Patti Smith

By David Ross. Let’s admit it. We all have a weak spot for certain women from the wrong side of the political tracks. Maybe you have little fantasies about discussing Bresson with Susan Sontag while soaping her back in the tub. Maybe you imagine sharing the Sunday paper with Joan Didion. My own weakness – lifelong – is for Patti Smith. I had a girlfriend who gamely stood in line to have Patti sign a CD copy of Horses for me. When she finally got to the front of the queue, she told Patti, “My boyfriend is in love with you.” Patti said, “Doesn’t he notice these grey hairs?” My girlfriend said, “I don’t think he cares.” Well spoken on my behalf.

William Blake offers – perhaps ‘records’ is the more appropriate verb – this exchange with the prophet Isaiah in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

Then I asked: “Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?”
He replied, “All poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination the firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything.” (V, 27-32).

What’s so alluring in the supra-physical sense is Patti’s capacity for this “firm persuasion.” She’s not mugging (like Bono) or merely howling (like Kurt Cobain): her music is a disciplined act of conviction in her own poetic and prophetic calling. One can look awfully silly as a self-styled poet or prophet (Jim Morrison certainly did) but Patti never waivers and never allows the spell to break; we’re convinced in the end because she’s utterly convinced from the start. Arguably, Patti was the last legitimate keeper of the romantic flame itself, that desperate belief in art that began in the late nineteenth century and guttered utterly in our own time.

A bony, boyish waif from Woodbury Gardens, NJ, Smith cut her teeth at the Chelsea Hotel and St. Mark’s Church during the late 1960s and early 1970s, achieving minor underground celebrity as an actress, playwright, rock journalist, artist, and poet. Her chief inspirations were predictable but nonetheless powerful: Rimbaud, Genet, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Dylan, Hendrix, the Rolling Stones. In 1971, she began to recite her poetry to guitarist Lenny Kaye’s accompaniment. By 1976, she had improbably become the most acclaimed female rock star since Janis Joplin and Grace Slick had emerged ten years earlier.

Smith’s first album, Horses (1975), weds cascades of Beat-and Symbolist-inflected poetry to the lean, driving sound of proto-punk garage rock. The album remains a signature argument for the artistry of rock’n’roll and is to my mind one of the ten supreme albums of the rock era. Rolling Stone ranks Horses 44th on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, just behind Dark Side of the Moon. This becomes a backhanded compliment when you consider certain albums that rank higher: the Eagles’ Hotel California (#37), Carol King’s Tapestry (#36), David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (#35), U2’s The Joshua Tree (#26), Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours (#25), and Michael Jackson’s Thriller (#20). Preferring Tapestry to Horses is like preferring Jennifer Aniston to Veronica Lake – an aesthetic misjudgment that raises questions about one’s entire world view.

Judge for yourself: here is the epic studio version of “Birdland,” Smith’s fantastic synthesis of Arthur C. Clarke, Shelley’s Queen Mab, and the Book of Revelations. Ponder also these scruffy, raging, nearly epileptic live versions of “Horses” and “Gloria.” Continue reading Patti Smith

YouTube Jukebox: David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon Commencement Speech

Author David Foster Wallace.

By David Ross. Every so often I dip into contemporary literature to confirm my sense that I’m not missing very much. I recall forays into the work of Paul Auster, Angela Carter, Douglas Coupland, Dave Eggers, Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Franzen, Michel Houellebecq, Jay MacInerney, Cormac McCarthy, Rick Moody, Chuck Palahniuk, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterston, and other passing fancies of Time and Newsweek. Zadie Smith waits her turn on my shelf. All this sifting of silt has produced only a few glinting nuggets. I discovered in Houellebecq a fierce and welcome fellow despiser of modernity (see my comments here), and something even more in David Foster Wallace: a vast nineteenth-century mind struggling to find itself.

The “covering cherub,” in Blake’s parlance, was the postmodernism that DFW formally embraced against the grain of his personality. He was profoundly sincere, empathetic, and humane, a believer in “the sub-surface unity of things,” as he puts it in his famous Kenyon graduation address of May 2005, and yet devoted his career to self-conscious intricacies of irony and gamesmanship. He made great art in this mode – only Nabokov and Borges are his postmodern betters – but it was not, I can’t help feeling, the art he was born to make.

I have additional misgivings about his prose, though he is the only prose writer of his generation even worth noting. While meticulously attentive to his art, he was ambivalent about the formality of his art, the ideal of the well-wrought urn. His language is often splendid, but always splendid despite a certain scruffiness and loose-limbed sprawl. My eye is always instinctively performing the function of an editor, pruning, reshaping. He was too invested in his own unpretentiousness, too much infected with the modern American ideal of jeans and sandals, which ultimately expresses a yearning to be liked, to be no better or different than the rest of the crowd. I suppose this is the symbolic meaning of DFW’s hallmark bandana, an accouterment of kitchen and field workers, housewives and athletes. Great writers don’t care about being liked. They scorn our right to judge. They discover themselves amid the execrations of the crowd.

Even with his foibles and arguable failings totted up, DFW was the redeemer of his literary generation. He saved it from the humiliation of being the first generation in American history to lay nothing – not the least nosegay – on the graves of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. He saved it from the gaping wound of a great naught.

DFW’s rightly famous Kenyon Commencement Speech (here and here) has become a pop-cultural touchstone. Perhaps enthusiasm for it has already become a bit of a cliché. Yet I defy anybody to listen attentively without succumbing to its moral seriousness and sinking into an inner hush just as the initially boisterous Kenyon audience stills into an outer hush. In the guise and moment of his speech, DFW defies the default setting of the culture. He sheds his celebrity – the unpeelable skin of the Oprah era – and becomes the conduit and servant of a message more urgent than himself. Thus Emerson spoke from the podium of the Concord lyceum.

Alex Niven, a friend of a friend, comments intelligently on the speech and on much else concerning DFW.

Posted on August 24th, 2011 at 2:04pm.

An Independent Film Hall of Fame

Cybill Shepherd in "The Last Picture Show."

By David Ross. “Independent film” is defined by its circumvention of the Hollywood production mechanism, but this is incidental. The issue is not process but content. Independent film is an indigenous American genre just like the science-fiction film, the noir film, and the Western. Its chief attribute is loquacity. Talk is cheap – literally – and independent movies have made a virtue of necessity by rediscovering what Hollywood can afford to forget: that dialogue is the basis of drama. Less cardinal but still defining attributes include gritty naturalism (almost always urban), cultural and moral skepticism, a penchant for irony and deadpan, identification with pitiable outsiders and addled anti-heroes, impatience with traditional sequential narrative, appreciation for the retro, and a certain seated or merely ambulatory anti-kinesis (not a few films, like Slackers and Before Sunrise, narrate a literal walk). Independent film disdains the happy ending and could not care less about sex or sexiness or conventional good looks (hence Steve Buscemi). The operative politics tend to be amorphously anti-establishmentarian, but too skeptical to be actively liberal. I could make an excellent argument for the conservatism of films like Annie Hall (1997), Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), and A Serious Man (2009).

The films of the “Easy Rider, Raging Bull” era – films like John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969), Peter Bogdanovich’s Last Picture Show (1971), Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), and Sydney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon – heralded the independent film movement, but were not strictly seminal. They yearned to be epic, mythic, and culturally central, with John Ford, Howard Hawks, and John Huston  in mind. Independent cinema would later snort at these manly pretensions, settling for a peripheral and ironic self-awareness, like the satirical wallflower at the high school dance.

The first true – and possibly best – independent film was Annie Hall. Inspired by European conversationalists like Ingmar Bergman and Eric Rohmer, Woody Allen created an aggressively small and verbal film in an era of equally aggressive hypertrophy and hyperactivity. Perhaps even more to the point, Annie Hall was a quietly scathing critique of the post-sixties liberal and pop-cultural order, setting the tone for a whole generation of filmmakers united by the instinct that “something is wrong,” though skeptical of their own capacity for overt social statement in the style of seventies masterpieces like A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Network (1976). Gabby symposia like Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre (1981) and Barry Levinson’s Diner (1982) further crystallized the verbal and essentially seated nature of the genre. Continue reading An Independent Film Hall of Fame

UPDATED: A Clockwork Orange, The Brontes & The London Riots

Malcolm McDowell as Alex DeLarge in "A Clockwork Orange."

[EDITOR’S NOTE: The New York Post’s Kyle Smith suddenly has a column out today (8/17) entitled “The Clockwork riots,” which compares the London riots to both the Burgess and Kubrick versions of A Clockwork Orange, referring to the “prophetic” nature of those works, as well as to the ongoing crime “orgy” in London. No attribution is made to Libertas. This seems to be a striking coincidence. We would appreciate a clarification from Mr. Smith.]

By David Ross. A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick’s classic interpretation of Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel, is no longer prophetic. It is actual. The realization of its vision is unmistakable as London mobs of juvenile miscreants burn and loot, differing from Malcolm McDowell’s Alex DeLarge only insofar as they would not be caught dead listening to Beethoven. We are witnessing the nanny state eventuate in its logical terminus: abdication of personal responsibility, dissolution of purpose, collapse of belief, crippling unconscious sense of one’s own infantilization. As Mark Steyn says, “Big government means small citizens.”

This seems to me the movie’s crucial exchange:

Tramp: Well, go on, do me in you bastard cowards! I don’t want to live anyway, not in a stinking world like this!
Alex: Oh? And what’s so stinking about it?
Tramp: It’s a stinking world because there’s no law and order anymore! It’s a stinking world because it lets the young get on to the old, like you done. Oh, it’s no world for an old man any longer. What sort of a world is it at all? Men on the moon, and men spinning around the earth, and there’s not no attention paid to earthly law and order no more.

“No attention paid to Earthly law and order” is a curious and pregnant phrase. The tramp wants to complain not merely about crime, but about alienation from something more fundamental than the penal code. The exasperated allusion to “men on the moon” implicates that rationalism and materialism of a post-religious age. Seduced by our new powers of knowledge and control, we’ve lost sight of basic truths and duties.

Just now I’m reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1857 biography of Charlotte Bronte. As the yobs spread their mayhem, I can’t help thinking of the three Bronte sisters, their mother dead, their two elder sisters dead, no schooling to speak of, no money to speak of, nothing but the cold and howling Yorkshire wind for company, and yet toiling to master French, German, politics, history, and literature, and eventually promulgating, from the nursery of a provincial parsonage, one of the great literary sprees in all history. How is it that their kind has become so utterly inconceivable?

Continue reading UPDATED: A Clockwork Orange, The Brontes & The London Riots

YouTube Jukebox: Tony Rice

By David Ross. The kiddy culture – the culture of sneakers, fast food, and video games – has subsumed the adult culture; or rather adolescents have stopped graduating from one to the other. Thus, as I read in Mark Steyn’s latest tome, the chilling and funerary After America, “males 18 to 34 years old play more video games than kids: according to a 2006 Nielsen survey, 48.2 percent of men in that demographic amused themselves in that way for an average of two hours and forty-three minutes every day – that’s thirteen minutes longer than the 12- to 17-year-olds” (181). Kay Hymowitz provides the definitive account of the new “child-man” in City Journal.

The kiddy world is characterized by impulse; the adult world by purpose. The kiddy world belongs to the playpen of the present moment; the adult world tethers itself to both past and future. The kiddy world passively imitates and downloads; the adult world discriminates and invents.

If I had to offer a living symbol of the “adult world” – its tenderness, stoicism, rigor, mature calm – I would point to Tony Rice’s version of “Shenandoah.” I would say to our thirtysomething sneaker-wearers, this is what it means to be grown up, to carry yourself like a man.

Posted on August 15th, 2011 at 10:34am.

Kinkade & The Art Establishment

By David Ross. Every so often liberal big leaguers take a whack at Thomas Kinkade, the king of mall and mail-order art, the entrepreneurial painter laureate of what Jed Pearl calls “Wal-Mart America.” His depictions of gingerbread cottages nestled in what seem to be sleepy Cotswold hamlets are beloved by the masses and equally detested by people who consider themselves – by virtue of college degrees and the occasional glass of white wine with dinner – Blue State sophisticates. In 2001, Susan Orlean gave Kinkade the once-over in the New Yorker (see here), though she semi-restrained her snark on the grounds that Kinkade’s buffoonery speaks for itself. Pearl has now followed suit with an inchoate piece of hostility – titled “Bullshit Heaven” no less – in The New Republic. Extending the toilet metaphor, Pearl concludes that Kinkade has “urinated on us all.”

There’s no denying that Kinkade’s art is pure kitsch, a confection of Christmas-card nostalgia derived from Wordsworth at his most fey, Norman Rockwell at his most precious, and whoever first had the idea of painting and mass-producing scenes of beagles playing poker. His cotton-candy shire scenes look as if model trains should be running through them or Hobbits should be peeking from the windows. I would no more hang a Kinkade in my living room than a poster of Ashton Kutcher in the buff.

The blame is usually – okay, always – directed at putative yahoos who clamor for this kind of thing and create demand for what were better handled like dog poo in the street (quick condescending glance, wide berth). Articles about Kinkade are never really about Kinkade; they are about the people who buy Kinkade. Essentially, they license the readers of the New Yorker and The New Republic to look down on “Wal-Mart America” from a standpoint of cultural and aesthetic superiority. Their real substance, in other words, is Blue State-Red State politics.(I wonder, by the way, whether a film like Winter’s Bone doesn’t exploit the same condescension.) Continue reading Kinkade & The Art Establishment