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Weekend Beats: “Miss You”

By the late 1970s the musical residue of the late 1960s had become troublesome ground, given the passage of time’s ability to turn the cool into the passé as well as the rise of genres that challenged first-wave rock’s popular ascendance, some of them enduring (punk) and others (disco) not so much. To be honest, postwar rock had taken some gross turns, like prog.  And the musically abetted idealism of “The Sixties” hadn’t done much in terms of, you know, preventing Nixon or a terrible recession. And a lot of great postwar bands were gone (the Beatles), close to disintegrating (Zeppelin), or on the early slopes of a long decline (the Kinks). And really, the Sixties in general *did* suck (ewww, Baby Boomers as young people are even worse than Boomers as anything else).

The Rolling Stones endured these winds with their standard vulgar genius, so different from the Beatles’ awkwardly self-conscious, cerebral magic. In 1978, as the Clash exploded toward London Calling (1979), the Stones dropped Some Girls. You’ve heard the lead song from this honky-tonk scumbag-disco masterpiece a thousand times, but I’ll bet “Miss You” still feels as urgently dirty as it did the first time you heard it bump. What’s a matter, man? We’re gonna come round at 12 with some Puerto Rican girls that’s just dyyyyyyin to meet you.

Picking the best RS albums is like picking the best Shakespeare, as in about fifty percent of the work they did in their prime could legitimately be called their “best.” On the other hand, this album clears most of the decks: Some Girls is their second-best album, after Sticky Fingers, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise, which is probably, like, eighty percent of Stones fans, given the above-noted reality of all those classics.

Just Stop

Posted on by under Authors, in the news, The Moronic Inferno

Jonathan Franzen is the second best essayist of his generation, just behind David Foster Wallace.* Amanda Hess is the 12,067th best essayist of her generation, so you can imagine the tenor and quality of her burn on Franzen over at “XX,” Slate‘s answer to a question Jezebel never asked. Sure, Franzen should get some ribbing for his long, fist-shaking Guardian article about how just about everything sucks now (even though he’s basically right). But that ribbing shouldn’t read like a drunk-text written by a college sophomore three weeks into her first Media Studies class. Hess writes:

Literature’s preeminent dude-bro took out his frustrations at a girl he “decided” not to have sex with (isn’t that how it always happens!) by fantasizing about old women destroying their bodies as they scrounge after his discarded fortunes. Franzen writes that he learned to overcome his youthful anger when he became a novelist, and was moved to empathize with other humans in the service of great literature; “to imagine what it’s like to be somebody you are not” is the “mental work that fiction fundamentally requires,” he now understands.

But Franzen is less enthused about the prospect of other humans actually responding to his stories—or, God forbid, telling their own stories without the aid of Franzen’s refined literary filter. Since Franzen came into this world in 1959 and human communication promptly went to hell in a handbasket—by the way, does that make Jonathan Franzen one of the horsemen of his own apocalypse?—people who do not look like Jonathan Franzen have leveraged the explosion of literary outlets to publish their own writing, tell their own experiences, and gain voices in the conversation. (Jennifer Weiner has already filed her response to Franzen’s essay in The New Republic, in a piece entitled, “What Jonathan Franzen Misunderstands About Me.”) But Franzen fails to draw any connection between the segregated swimming pools of his youth and his own ability to “find my place” as a writer in the long tail of that old world. Franzen briefly acknowledges the diversity argument just to knock it down. He expresses disappointment with the literary magazine N+1, which he says “denigrates print magazines as terminally ‘male,’ celebrates the internet as ‘female,’ and somehow neglects to consider the internet’s accelerating pauperisation of freelance writers.”

If Franzen had published his wistful German train station anecdote today, the “penny-pinching old German woman” could tweet evidence of Franzen’s insufficient tip; the hot girl could tell the world how their interaction really went down in an xoJane IHTM. That doesn’t mean that writers today have lost the ability to seriously explore the human condition. It means that a much wider and diverse group of humans now has the power to inform privileged literary voices like Franzen about what the conditions are actually like on the ground.

Honestly, I don’t even think Hess knows what she’s trying to say here. Cliched “he’s a bad tipper” Reddit posts and the just pathetic “please, somebody validate me” tripe of the reality TV/blogging/vlogging/TVlogging-sphere are not “conditions on the ground.” They are cries for help from people who can’t deal with the fact that the world hasn’t recognized how special they are, not literary criticism. Jonathan Franzen couldn’t care less about folks tweeting at him, let alone second-rate pop-feminist blogs saying that he does. But as Jennifer Wiener has made clear, there are second careers to be had griping in Franzen’s wake.

*For the record, I think Joan Didion is probably the greatest essayist of any generation.

Koko the Clown drops “St. James Infirmary Blues”

Posted on by under Visual

Labor facts: For Thomas Jefferson, a republic could thrive only with a landed middle class; but for mature capitalism, there was no way or need to secure that fantasy for most; and so for some American artists, that meant streaming fever dreams of failure, loss, and nomadic anger. As Leslie Fiedler points out, we have a native genius when it comes to horror. Exhibit A: Eighty years ago, the Betty Boop softcore empire made a good mini-doc (featuring the voice of Cab Calloway) about working conditions that persist today. Sure, the cartoon might just be about heartbreak, but I enjoy going out on interpretive limbs. I’ve got this all theorized and worked out, trust me. Long live the precariat! Happy Thursday, y’all.

Weekend Beats: Darkness Visible

Posted on by under Weekend Beats

One of the worst things that happens when a really talented artist commits suicide (you know other than the fact that they have committed suicide and are dead FOREVER), is that critics and fans often come to view all of their prior art through the lens of this single, destructive act. There’s nothing funny or subtle about suicide, so Sylvia Plath’s verses get read as odes to how awful the patriarchy is, and her depression comes to stand-in for the poet herself. But Plath’s depression (much less her suicide) didn’t write one of my favorite similes ever; a complex, witty, mean, smart, fucked up, whole woman thinking about motherhood as both entirely natural and unnatural at once did. From “Morning Song”:

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

As I’ve told many students, there are essays within essays contained in that single line. But the popular sense of Plath is that she was the living last line of “Daddy” stripped of any possible irony. She was pure ladyrage driven to its boiling point by the evil Ted Hughes. That version of Plath is not a real person, and we’re worse off as a culture for not coming to grips with all of Plath.

Plath’s fate is no different from Kurt Cobain’s. Nirvana’s In Utero (the band’s best album, in my opinion) turns 20 this year, and of course that means it’s being rereleased with all kinds of extras and stray bits attached. It also means that the Cobain as poete maudite narrative will likely be rehashed. Obviously the guy was depressed. But he was also this:

From this and other accounts, Cobain doesn’t seem like he was the easiest person to deal with. But even saying that is a lot more complex that saying he personified teenage angst or something pat like that. Artists aren’t symbols. Symbols don’t do anything. Only people can. And really talented people do things like this:

Topical Verse: Neruda’s Job Letter

Posted on by under Topical Verse

The boutique styling lab (a Supercuts down the road) where I get my hair cut is across the way from a thrift shop with an above-average paperback selection. The shop, or “shoppe,” as the sign has it, is close to UCSB in a neighborhood where a lot of graduate students live, so it gets quality runoff. Today I went in before driving home and found the City Lights-published, Stanford-curated selection of Pablo Neruda’s poems. It only seems fair to share the good luck, so here is “Poet’s Obligation” (1962), one of his late lyrics:

To whomever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whomever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or harsh prison cell:
to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a great fragment of thunder sets in motion
the rumble of the planet and the foam,
the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,
the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,
and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.

So, drawn on by my destiny,
I endlessly must listen to and keep
the sea’s lamenting in my awareness,
I must feel the crash of the hard water
and gather it up in a perpetual cup
so that, wherever those in prison may be,
wherever they suffer the autumn’s castigation,
I may be there with an errant wave,
I may move, passing through windows,
and hearing me, eyes will glance upward
saying: how can I reach the sea?
And I shall broadcast, saying nothing,
the starry echoes of the wave,
a breaking up of foam and of quicksand,
a rustling of salt withdrawing,
the grey cry of sea-birds on the coast.
So, through me, freedom and the sea
will make their answer to the shuttered heart.

(Trans. Alastair Reid)

Today in Foil Shrines and Monkeyshines

Posted on by under Life of the Mind, Visual

Call me John Ruskin, but when it comes to home decoration, whether aesthetic or functional, it’s hard to beat the work of an obsessive craftsman. Sometimes having a limited set of tools makes for human creations that are even more astonishing. Just look at this! (h/t Dan Pecchenino, co-editor of TGR, and to Slate.com’s The Vault, where you should click some links) The fact that it was made for Henry Ford has kept me chuckling for the past 36 hours.

It reminds me of James Hampton’s The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly. Googling this miracle will make you proud to be human and American. Plus it’s the title of a good (well, often) poetry collection by a fantastic American novelist. A win-win for you.

Damage Control

Posted on by under guides and nudges, The Moronic Inferno

Over at Deadspin they’re running a piece proclaiming 1978’s Superman vs. Muhammad Ali “the greatest” (get the joke, eh? Eh?) comic book ever. This woke up the little nerd who lives inside my gut, because it’s clear these people have never heard of Damage Control, a cluster of comics spread across two decades about a team of engineers using “engineering techniques that are much more advanced than the competition which enables them to perform their job in remarkably short periods of time.” That quote is from Marvel’s Wiki. I apologize for the ghastly phrasing. In any case, the Damage Controllers’ job is cleaning up the mess after superbeings destroy buildings and such. I was lucky (unlucky?) enough to own a copy of Damage Control Vol. 1, #1 when I was a kid (I think I traded a Frank Viola baseball card for it), and I remember feeling confused when I read it. It was basically about working in an office, something both my parents did. I imagine some guild of civil engineers put Marvel up to publishing it. Otherwise, I have no idea why this comic was made, let alone why there have been four limited series. I invite some poor grad student in need of a publication or conference appearance to dive into the wreck (er, stacks) and make a case for why Damage Control is some sort of protest against neoliberal values. Me, I’ll just bask in its bureaucratic glory and think of Frank Viola.

Sporting Chances

Posted on by under Other Critics, sports

In light of Dan’s perspicacious post about the societal burdens of big-time sports, here is some reading to help you intellectualize your version of the general human love of watching young men chase rounded objects and/or injure one another. This afternoon mine entailed watching the Miami Dolphins on the ole flatscreen, as my beloved rotating cast of gladiators, employed by a billionaire from Detroit (postindustrial-dystopia Detroit), did televised battle with the Cleveland (postindustrial-dystopia Cleveland) Browns, who are also owned by a billionaire (one facing federal charges because his company stole money from its customers). Like Dan said: FOOTBALL!

  • “The Legend of Jadeveon Clowney,” from the New York Times. Jadeveon Clowney is going to make a Scrooge-McDuck pile of money playing pro football because he is almost unfathomably talented at aspects of that sport. That’s awesome for him and his family; it’s the opposite of what happens when Meghan McCain or Chelsea Clinton or some other potentate’s child graduates from Stanford then takes a job at the UN. I’m happy that his grandchildren are set for life, provided he obtains sound financial advice. His game is beautiful, an otherworldly blend of spatial intuition, bison strength, ballet-dancer grace, and vicious concentration. Kid is a football genius who makes football aesthetes’ eyes pop out of their heads. But still you wonder what would have happened to Clowney if he weren’t an athletic marvel, if he had a gift for math or writing or painting; or if he were “merely” a reasonably intelligent, average human being; or if he wasn’t all that talented or ambitious and just wanted to manage a hardware store or something. He grew up poor and black in North Carolina. What happens if he isn’t a brilliant entertainment provider? What happens to that kid? The US (especially the South) has developed a superb system for producing football and basketball players.  Imagine if they (we) put that much effort into the academic side of the schools that students like Clowney have to attend whether or not they’re rare athletes.
  • “Roger Federer as Religious Experience,” also from the NY Times. Somewhere in his published Letters, Kingsley Amis remarks that anyone who denies that Shakespeare is the greatest of all English poets can be ignored because they have a second-rate mind. I feel the same way about anybody who claims that David Foster Wallace, who wrote this essay, wasn’t all that good, especially if they dredge up the stupid gripe about how it’s a corny stereotype for young people, especially young (or not-so-young) males, to love his work. DFW isn’t Shakespeare, but nonetheless, fuck you if you aren’t amazed by his nonfiction. You probably don’t like Dr. Johnson, Hazlitt, Didion, Sontag, Edmund Wilson, Lester Bangs, or James Baldwin either. Yeah, I said it: amazed.
  • Baseball Card Vandals is a website you shouldn’t look at if you dislike laughing for extended periods of time.
  • I rode hard for Wright Thompson’s “When the Beautiful Game Turns Ugly” earlier this summer. I ride for it again here. Fantastic pop-ethnography for sports dorks who appreciate history, politics, and the utility of long clauses.

So stop watching sports!

Just kidding. Don’t ever do that.