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Thursday, December 21, 2006
Locust St.'s Chris O'Leary emailed the other week and asked if MW would be raising a glass to the late, great George W.S. Trow. I wrote back right away, saying yes, of course. Then I got ambivalent. He's an important writer to me, personally - his style and sentences made as much of an impression as whatever he had to say. And, of course, Trow had a great deal to say, and I agreed with a lot of it. More than that - I was always emphatic, but back when I was young and emphatic, Trow taught me that it was ok to be that way.
On the other hand, what a shitty death; I'm not sure it's something to celebrate. I asked O'Leary if it was ok if I posted something from years ago instead. So, this is kind of old - it's from FEED, c. 2000, when I was twenty-seven, and not quite putting things together yet. It's long, and idiotic. But, because Trow did get to see his worst fears realized, I hope it's not inappropriate. Whatever the case, you should certainly listen to Johnnie Ray's "Cry," and if you've never heard Joe Bataan's cover, my advice is to listen to it on drugs.
CRY
Johnnie Ray
Okeh : 1961
Available on: Cry!
Bear Family: 1990
[Buy It]
At twenty-year intervals over the course of the past forty-six years - in 1960, 1980, and again in 2000 - three writers associated with The New Yorker published separate installments of what, in hindsight, amounts to a unified theory of culture. Dwight Macdonald's Masscult and Midcult, George W.S. Trow's Within the Context of No Context, and, most recently, John Seabrook's Nobrow.
Macdonald, who died eighteen years ago, was the archetype of old-guard intellectualism. Educated at Phillips Exeter and Yale, he served, at various times, as an editor of the Partisan Review, a film critic for Esquire, and a book reviewer for The New Yorker. But it was at Fortune that Macdonald cut his teeth, and Masscult and Midcult - which was originally published in the Partisan Review in the Spring of 1960, and for which he's best remembered today - can be seen as a direct reaction against what he learned there. Henry Luce's magazine empire - of which Time, Life, and Fortune were the cornerstones - was both the reflection and a contributing factor to the rise of a media-industrial complex which propelled America towards the condition of Empire in the 1930s. But the conditions that made Empire possible, Macdonald worried, also led to a homogenization in American life. Long before "atomization" had entered the sociological vernacular, he wrote that "the tendency of modern industrial society is to transform the individual into the mass man... a large quantity of people unable to express their human qualities because they are related to each other neither as individuals nor as members of a community. In fact, they are not related to each other at all but only to some impersonal, abstract, crystallizing factor.... The mass man is a solitary atom, uniform with the millions of other atoms that go to make up the 'lonely crowd.'"
Macdonald wasn't the first to articulate the threat; rather, his was a popular distillation of Frankfurt School philosophy, much in the same way that Thomas Frank and The Baffler distilled the same school of thought for the dot-com generation. Nor was Macdonald the first to deal with the cultural fallout - a blurring of the distinction between Highbrow and Lowbrow culture that Clement Greenberg had written about twenty years earlier. But Macdonald was eloquent and impassioned, and the timing and scope of his critique, which is rooted in aesthetic considerations but encompasses the political, gives it a resonance that echoes well into the present day. Macdonald drew an explicit parallel between the "mass society" of the 1950s and Europe's totalitarian regimes, noting that both cultures "have systematically broken every communal link - family, church, trade union, local and regional loyalties, even down to ski and chess clubs - and have reforged them so as to bind each atomized individual directly to the center of power." For him mass culture is, in fact, a cult: In a fascist regime, the center of power is occupied by the cult of State, in Communist countries, by the cult of Personality, in an industrialized democracy, by a cult of the People enforced by corporate and governmental beaurocracies and maintained by an army of pollsters and statisticians. "When one hears a questionnaire-sociologist talk about setting up an investigation," Macdonald wrote,one realizes that he regards people as mere congeries of conditional reflexes.... At the same time, of necessity, he sees the statistical majority as the great Reality.... Like a Lord of Masscult, he is - professionally - without values, willing to take seriously any idiocy if it is held by many people... The aristocrat's approach to the masses is less degrading to them, as it is less degrading to a man to be shouted at than to be treated as nonexistent. But the plebs have their dialectical revenge: indifference to their human quality means prostration before their statistical quantity, so that a movie magnate who cynically "gives the public what it wants" - i.e, assumes it wants trash - sweats with anxiety if the box-office returns drop 5 per cent. The result, for Macdonald, was neither high culture nor folk, but a hopelessly muddled monster that absorbed everything from the avant-garde to the professional wrestling and turned it into a "Kulturkatzejammer" - a "midcult" that was at best a vulgarized reflection of high culture, and at worst a slough of kitsch and sensationalism. Not art, but something like the Soviet's Socialist Realism; an art for everyone and no one, aimed at the lowest common denominator. The alternatives, in his eyes, were to restore the class lines that allowed the original cultural elite to emerge, or to erect a permanent barricade between high culture and the masses. Borrowing a phrase from Stendahl, Macdonald pleaded with the "happy few" - those writers, critics, philosophers, composers, and architects sticking to their posts as guardians of high culture - to ignore the masses altogether, and asked that the "only public they consider... be that of [their] peers." A vague manifesto, to be sure, but a manifesto nonetheless. In comparison, Trow's essay reads like a suicide note.
CRY
Joe Bataan
Latin Funk Brother
Fania/Vampi : 1972
[But It]
In order that everything should be reduced to the same level, it is first necessary to procure a phantom, a monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage...
-Kierkegaard, The Present Age Macdonald invoked Kierkegaard's specter as an example of the tide he was struggling against, but it wasn't until twenty years later that George Trow gave it a name - celebrity. Trow's celebrity is neither the self that supports the image, nor is it exactly the image itself; rather it is "[a] record of the expression of demographically significant preferences: the lunge of demography here as opposed to there." It lives in a history stripped of context, in which "nothing [is] judged -- only counted" and in which "the ideal [becomes] agreement rather than well judged action." And since it is neither mass nor man, but rather a reflection of statistical leanings, Trow doesn't trace its history in time, but rather plots it as a trajectory between two grids:[As] the middle distance fell away, so the grids (from small to large) that had supported the middle distance fell into disuse and ceased to be understandable. Two grids remained. The grid of two hundred million and the grid of intimacy. Everything else fell into disuse. There was a national life - a shimmer of national life - and intimate life. The distance between these two grids was very great. The distance was very frightening. People did not want to measure it. People began to lose a sense of what distance was and of what the usefulness of distance might be.... The grid of national life was very large now, but the space in which one man felt at home shrank. It shrank to intimacy.... In the vast distance between the protection and the protected, there is space for mirages of pseudo-intimacy. It is in this space that celebrities dance. It is, in fact, almost impossible to distinguish Trow's idea of celebrity from his definition of television: What is it?... Two abilities: to do a very complex kind of work, involving electrons, and then to cover the coldness of that with a hateful familiarity. Why hateful? Because it hasn't anything to do with a human being as a human being is strong. It has to do with a human being as a human being is weak and willing to be fooled: the human being's eagerness to perceive as warm something that is cold, for instance, his eagerness to be a part of what one cannot be a part of, to love what cannot be loved. Within the Context of No Context, which is composed as a series of aphorisms and miniature essays, is unspeakably sad. Trow's sentences are short from grief. His italics bleed. He published the piece in The New Yorker, and largely disappeared from its pages, and public view, not long afterwards. Where Macdonald is motivated by self-interest, or, to be more generous, class or professional interest - it is, after all, the space of cultural guardians, which he himself occupies, that Macdonald is struggling to protect - Trow's concern is profoundly American. I'd like to imagine that, if we could somehow bring Whitman back to life to deliver his Democratic Vistas in person, it would be Trow we'd pick to pull him aside and explain that, ahem, things didn't work out quite as the old man had hoped.
But Trow's roots aren't fundamentally different from Macdonald's. He, too, is a member of the old guard - the scion of one of New York's oldest publishing families - and a graduate of Exeter and Harvard. And though his prose is stronger, and his sympathies wider, he is eulogizing the same thing Macdonald sought to protect.
* * *
John Seabrook comes from a similar background. An heir to the Seabrook frozen-food fortune (you can still see the brand, which no longer belongs to Seabrook's family, at your local supermarket), he studied at Princeton and wrote a master's thesis on Eliot at Oxford. But if Trow is a more generous version of Macdonald, Seabrook, who came of age in Tina Brown's New Yorker, is an entirely different animal. Like many New Yorker writers, he is a fine stylist - remarkably fine considering how unselfconscious his writing is; it seems to spill out of him wholly formed and unfiltered - and a keen observer of cultural mores. But Seabrook stands firmly on the other side of a cultural schism which the surface similarities to Trow and Macdonald don't quite bridge. For him, Macdonald's argument and Trow's lament miss the point.
"One of Tina Brown's gifts as an editor," he writes "was that she saw the American cultural hierarchy for what it really was [italics mine]: not a hierarchy of taste at all, but a hierarchy of power that used taste to cloak its real agenda." It's a revealing aside, not only because it firmly places Seabrook's position on a particular side of the culture wars, but because it doesn't allow for the possibility of taking any other side; it assumes - as Brown herself did - that the realization dictates a course of action. Namely, exploiting that very power structure for all it's worth. Thus, in Brown's hands the role of editor becomes that of trend-spotter and power broker, trading on The New Yorker's ever-diminishing collateral as a last remaining voice of cultural authority (ever-diminishing because a good portion of it was being siphoned off into Tina Brown's own account as cultural arbitrageur) to leverage her writers into positions of proximity to buzz, celebrity, money, and power - all of which increasingly began looking like one and the same thing.
Who's to say what's right these days?
What, with our modern ideas and products?
-Homer Simpson
Needless to say, the writer's role changed as well. Seabrook's book is a collection of celebrity profiles he wrote for the magazine over the course of the past five years, stitched together with anecdotes about how he came to write about the particular celebrity in question. The segues consists of passages like the following: Tina and [Ben] Goldberg [the CEO of Mercury records], I knew, had certain mutual (synergistic) interests. Mercury, it was shortly to be announced, would be putting out a CD series of New Yorker writers reading their work. They also supported similar charities... and were loosely attatched to the same circle of tastemakers in New York City. For me, accepting the assignment would inevitably mean functioning not only as a reporter, but also as a kind of broker in a negotiated relationship between Tina and Goldberg, who were themselves functioning as brokers in a negoitiated relationship between Si Newhouse and Polygram. I knew I would be wading a little bit deeper into the vast, tepid swamp of Buzz, with its surrounding cedar bogs of compromise. On the other hand, the idea of a rock prodigy - a kid who had learned to be a rock star from watching rock stars like Kurt Cobain on MTV - did sound like a good story. Seabrook is so forthcoming about compromises he's made in order to curry favor with Brown that it seems besides the point to fault him for making them. His book is, in almost every way, the most honest and eye-opening account of life at The New Yorker published thus far. But the fact remains that, where Macdonald spotted a blood-dimmed tide rushing his way, and Trow found himself drowning in the flood, a new generation of writers seems to have grown gills, and forgotten what dry land looks like.
CAN IT BE ALL SO SIMPLE
Wu-Tang Clan
Enter The WuTang (36 Chambers)
RCA : 1993
[Buy It]
"It's not really about is this a terrible thing or is this a good thing," Seabrook told a radio interviewer, not long after his book was published, "because I don't really feel like I can make that judgment. But I can show people what's going through my mind as I think about these things." This sentiment would have outraged Macdonald, I think, and brought tears to Trow's eyes. But Nobrow is, in many ways, the direct manifestation of Trow's ideas. Take, for instance, Trow's invocation of the First World War:Very rarely are [game show] contestants asked about the old history, the history before demographics became the New History. When this older, more distant world is invoked, it is made obvious that this world is mystifying and too difficult to be comfortable with. One game-show host asked a question about the First World War and then described the First World War as "certainly a military event of considerable importance." He was assuring his audience that the First World War was popular in its own day. and compare it to what Seabrook has to say about the Second: The Wu didn't seem to know about anything that happened before 1975, which was around when they were born. If you told Ol' Dirty Bastard or GhostFace Killah about, say, World War II, he might say "Whoa, that's some marvelous-ass shit," as though history were just something to roll up in a blunt and smoke. But the Wu were real artists: they got that post-Jamesian flow of urban consciousness that goes through everyone's mind just right. One might ask, when coming across a passage like this, whether "this is a terrible thing or not" should, in fact, be The New Yorker writer's concern. Seabrook would probably point out that the question has no antecedant, because in his world, the World War happened in a context that no longer exists. "The lie of television," Trow wrote, "has been that there are contexts to which television will grant an access. Since lies last, usually, no more than one generation, television will re-form around the idea that television itself is a context to which television will grant an access." That prediction seems to have come true a decade or more ago, with the advent of Letterman and Seinfeld. Today, the context of television has expanded even further: more and more, it seems, all the equipment one needs to go over at cocktail parties is an encyclopedic knowledge of Simpsons episodes. Come to think of it, seeing Seabrook whore his cheerful way through the cultural wasteland doesn't bring Trow's essay to mind at all, or Macdonald's. Instead, it's a bit like watching the Happy Hooker wander through Hersey's Hiroshima, taking notes.Labels: alex, joe bataan, johnnie ray, obituaries, wu-tang clan
posted by Alex
LINK |
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
SUICIDE IS PAINLESS
Johnny Mandel
M*A*S*H
Sony : 1970
[Buy It]
SUICIDE IS PAINLESS
Jimmy Smith
Off The Top
Elektra : 1982
[Buy It]
SUICIDE IS PAINLESS
Carl Tjader
The Shining Sea
Concord : 1981
[Buy It]
SUICIDE IS PAINLESS
The Scott Oakley Trio
Come Home Brother Oakley
Invisible Music : 1996
[Buy It]
SUICIDE IS PAINLESS
Bill Evans
You Must Believe in Spring
WEA : 1977
[Buy It
THEME FROM M*A*S*H
Ahmad Jamal
Jamaica
1974
[Out of Print]
To play it safe is not to play.
- Robert Altman Labels: alex, obituaries
posted by Alex
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Tuesday, May 23, 2006
JUST A KING IN MIRRORS
The Go-Betweens
Peel session: 1984
Available on Before Hollywood [expanded reissue]
Jet/Set : 2002
[Buy It]
NEAR THE CHIMNEY
The Go-Betweens
Studio outtake: 1982-3?
Available on Before Hollywood [expanded reissue]
Jet/Set : 2002
[Buy It]
STATUE
The Go-Betweens
Oceans Apart
Yep Roc: 2005
[Buy It]
BLACK MULE
The Go-Betweens
That Striped Sunlight Sound
Yep Roc: 2006
[Buy It]
As many readers already know, Grant McLennan, who co-founded and co-led The Go-Betweens with Robert Forster from 1978 to 1990 and, in their second incarnation, from 2001 until two weeks ago, died in Brisbane on Saturday, May 6th, at the age of 48. He had been making preparations for a party that evening, complained of not feeling well, went to bed, and never woke up. In the brief interval since the news appeared on the band's official website, nearly 1,500 fans and friends have posted condolences and tributes to the site's message board. Many are from fellow musicians, ranging from Luke Haines (of The Auteurs, whose debut album New Wave is audibly indebted to The Go-Betweens mid-'80s recordings) to Bikini Kill's Tobi Vail. As for me, not just my musical endeavors but probably my personal life would be unimaginably different if not for the 20-plus year relationship I've had with The Go-Betweens' music, so I'm grateful to Alex for inviting me to contribute this note.
In 1977, McLennan was a film-and-literature-obsessed arts student who had never played guitar; he first picked up the bass to learn the songs that the slightly more seasoned Forster had begun writing. (He switched to guitar when the band became a quartet.) But he quickly found his feet as a songwriter: from 1981's Send Me a Lullaby to last year's Oceans Apart, every Go-Betweens full-length was evenly split between the leaders' compositions. In fact, he eventually emerged as the more prolific partner: during the band's 11-year hiatus, he released four solo albums, including the 17-song double-disc Horsebreaker Star, and collaborated on two with The Church's Steve Kilbey as Jack Frost. When he wrote about romantic entanglements, it was with a freshness and specificity that the term "love song" doesn't quite capture. (You could say this of Forster's songs as well.) McLennan's autobiographical songs, evoking his fatherless childhood on a farm in Queensland ("Cattle and Cane," "Unkind and Unwise," "The Ghost and the Black Hat"), were utterly his own, not merely in their subject matter, but in their unconventional, unforced rhythms. In recent blog entries, here, Kilbey recalls the insights into McLennan's methods he got from their writing sessions: "he's got all his songs/written out in one big exercise book/that he musta had since high school...when I first met him grant said he had/thousands of songtitles ready to go." Making songs, it seems, had become one of McLennan's primary ways of responding to the world.
In picking a handful of McLennan songs from the dozens that have been in my head for the last two weeks, I have to begin with the first one I ever heard. "Just A King In Mirrors" is one of his two b-sides to "Part Company," from a 12" single bought at Claremont's Rhino Records in, I think, 1985. (The other, "Newton Told Me," is a cryptic number based on the chord progession to "Lay, Lady, Lay." I have no doubt that McLennan, an avowed Dylan nut, knew this.) I had never so much as heard of the group - and certainly wasn't aware of the awful "critic's band" label they labored under for so many years. I was drawn to their absence from Bleddyn Butcher's cover photo (the skylight of what might be a rural train station, or a sheep-shearing barn), to the uninflected, un-"rock" plainness of their name (I'd never heard of L.P. Hartley's novel or Joseph Losey's film adaptation), and to the lyrics to the a-side (which are Forster's: "that's her handwriting, that's the way she writes") printed on the back. The sleeve had - still has - a slight tear; it cost me 37 cents. The song itself is a bit of a pastiche, as Go-Betweens songs go: the changes and the barstool-hero portrait, too static to be called a narrative, read as country-influenced. But it's also idiosyncratic: the extra two beats in each line of the verse, the way that the leads trouble the harmony (a trademark of the band's first decade, however the guitar duties were split up), the suspended quality of the brief bridge. And, of course, the vividness of the imagery and even the off-rhymes ("scepter"/"spectre") - all these touches make the song's melancholy feel achieved, like something of its own, rather than a quality read off of genre.
Backtracking slightly, "Near the Chimney" is one of the many early songs left unreleased until 2002's reissues of the band's catalog. This one shows up on the bonus disc to 1983's Before Hollywood (the band's second album, and first masterpiece). Musically, it captures the Go-Betweens at their most oblique and enervated, with McLennan still on bass, Forster doing his best to obscure whatever the original chord progression might have been, and the great Lindy Morrison splintering the beat. It's the sound of a band trying to make every moment of what they do a reinvention - or, perhaps, attempting to fit their pop imaginations to the post-punk manners of the time. It takes a few listens to grab hold, but behind the spikiness - and McLennan's urgent art-rock vocal, so different from the even-tempered half-croon he eventually adopted - there's a vivid, vulnerable, and surprisingly well-formed cheating song: "So this is what it comes to/dressing like spies/he won't sleep where another man lies." The reluctant lover who "comes from the long grass" can only be McLennan himself - the wondering country boy of "Cattle and Cane," still disoriented by the ways of the adult world.
I'd be lying if I said I wasn't frustrated by some of McLennan's later, smoother work: it could sometimes seem as though his formal facility at tying a strum pattern, a sharp opening couplet, and a pleasing chorus hook into something song-shaped could lead to pat results. (I suspect he was also finishing one song so he could start the next, which might, every time, turn out to be the one. I know the feeling.) But all the solo records contain gems ("Haven't I Been a Fool," "Riddle in the Rain"), and reuniting with Forster on the three post-hiatus Go-Betweens albums seemed to rekindle his ambition. "Statue" is my favorite from his half of Oceans Apart, an chorusless Symbolist vignette that finds (as I wrote in a Village Voice review) "the singer struggling to bust through some ice maiden's reserve, to say nothing of his own." The arrangement's au courant programmed opening and lush synth oscillations are a world away from the records above - as well they might be, two decades on - but again, the song's heart lies in a vintage McLennan/Forster rhythm/lead division of guitar labor, and in the pockets of unexplored detail - "the songs of Sacha"? Sacha Distel? - tucked into corners of the lyric.
"Black Mule" first appeared on 1991's Watershed, McLennan's first solo album; this solo acoustic version is the first track from That Striped Sunlight Sound, The Go-Betweens' recent, career-spanning live record, on which McLennan appeared satisfied in his achievement and comfortable in his skin. (This bears mentioning because it wasn't always the case: in the mid-'90s, I saw both Forster and McLennan play dispiriting, ill-attended solo shows on separate occasions at Los Angeles' Luna Park. McLennan's ended with a painfully bitter and accusatory song called "Charlatan," which, to my knowledge, he never released.) By way of closing, I'll let the song tell its own story; if there's one thing McLennan knew, it was the power of small mysteries. His songs were his work, his love, his way of understanding the world's strangeness, and of adding to it. Robert Forster has already said that he will no longer use the name he and his partner appropriated PICK from the book that famously begins: "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." The Go-Betweens, as such, are now citizens of that country. McLennan's songs still reside in ours.
- by Franklin BrunoLabels: obituaries
posted by Alex
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