via rap and advertising and the lingo of the young (which stuff dates pretty fast, as those of us who have been around more than two decades are well aware) -- and sounded at times like surrealist bumper-stickers, suitable for framing as a banner on any Brooklyn-bound subway. Kewl. But my overall feeling was that the evening was the literary equivalent of "Harold and Kumar Read Poems at Yale," which, I admit, I would probably watch and snicker at from time to time. I mean, Harold Bloom jokes, wow.

And though there weren't stoner references per se, there was the general party (or poeticize) till you puke ethos of frat boys (or iz dat Beastie Boyz?) with its titties and beer, dicks are for chix man-child assertiveness. Grab yers and crow, kids. Granted, scurrilousness can be found in great classical authors like Catullus (whom Cistulli admired for getting to use a Latin verb that means "making someone fellate one") -- the most Catullus-like poem of the evening, to me, was the one when Cistulli argued that some poets of his acquaintance wrote poems bad enough to kill a hornet buzzing around his desk -- but in the classics the scurrilous is couched in Latin diction, syntax and form. To write trash-talk in English is no distinction. What did make Cistulli seem distinctive, at times, was his extreme narcissism in reading on and on, seemingly oblivious to the fact that even his sister's sense of hilarity was dwindling. "I've got a T-shirt that says it all."

Saturday, Oct. 4th: Caved

Saturday night found me at the WaMu Theater (or, as my daughter dubbed it, "the bankrupt theater") to hear Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, who made a glorious noise and offered coverage of the entire career -- "Tupelo" was unexpected and a real treat -- with five numbers from the latest release: Dig!! Lazarus!! Dig!!!. But I have to say I was more than a bit disappointed. For me, Cave has matured considerably as a songwriter, beginning with 1997's The Boatman's Call (from which he played nothing) and continuing through No More Shall We Part (2001; 2 songs), Nocturama (2003; none), and culminating in the twin disc career peak: Abattoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus (2004; one song a-piece: the first song of the former, title track on the latter). A pity; I would've preferred a show of recent stuff with an occasional "classic" thrown in for the diehards. Later, listening to songs from the latter release I realized that one reason the songs therefrom might be eschewed in concert is that Cave's line-up was lacking the back-up singers essential to some of the arrangements. OK, but still, there should've been a way to bring us a more stripped down version of "Abattoir Blues," the song I was most hoping to hear, from the year of W.'s re-election:

The sun is high up in the sky and I'm in my car
Drifting down into the abattoir
Do you see what I see, dear?

The air grows heavy. I listen to your breath
Entwined together in this culture of death
Do you see what I see, dear?

Slide on over here, let me give you a squeeze
To avert this unholy evolutionary trajectory
Can you hear what I hear, babe?
Does it make you feel afraid?

Everything's dissolving, babe, according to plan
The sky is on fire, the dead are heaped across the land
I went to bed last night and my moral code got jammed
I woke up this morning with a Frappucino in my hand

I kissed you once. I kissed you again
My heart it tumbled like the stock exchange
Do you feel what I feel, dear?

Mass extinction, darling, hypocrisy
These things are not good for me
Do you see what I see, dear?

The line that God throws down to you and me
Makes a pleasing geometry
Shall we leave this place now, dear?
Is there someway out of here?

I wake with the sparrows and I hurry off to work
The need for validation, babe, gone completely berserk
I wanted to be your Superman but I turned out such a jerk

I got the abattoir blues
I got the abattoir blues
I got the abattoir blues
Right down to my shoes
--Nick Cave, "Abattoir Blues" (2004); here it is on YouTube

MORE MUSIL

In a short piece by Robert Musil called "The Perfecting of a Love," I was struck by this passage. In the story, "she" (Claudine) is away from her husband, with whom she shares, seemingly, a completely symbiotic love, which she found after a failed earlier marriage and a youthful period of aimless erotic encounters. But now she's away from her husband for the first time and is suffering from a temptation not visited upon her by another person, so much as it's a state of restless uncertainty about her own identity.

And then she had been assailed by the secret thought: 'Somewhere among all these people there is someone -- not the right one, someone else -- but still, one could have adjusted oneself even to him, and then one would never have known anything of the person that one is today. For every feeling exists only in the long chain of other feelings, each supporting the next; and all that matters is that one instant of life should link up with the next without any lacuna, and there are hundreds of different ways in which it can do so.' And for the first time since the beginning of her love the thought had flashed through her mind: 'It is all chance -- by some chance something becomes reality, and then one holds to it, that's all.'

For the first time she had felt her being, down to its very foundations, as something indeterminate, had apprehended this ultimate faceless existence of herself in love as something that destroyed the very root, the absoluteness, of existence and would always have made her into a person that she called herself and who was nevertheless not different from everyone else. And it was as if she must let go, let herself sink back into the drift of things, into the realm of unfulfilled possibilities, the no-man's-land. And she hurried through the mournful, empty streets, glancing in through windows as she passed, wanting no other company than the clatter of her heels on the cobbles -- reduced to that last sign of physical existence, hearing nothing but her own footsteps echoing now in front of her and now behind her.

The idea that whoever one is, whoever one loves, whatever one does, might just as well have been something or someone else is, perhaps, not so surprising a thought. Perhaps we all entertain it every now and then, but, if so, it's usually, I suspect, so as to feel more empowered, to be able to assert that we aren't "summed up" by what our life and love and work have been up to this point. That something remains yet ahead. But here Musil gives yet another account of what he calls, in The Man Without Qualities, "living in the subjunctive": the sense that everything "might just as well have been something else." The difference in gender -- Claudine here and Ulrich in MWQ -- makes for a difference in situation as well. Ulrich deliberately does not profess any purpose -- no great love, no great work -- because he sees his life as "indeterminate" in that unmasking sense. But Claudine's situation is more tantalizing -- for, as she says, it's not that there is some "perfect" or "correct" love out there to be discovered, it's the recognition that any love would be the same -- in the sense of causing a similar transformation, a similar identification, a similar certainty -- regardless of what kind of life it led one. It's the startling idea, which the mind is slow to grasp and which, when it does, it tends to register ironically, that one's emotions have at some point made one's life what it is. No problem, so long as those emotions remain in force. But should they alter . . .

It may be that, in our day, we easily take off one mask and put on another. Perhaps it requires a stretch of the imagination to even understand what kind of epiphany it is that Claudine experiences here. It comes about with an almost Jamesian acceptance of the idea that only the life that one recounts to oneself -- the one we live between our ears -- can truly determine the value of one's existence, and that, if we fail, it is in ourselves we find our hell. Or, as Dylan might say, "to keep it in your mind and not forget that it is not he or she or them or it that you belong to." Here, that not belonging to anything external, that not accounting for yourself in the terms supplied by those desired "realms" (to use Musil's term), is to assume that one belongs to oneself, that one is or has or inhabits a self that is separate, determinate. But what "the subjunctive" asks one to realize is that everything by which one recognizes this "self" could just as easily have been something else. And what then does that "you" belong to?

THE CDS: BabyShambles

In the best tradition of Nero -- "he fiddled while Rome burned" -- I'm going to talk about music while debate about the debate rages, while the presidential candidates compare bracelets, while the Dow Jones drops and rallies and drops and whatever, while the bailout efforts continue and my own bank gets the kiss of life from a bigger bank. I mean, ever since the days when The Stones asked "what can a poor boy do, 'cept sing for a rock'n'roll band?" it's been axiomatic with me that rock is the medium, if not "of the people," then of the people who can remain cooly detached from whatever shit-storm is currently appalling the pundits.

And since I haven't written about rock in awhile, I'll go back to my alphabetical CD list and see what's up next...

BabyShambles

Not unfitting. Peter Doherty, if anyone is, is currently rock's resident "bad boy" and even now is tabloid fodder: "a coked-up pansy who spends his nights in flights of fancy" (as "La Belle et la Bête" has it). I know of his existence, apart from his crack-smoking with super model Kate Moss, because my daughter became a big fan of The Libertines back in her art school days, and passed along to me the two gritty albums that band, led by Doherty and his bandmate Carl Barât, released in 2002 and 2004. Doherty -- doing that old "too wasted to make the gig" schtick -- was soon on the outs with his bandmates, or incarcerated, or in rehab, or something -- and so that band dispersed. Doherty went solo with the 2005 album Down in Albion which is the only disc of BabyShambles I possess, though my daughter was kind enough to lay some Doherty demos on me which were released in the chaotic interim between Libertines' end and BabyShambles' beginning (the latter was supposed to be a "side project" that became the main project once Doherty was no longer a Libertine . . . band member, he may very well still be a libertine).

In fact, back in 2004-2005 Doherty's "other project" was mainly unreleased demo stuff, much of it on the internet. I'm not sure how all this stands right now. The Libertines never had much U.S. presence anyway, and BabyShambles seems even more a U.K.-only phenomenon. A year ago, BabyShambles released their second album, Shotter's Nation (2007), but I still haven't tracked it down. So, what I've got to say pertains mainly to Down in Albion.

I will say this: Doherty, to me, was the more interesting of the two Libertines singer/composers, but, like other great song-writing duos that might spring to mind, I think he's better working in that duo format. But obviously, it's up to an individual artist to decide if he really is a collaborator or not. Because Barât/Doherty didn't last that long, this album didn't give me quite the sense of a falling-off as when Strummer/Jones went their separate ways (Jones, by the way, produced both Libertines albums as well as BabyShambles' debut -- the irony there is that I would liken Doherty to Strummer and Barât to Jones), and, if anything, Doherty solo is more "Clash-like" than even The Libertines were, which was quite a bit. But it's also the fact that Barât seemed more the pop stylist and Doherty more the ... romantic spirit? In any case, The Libertines albums always featured a few songs that stood out more than the rest -- and those tended to be heavy on the Doherty. On BabyShambles, I guess it's the Libertines-like numbers that still stand-out from the rest, for me.

My favorite track is "Albion" though I still may prefer the solo acoustic demo to the BabyShambles version. In either case, it's a good example of what Doherty does well: it's so dissolute, but as a show of strength. I mean, if you're pretty much wasted all the time, you're pretty vulnerable, but on the other hand, you're also not really accountable. So the song makes you feel that hopping a tram to "anywhere in Albion" is a suitable means of escape, and, if you're in love, or have enough stuff with you, well, maybe it is. See, I did say this was romantic. The other track, kinda the flip side of the lyrical pining on "Albion" is "Fuck Forever" -- because if you're wasted all the time you might also be horny all the time and hopping a bird might just be a suitable means of escape. And it's easy enough to hear, in the "I'll fuck forever, if you don't mind" chorus, "I'm fucked forever" -- which seems to be the modus vivendi of our man Doherty.

Anyway, musically Doherty is able to channel lots of good, hard Brit pop into his songs: early Kinks have a way of coming to mind, as do The Faces, as do almost-falling-apart bands like The Stooges and The New York Dolls, as do catchy punk acts like The Pogues and The Clash. So, if you've been missing that kind of thing (and God knows we could always use more of it), then Doherty's shambles is as likely a place to find it as anywhere, baby. Further note: one reason my daughter looked to The Libertines as the saviors of rock was because of the prevalence of bands like The Strokes at the time. In other words, where that stuff seemed, if catchy, rather pallid and erstaz, The Libertines had more bite, more balls and ... more drugs? In any case, I'm still intrigued by Doherty and BabyShambles' 2007 single "Delivery" keeps his cred.

How can you choose between death and glory?
Happy endings, no, they never bored me
Happy endings, they still don't bore me
But they, they have a way
They have a way to make you pay
And to make you toe the line
Sever the ties
Because I'm so clever
But clever ain't wise
--Peter Doherty, "Fuck Forever" (2005)