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Thursday, August 28, 2008
YOUNGER POINT OF VIEW
The Dogs
1976
Available on : We're Desperate: The L.A. Scene (1976-1979)
Rhino : 1993
[Buy It]
TEENAGE PRESIDENT TALKING BLUES
Kim Fowley
Hotel Insomnia
Marilyn: 1994
[Buy It]
This story starts with two beautiful women. I knew neither of them. I know neither of them. It was on the subway. One was black, tall, and to my left. One was short, white, and to my right. Both were around twenty. It made for a nice balance, which isn't to say symmetry. I am old and married but still I ogled for a minute: nature's way. Then I got on with noticing other things, including that both were reading books, one of which was The Secret History and the other of which was The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat.
Despite the beauty, despite the youth, despite it all, I wasn't ogling anymore. I was rereading, or at least remembering reading. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat came out in 1985, when I was in high school. The Secret History came out in 1992, after I was out of college. I can't prove this, but I think that I read more books during those seven years than in any other seven-year period in my life. This doesn't mean that I read with any goal in mind other than the reading itself, or that I retained very much of what I read, or that I was able to connect the books I read to specific emotions or events in my life. It just means that I went through a book a day, sometimes two, friction burns on the pads of my thumbs. I read like it was going out of style, which it was: I couldn't have known it at the time, but a few years after that my pace slowed. It's only gotten worse, unless it's better: I can still rip through a new novel on the subway ride home, but I don't consider it reading. I consider it watching TV on the page. Reading now takes time. It requires losing the thread and then picking it up again. It requires ambition, thwarted and then (hopefully) achieved. Now, a book goes into me over a half-week of stolen hours.
I'm off track. The subway stayed on track. The beautiful girls stayed on the subway. My thoughts stayed on the beautiful girls. I ogled for another minute -- nature's way -- and then I started thinking more about the books they were reading. The second phase of my thinking was significantly more superficial than the first. It went something like this: "Suckers!" And then: "Sucker!" again, but this time directed to myself. I had read both of those books, long ago. Been there, done that. I felt a half-second of superiority and then a much longer period of something else, maybe the opposite. The careful case I had built for setting aside greedy, promiscuous reading for a more carefully curated selection dissolved, and what was left was the sense that youth had passed, all at once. It was wrong to be ogling twenty-year-olds and it was sad that they were discovering books that were long since dead to me and while it was probably true that a sixty-year-old woman was looking at me and thinking the same thing, that was no consolation. Time passes. It passes you. There is no way to remove the venom from this truism. This is the case with music even more powerfully than with books. The years of discovery end with a thud and we become conservationists, at least most of us. The Dogs, who came out of Lansing, Michigan when the Stooges were tearing up Detroit and spent the seventies moving between punk-pop and pop-punk, explained this so perfectly that all I have to do is quote them, which is to say remember them, because I heard them first when I was young, and you don't forget those things:I seen Chicago on the TV yesterday
I didn't make Woodstock
Seen all the children of love fade away
With a younger point of view
What did you used to say
What did you used to do?
With that teenage attitude? The subway stayed on track. One of the girls put away her book and took out a newspaper. Bill Clinton was on the cover, along with Barack Obama's name. Time passes. It passes you. This is the case with politics as powerfully as with music or books. The Dogs understood that, too: they were as political a pop-punk band as you were likely to find, picking up the thread not only from the Stooges but from the MC5. We have years of intense receptivity and then years of trying to make sense of what we received. I saw a documentary on Helen Thomas the other night. What struck me as startling was the way that she became more liberal, more convinced of the importance of taking a strong stance against the evasions of the powerful, as she got older. This isn't the usual way. Usually progress through the world contextualizes passions, fits them in alongside realities, removes sharp edges. Bill Clinton looked old on the cover of the paper. Obama looks so young. The girls on the subway looked so young. Does Obama matter more to them than he does to me? Is that failing in them or in me? Is it a failing at all?
Kim Fowley is older than you think, if you think of him at all. He'll be seventy next year, which means that he was fifty-five when he released Hotel Insomnia, which means that he was somewhat younger when he wrote "Teenage President Talking Blues." The title of the album is probably stolen from a book by the poet Charles Simic. Fowley, of course, is a known cultural provocateur and svengali, an inappropriate appropriator responsible for, among other things, the novelty hit "Alley Oop" and the novelty band The Runaways. "Teenage President Talking Blues" is odd, like nearly everything Fowley has recorded. It describes a young man's arrival in Hollywood in 1959. It's not autobiographical exactly, I don't think, because Fowley, the son of a Hollywood character actor, was already there; he had worked at American International and Arwin records and was well on his way to novelty-song fame. In the song, the young man comes to Hollywood and promptly sets about making a spectacle of himself:With silk underwear and platform shoes
I'm limber like a lady I hang real loose
I dress to kill and am ready to rock
I've got legs like a ladder and hands just like a clock He may be spectacular, but he's not a spectacle:Nobody's watching, nobody's watching, nobody's watching me
Nobody's watching, nobody's watching, I can be anything I want to be I watched the girls on the subway. One of them noticed, met my gaze, dropped her gaze. That's youth, isn't it? Perfect to look at and convinced that no one is looking, needful of attention but also of enough anonymity and freedom to read, listen, see, try, and eventually to grow into something older, something else.
More people boarded. They interfered with my clean lines of sight. The two girls and their books must have had earlier stops, because by the time I got to midtown they were gone. The one who had been reading the newspaper had left it on the seat. Bill Clinton looked old. I felt young remembering when he looked young. This isn't a satisfying piece about youth and age. This isn't a satisfying piece about books. This isn't a satisfying piece about politics. This isn't a satisfying piece about people. Is it ever possible to bring those things into sharp focus, to fix them, or do they escape as quickly as they're acquired, forcing you to go back to them? I don't know, but I mean to find out. Nature's way.Labels: ben, punk
posted by Ben
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