American Idle

"Pictures Generation" Post No. 1: The Aura of the Original Work of Art

I have many things to say about "The Pictures Generation" show at the Met, which I trekked up to New York to see last weekend. And I will say all of them. But not today. Today I only want to point out how shocked I was to learn-- and at a museum, of all places-- that I had been trapped for years in a completely false supposition about one of my favorite songs of all time.

The song in question: the Cocteau Twins' "Song to the Siren." A pop music masterpiece, it is built around the sparest of melodies-- just a few chords, strummed at intervals so wide that the vocals have plenty of room to float in and around them. 

As for the vocals themselves, I can't think of a more moving performance. But really, what would one expect from Elizabeth Fraser? Much of the song's power comes from her phrasing and dramatic changes of register, which always seem natural and effortless, never forced or showy.

Here are two Cocteau versions of the song, the first from the "This Mortal Coil" album on which their version was originally released and the second from a live television performance.

Yes, the first video is goofy, with Robin Guthrie coming about on a lazy susan in his long leather coat and cotton ball hair. And in the second, the song's pace is accelerated to the extent that it's not quite the same song, the speed sacrificing a good deal of its depth of feeling. Nevertheless, you see what I mean. You see how magical this song is, and understand why I've remained attached to it for 25 years.

So there I am in New York last weekend, walking through one of the "Pictures Generation" galleries, when I hear this familiar but not so familiar tune. Unheimlich. It was coming from a room set apart from the exhibition, in which was recreated a 1977 installation by the young David Salle called "Bearding the Lion in His Den." 

The installation includes two wall-mounted photos and a floor-mounted bank of lights. It also includes, on continuous loop, a version of "Song to the Siren" by its original composer, Tim Buckley. That's right. "Song to the Siren" isn't a Cocteau Twins song. It's a Tim Buckley song. One of my favorite songs of all time is a mere cover!

Each new discovery delivers a litle thrill. But this one also brought a kind of sadness. I mean, it's not like finding out your dad is really your uncle, or anything like that, but when you hold something close to your heart, you like to think you know it intimately. You like to think that. All kinds of lessons there.

The World's Strangest Living Author (Well, One of Them, at Least)

It had been a few years since I'd heard anything about William T. Vollman.

So naturally, I presumed he was dead. You know, killed by some crackheads, or skinheads, or another of the kind of essentially empty-heads with whom he was notorious for hanging out.

Not so, it turns out. Today's New York Times has a longish piece on the neo-marginalist writer, on the occasion of the publication of his forbiddingly lengthy new book, Imperial.

Mr. Vollmann’s newest book, “Imperial,” which comes out from the Viking Press on Thursday, costs $55 and is 1,300 pages long — so heavy, he observed recently, that if you dropped it, you’d break a toe. A companion volume, to be published next month by powerHouse Books, contains some 200 photographs he took while working on “Imperial,” for which he also wore a spy camera while trying to infiltrate a Mexican factory, and paddled in an inflatable raft down the New River in California, a rancid trench that is probably the most polluted stream in America. The water, he writes, tasted like the Salk polio vaccine.

Mr. Vollmann, who just turned 50, is a loner, a bit of a recluse, despite being married and the father of a daughter, and a throwback: a wandering, try-anything writer-journalist in the tradition of Steinbeck or Jack London. Some people think he’s a little nuts.

By the way, isn't that photo one of the most remarkable portraits you've ever seen? (Click to enlarge.)

DFW Posthumous Novel; Circumstances of Death

A piece in today's Washington Post relates that this week's New Yorker will contain "a short excerpt from the novel"-- it's to be called The Pale King-- "as well as a long article on Wallace by D.T. Max that tells the story of the unfinished work."

According to the Post, the Max essay contains speculation [UPDATE: as it turns out, much more than speculation; the piece is already up on The New Yorker's website ] about the circumstances of Wallace's death. The paper's paraphrase:

After his diagnosis of depression as an undergraduate, he had been on medication.... He [recently] decided to wean himself from the antidepressant Nardil -- a decision that may have had fatal consequences, though nothing about suicide is ever certain -- in part, Max writes, because he thought the drug "might be getting in the way of The Pale King. "

The Post report also includes a line that might function as something of an epitaph. Not long before his death Wallace apparently wrote, in a letter to novelist Don DeLillo, "I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today."

About the Max essay: read it.

Maybe Not "Saints," But Close

While in New York a few weeks ago, one of my employment-related contacts was a friend of a friend who works in the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. My goal was a job as a press officer for that or another U.N. agency.

The more I learned about what he and his U.N.H.C.R. colleagues did—the camps, the logistics, the danger to the relief workers and refugees alike—the less I believed I was equipped to explain those hardships to anyone.

A recent piece in The New Yorker only hammered that point home. The January 5th issue features an article by Jonathan Harr entitled “Lives of the Saints.” It details the conditions in eastern Chad, just across the border from Darfur.

Along that border, the U.N.H.C.R. oversees the operation of twelve refugee camps with a population of nearly two hundred and fifty thousand Sudanese who have fled to Chad to escape death, mayhem, and ethnic cleansing.

Harr’s article begins with this assessment of conditions at those outposts: “Everything is fine, until the moment when it is not. And when that moment comes it can be very quick and very bad.”

The danger around whose immanence the piece revolves is the approach of Chadian rebel groups, who, in the course of trying to overthrow that country’s government, have been known to commit everything from robbery to murder at the camps and the bases of any and all relief organizations—not just the U.N.H.C.R., but also the World Food Program, the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, among others.

I can imagine few professions over which fear casts as much of a shadow. The aid workers labor under perpetual psychological stress.

The United Nations classifies eastern Chad as a level-E duty station, the most extreme of its five hardship categories. In the normal rotation, these employees must remain here for at least two years before they can apply for another duty station. They receive hardship pay and, for every six weeks in country, one week of leave, which they are required to take for their psychological well-being.

Harr’s piece also includes the most economically terrifying account of how the situation arose in the first place.

The great diaspora from Darfur began in the spring of 2003, when the government of Sudan, led by a regime of Arab supremacists, embarked on a campaign to crush an uprising by the black African farmers of Darfur. The government’s strategy was to obliterate the villages in which the rebellion had arisen. The favored tactic was to drop rudimentary bombs—fifty-five-gallon drums packed with explosives and scrap metal—from old Antonov cargo planes, followed by an assault on the villagers by mounted Arab militias known as the janjaweed, the “demons on horseback.” The janjaweed killed those who had not fled into the bush, poisoned wells with their corpses, raped girls and women, set buildings ablaze, destroyed stocks of food and seed, trampled fields, and hacked down fruit trees.

Tens of thousands of villagers, most of them women and children, set off across the bleak Sahel landscape in search of refuge. Many dispersed throughout Darfur, and others headed toward the border with Chad. They arrived in Chad with few possessions, and camped on the outskirts of villages and towns. For the most part, the Chadian villagers greeted them with compassion, offering water and food. The refugees hoped to return soon to their homeland, but, as the months wore on, more refugees arrived, bearing horrific accounts of janjaweed atrocities in one village after another.

I’m not without reservations in suggesting that you read the piece. But I found fascinating its candid description of the people who offer themselves up to this lifestyle—people who, in Harr’s words, come to such places “in search of adventure in an exotic locale, and inspired by a vague desire to do good,” some of whom “end up devoting their lives to the work,” and others who, quite justifiably unable to handle it, “come and go within six months or a year.”

(Nothing Less Than) The Future of Journalism

Finally I’ve heard someone enunciate what I’ve been thinking to myself for quite some time: that the only way for news organizations as we know them to survive is on the non-profit model.

I remember that as early as 2005 my most thought-provoking conversations about the demise of print journalism were with then-cohorts Lawrence Donegan, of the UK Guardian, and Bob Harig, formerly of Florida’s St. Petersburg Times. Why? Because both those papers are funded by non-profits—the Guardian out of the Scott Trust , and the Times by the Poynter Institute. The steadiness of their funding was the reason those reporters and their papers were perhaps less panicked than others about waning ad revenue (and indeed the seemingly inevitable collapse of the ad-revenue model of business altogether).

On today’s Kojo Nnamdi show (click to listen) on NPR—yes, also a non-profit—journalism scholar Charles Lewis pointed out that non-profit media organizations

are not new. The largest news organization in the world is the Associated Press, which is a non-profit. NPR is the only news organization in America that’s doubled its audience in the last ten years—that’s 25-30 million listeners for a non-profit…. So can you do these things as a non-profit? Really, there’s no question about this. And there are non-profit newspapers. The Christian Science Monitor has for years been a non-profit. They’re had some issues lately. But “Can it be done?” is not a question. It has been done. It is done.

Continuing, Lewis also mentions the St. Pete Times and Guardian.

Why makes this so important?

Well, consider the world without a fourth estate. Which is to say, without watchdogs whose reputations, resources and clout at least attempt to keep government, corporations, et al. accountable. The stakes are indeed considerable. Says Lewis,

There were 21,000 newspaper jobs lost last year. Every major paper has lost hundreds of journalists, collectively thousands of journalist throughout the nation. That’s the problem. There is this hemorrhage going on, this diaspora of immensely talented journalists with nowhere to work. And it’s a democracy issue now. It’s much larger than journalism.

Yes. It bears repeating: it’s a democracy issue now. It’s much larger than journalism.

What would it take for a major news organization to refashion itself as a non-profit? A $500 million - $1 billion endowment, Lewis estimates. So, there’s one thing The New York Times can do with the cash it gets from mortgaging its new headquarters.

Clearly, journalism's old institutions have to retool themselves in other ways, too—to begin with, by remaking themselves as television stations, because that, in the internet age, is what will carry the day. (More of that little bit of soothsaying another time.) For now, however, what’s pressing seems (at least to these two Lewises) to be to transition from one model of operating capital to the other—while there’s time to use current, traditional revenue streams to help fund the process, and while there are enough brand-loyal traditionalists out there to help with the (again, NPR-modeled) consumer underwriting that will probably also have to be part of future operating costs.

The Village Voice in Its Heyday

If you're like me, you're way behind on your New Yorkers. Indeed, I measure how busy I've been by the height of the stack of unread back issues in the corner of the room.

Why not just throw the old ones away? Because one would risk missing a gem like the January 5, 2009 edition, almost every one of whose features is clip and save-worthy.

On this blog there may eventually be more than one post about this issue's contents. For now, though, I'd like to talk specifically about Louis Menand's piece on The Village Voice, "It Took a Village." More than just an article about a magazine, it manages to be a tidy little nine-page history of post-War literary New York, deep focus on the Cedar Tavern/White Horse/San Remo scene, where, in Anatole Broyard's famous formulation, "If it hadn't been for books, we'd have been completely at the mercy of sex."

Menand nominates as the Voice's most representative voice the illustrator Jules Feiffer. His comic strips-- usually, a guy sitting alone at a bar, carping about some perceived injustice-- expressed a kind of equal-opportunity contempt: they, like the entire paper, were not only critical of the establishment, but also "maintained, on the whole, a skeptical detachment from the hippies and the radical left."

The meat of Menand's piece is the argument that the paper accomplished far more than simply expressing a neighborhood's worldview. He broadly claims that the Voice "changed journalism, because it changed the idea of what it was to be a journalist."

One of the services the piece performs is furnishing a syllabus of great, originary works of the New Journalism.

They were pieces like Lillian Ross’s profile of Ernest Hemingway, “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” (The New Yorker, 1950); Tom Morgan’s “What Makes Sammy Jr. Run?” (Esquire, 1959) and “Brigitte Bardot: Problem Child” (Look, 1960); and Gay Talese’s profile of Floyd Patterson, “The Loser” (Esquire, 1964), and his immortal “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (Esquire, 1965). The stylistic markers of the New Journalism were in all those pieces. The trick was expanding the range of subjects, downward into strange subcultures and outward into political campaigns and, eventually, the war in Vietnam. New subject matter was as much the point of the development as new technique.

Note that none of those pieces was published in the Voice. Neither was Mailer's "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," (Esquire, Sept. 1960, the month Kennedy was elected President) nor Tom Wolfe's "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" (Esquire, 1963). Which considerably weakens Menand's assertion that the Voice changed journalism. It would seem that Esquire (as is commonly held) was the revolution's Ground Zero.

The lynchpin of Menand's argument is Clay Felker, an editor at Esquire on many of those landmark pieces. In 1974 Felker assumed control of the Voice... but stayed only two years. Menand seems to want to say that Felker's stamp on the Voice made it a kind of New Journalism beacon. It seems a lot safer, however, to toe the line, say that Esquire was the true trend-setter, and allow that the Voice was less influencer than influenced.

Not that I'm knocking Menand. He's by far my favorite New Yorker writer. His is not a name (like Gladwell or Paumgarten) that you'd think of looking for in the table of contents. But when you come across it as you make your way through an issue, you invariably think, "Cool. Here's a guy whose work I always enjoy-- who's a real master at beautifully crafted, every-word-in-its-right-place, sneaky-funny journalism. (The SI readers among you will think in this context of John Garrity.)

Menand also has an entertaining habit of smuggling into each of his pieces what I'll call Casually Dropped Truths. Exemplum gratia from the Voice article: about the universality of Feiffer's and the Voice's contempt, Menand writes:

They loved the Voice on Madison Avenue. Feiffer’s characters were sometimes business types and politicians, but they were also sometimes caricatures of the sort of people one would imagine to be Voice readers—beatniks, lounge lizards, modern dancers. The hip was mocked as much as the square. This was also an attribute of the new comedy: it made fun of the establishment, but it was not antiestablishment. It was merely disillusioned, which is the place where all comedy begins and ends.

"It was merely disillusioned, which is the place where all comedy begins and ends." I love it. You can almost hear Menand snickering to himself as he types the words. While at the same time being firmly convinced that what he says is true.

In any case, the piece is-- if you're like me, and perhaps even if you're not-- a real pleasure to read. I know: I'm probably biased. I grew up with the Voice. If memory serves, it, along with the Times and the New Musical Express, were the only things I actually read when I was in high school. (If you asked me whose work defined the Voice for my generation, I'd say Greg "Ironman" Tate and Geoffrey Stokes, whose "Press Clips," I'd argue, was in its era the Voice's signature column.) One way or the other, these have got to be nine of the best pages in your own personal stack of unread New Yorkers. Don't neglect 'em!

Web 2.0 for Advocacies and Non-Profits

Many advocacies and non-profits in Washington-- interest piqued by the grand success of my.barackobama.com-- are currently looking at ways to implement web 2.0 plays for their websites. While speaking with some of them about employment possibilities, I did a little video presentation to offer up a few conversation starters. (Double-click on the video for better quality video.)

Radio On: LA, the ATL, DC and WNYC (and Johann Johannsson)

It's amazing how much a great radio station can contribute to a city's quality of life. When I left L.A., one of the things I missed most sorely was KCRW-- Jason Bentley's "Metropolis" in my car at the beginning of a night out,* for example, or Chris Douridas providing the soundtrack for my third and fourth cups of coffee on "Morning Becomes Eclectic" (before the show was taken over by the awful, singer/songwriter-narcotized Nick Harcourt).

I missed KCRW all the more because the NPR outlet that greeted me when I moved to Atlanta has to be the worst in the country. (I have done the research: in this sentiment I am far from alone.) The music: classical, which in principle is fine by me. But WABE's selection is the most banal classical music imaginable. Usually it is the kind of stuff you hear on TV commercials. Wait. Actually, it is worse: it's usually the kind of stuff you hear on hold. When it isn't, it's Sousa marches-- so many, in fact, that you can't help but think that the station's chief music programmer is ex-Marines. Let us not forget the station's traffic reports, interrupting "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered with mispronunciations of local street names, not to mention the local news segments that-- unbelievably on an NPR outlet-- often had a vicious rightward slant.**

D.C. is just weird. I don't think there is any music at all on the capital radio dial-- I think it's nothing but politics. Seriously. By my third day there, it had gotten so that I could identify by voice dozens of Representatives and Senators. Every act of turning on the car radio began another game of Name That Politician.

<Click.> "...hope the stimulus package..." I can name that pol in 7 syllables! It's Barbara Boxer!

<Click.> "...necessarily true that more spending can get us out..." Mitch McConnell! 

Which brings us to New York, the other of the two cities running for My Place of Residence.

Specifically, it brings us to WNYC-FM.

I want to say I had forgotten how cool WNYC is, but the truth is I didn't really appreciate it when I used to live here. My roommate Oscar had it on all the time, starting me on my clearly incurable NPR addiction, but also habituating me to having classical music on as background music pretty much all day.

But WNYC's classical music-- and this is my point, if indeed I have one here-- isn't just classical music. At least not in the Greatest Hits of 1852 sense. It's an awful lot of new music, too. Thinking back to the Oscar apartments, I inadvertently took in a lot of Kronos Quartet, Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, and a lot of other great stuff that even now I can't put a name to-- stuff that expanded my musical palate without my even knowing it.

I guess that now I am a more appreciative radio listener. Because now, having planted my clock radio on the beside table in Herr U.'s Hell's Kitchen apartment, I am beginning to learn just how wide-ranging and forward-looking the station's playlist has (presumably always) been.

The best current example I can offer is their late night show "New Sounds," to which I've been listening right before bed every night during my recent sojourns in Manhattan.

Actually, judging by "New Sounds," WNYC's is probably more adventurous now than it's ever been. What brought this into sharp resolve for me, and prompted these scribblings, was the show's Jan. 12 edition (check out set list and listen here), which prominently featured work by an Icelandic artist named Johan Johannsson.

Specifically, it featured a track called "The Rocket-Builder" (above; double-click for higher-quality video) from an extended piece called Fordlandia, a meditation on the failed 1920's experiment by Henry Ford to set up a community in Brazil solely devoted to producing rubber for tires for his cars.

It's a fascinating bit of history. (Pic of disused factory, left.) From Wikipedia:

Ford intended to use Fordlândia to provide his company with a source of rubber for the tires on Ford cars, avoiding the dependence of British (Malayan) rubber. The land was hilly, rocky and infertile. None of Ford's managers had the requisite knowledge of tropical agriculture. The rubber trees, packed closely together in plantations, as opposed to being widely spaced in the jungle, were easy prey for tree blight and insects. The mostly indigenous workers on the plantations, given unfamiliar food such as hamburgers and forced to live in American style housing, disliked the way they were treated — they had to wear ID badges, and to work midday hours under the tropical sun — and would often refuse to work. In 1930, the native workers actually revolted against the managers, many of whom fled into the jungle for a few days until the Brazilian Army arrived and the revolt ended.

Ford forbade any drinking or even smoking cigarettes within the town, including inside the workers' own homes. A settlement was established five miles upstream on the "Island of Innocence" with bars, nightclubs, and brothels.

Anyhow, I instantly fell in love with this piece and listened to it compulsively for pretty much a week. I must say that part of its charms was its being on 4AD records, the home-label of (among other acts dear to my heart) the Cocteau Twins. (Frankly, I was surprised to learn 4AD still existed.)

As you can see from the afore-linked "New Sounds" info, other nights that week offered up pieces by Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, and all sorts of people whose recorded tracks, until recently, would never have been afforded the honorific "pieces," never mind played on a "classical" radio station.

The openness of thinking of the folks over at WNYC-- wonderful. Really encouraging. Impossible to think of encountering in any other city in America (except maybe L.A., now that Harcourt's gone from KCRW).

Not insignificant encouragement to made New York my next home city. A real factor in New York's favor. Yes, this kind of stuff is important to me. I mean, not as important as friends or gainful employment, of course, but pretty darned important.

Footnotes:

*Surely the (present and former) Angelinos among you recognize the feeling I'm talking about-- to me, part of the very essence of living in LA during the late 'nineties and early 'aughts. I get a shiver just thinking about Bentley talking over the end of the show opener-- a long, dark DJ Shadow or Portishead remix, maybe, at, say, about 8:05 p.m., just as I pulled onto the 10 East, full of anticipation for the evening ahead, and also for what cool, cool stuff Jason was going to play for me before I reached my first port of call.

** Seriously. Just listen to the crap that came spewing out of my radio on the local news fill the morning after the November election. WABE led with local reaction not to Obama's win (why do that? not like Atlanta's largely African-American or anything!) but with McCain supporters describing the result as "another 9/11," not once, but twice. Far too horrifying to have been a joke.

Media Hands Ball to AP; AP Drops Ball

I wouldn’t consider Roger Ebert the torchbearer for My Kind of Film Criticism, but the old thumbs-up-or-downer has lashed out against the latest arts media standards plunge: the Associated Press’s imposition of “a 500-word limit on all of its entertainment writers.” The affected product includes all “reviews, interviews, news stories, trend pieces and "’thinkers’" (that is, think pieces).

Worse, the AP wants its writers on the entertainment beat to focus more on the kind of brief celebrity items its clients apparently hunger for. The AP, long considered obligatory to the task of running a North American newspaper, has been hit with some cancellations lately, and no doubt has been informed what its customers want: Affairs, divorces, addiction, disease, success, failure, death watches, tirades, arrests, hissy fits, scandals, who has been "seen with" somebody, who has been "spotted with" somebody, and "top ten" lists of the above. (Celebs "seen with" desire to be seen, celebs "spotted with" do not desire to be seen.)

What makes this development so frightening (I mean, beyond the craven demands of the newspapers) is the AP's position in today's media. Newspapers, of course, are firing reporters by dozens (if not hundreds), not only in the arts, but in sports, politics and everywhere else. What's filling the inches is AP wire stores. Take a look at your local paper. All those pages that used to be written by people based in your town are now produced by that very news service. If AP's not going to give us anything to read-- I mean actually read-- that's a big dent in the intelligence and value of our nation's papers.

Truth to tell, local papers never gave us great arts coverage in the first place. (I challenge you-- unless you live in New York or L.A.-- to find a non-AP "thinker" anywhere in your local paper's archives.) What's really at issue here is the wire service's willingness to shorten it up and dumb it down. They provide a colossal proportion of our nation's news. And if they won't give us expansive, intelligent discussion of current films-- and politics, and sports, and business, et al.-- then where are we going to get it?

Think of it this way: where length is considered, the AP wants to be more like the USA Today. As for content, they want to be more like Us Weekly. Nothing like progress.

First Annual Atlanta One-on-None Basketball Tourney

Okay, okay. Alright already. By popular demand, here's the samizdat video.