Art and Madness

Artists are (sometimes) bonkers. Many of us who are in the game know this, and understand the reality of it. Are psychiatrists bonkers? Judging by what just happened in Texas, probably. How about lawyers and politicians? Probably; the human race often seems pretty bonkers, actually. But in the hierarchy of madness, artists are at least “up there.” I defy any artist worth his or her salt to deny this. Maybe it’s because art is so connected to extremities— of feeling, form, and thought. Maybe it’s because artists are more in touch with the collective unconscious, with impulses and images that float around, waiting to be captured. Maybe it’s the separation from the comforts of mundane life that many of us eschew. In the end, it doesn’t matter that much, because art is funny— once you’re in, it’s very hard to get out. William S. Burroughs forgot to mention that art, like language, is a virus from outer space. But it’s a virus that makes some of our lives worth living, even if the vast majority of human beings get along alright without it. I thought it might be useful to show a few instances in which madness can actually help artists create. The examples I’ve chosen are not people who lost it forever, but rather artists that went through a period of darkness that enabled them to create something extraordinary. As has become customary, the movie segment is different, and has to do with the madness of a specific character and how it makes a movie work. But, within or without, madness it is.

Devoted David Bowie fans can argue endlessly about what his best album is. I’m not going to pull an arsehole move and say THIS is his best album; I’ll simply say that Station to Station, which was released (I believe) the week I was born (2/76), is my favorite. I don’t like it specifically because Bowie almost went mad making it, but, for better or for worse, it does add to the album’s aura. Most serious rock fans know the stories involved— Kabbalah, Los Angeles, cocaine, witches, pentagrams, Aleister Crowley. What’s important is that Bowie integrated these things into the album, without turning it into a comic book, the way that someone like Jimmy Page did. Actually, some things no one (to my knowledge) has even spotted. Like on the CD insert, not only is Bowie doodling the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, he has the planetary attributions filled in as well. There was some serious immersion going on here, occult wise; but it wouldn’t matter, if the quality of the album weren’t also uncanny. Bowie seemed (again, for better or for worse) literally to have channeled and harnessed all these occult energies into viable art, a musical synthesis that put soul, disco, Kraut-rock, Euro, straight rock, funk, and torch songs into a blender and came out with a unique, irreplaceable whole. And, from everything he’s said, went through absolute hell doing it.

T.S. Eliot, also, had an interest in the occult, but was inclined to be patronizing about it. Thus, you get the ditsy tarot card reader in The Waste Land, his most famous poem, and the drowning man, and the man with three staves. How many people know that Eliot composed what became (in Ezra Pound’s judicious hands, and editing this poem could be the most important thing Pound ever did) Waste Land in a sanitarium in Switzerland? The pressures of working at a bank and living with a mentally unstable woman had driven Eliot to the brink. So, he produced roughly forty pages of what he called “rhythmical grumbling” and handed them off to Ez. Many people believe that this collage, so bleak yet so expansive, secular but with non-secular overtones, is the most important poem of the twentieth century. Honestly, where twentieth century poetry is concerned, what doesn’t it dwarf? I feel that even many century XX “classics” are mediocre in comparison. William Carlos Williams, of course, complained that WL put poetry “back in the classroom,” with all its arcane symbolism and recondite references. But that’s a small price to pay (I feel) for the visionary power of the piece as a whole, where the parts add up to more than their sum, and to all the many facets of twentieth century art that this anticipated, up to and including facets of popular music like hip-hop techno (sounds like a stretch, but it isn’t; think “sampling”). And if Eliot hadn’t had a nervous breakdown, the whole thing wouldn’t have happened.

Madness in a work of art is a little different. Representations of madness, especially in movies, can be very compelling, because almost any sensitive person can identify with madness. Travis Bickle, the protagonist of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, seems to represent a specific type of American madness: violent, anti-social, willing to destroy in the name of justice. In some ways, he’s a sophisticated Rambo. The scenes with both Cybil Shepherd and Jodie Foster are painful, as Travis tries to make successful human connections. In the end, all of Travis’s madness (and the actions it leads to) leave us with unsettling questions— does the end of Travis’s actions justify his madness? Do we become complicit with him if we approve of what he’s done? Eliot’s poem is often thought to implicate a secular society, a G-dless world; Travis Bickle seems to implicate a society, not just for being secular, but for being crass, ruthless, mercenary, “scummy,” and completely lacking in innocence. And, of course, the final question that rises from this, and perhaps from the whole movie: is Travis Bickle mad? This is an instance of a filmmaker specifically investigating these issues, and from a point of sanity and comprehension. As such, it makes a neat contrast to the first two bits, in which a felt madness dictated the creation of the work of art. But, consciously or unconsciously, the “mad” elements here are impossible to efface.

Eventualities

Many good works of art, whether they’re famous in their day or not, exude a kind of “afterglow effect.” They have enough value that isn’t just hitched to one era to continue to shine, and to give pleasure to audiences. Why some good art isn’t big in its own time is an interesting question, with no single answer. Sometimes, it has to do with the personality of the artist. Some artists are just too difficult, too defensive, too ornery to make a name for themselves; some are too shy, too diffident. Whatever the reason, the idea of a “late rise” is by no means unheard of. “Posthumous rises” are not uncommon either, especially in literature, where books take time (from years to decades to centuries) to sink in, and initial receptions don’t matter that much. Popular artists generally put more of a premium on initial receptions than literary artists do, because (often) their livelihood depends on them. Poetry stands at an extreme in this regard— in poetry, initial reception counts for almost literally nothing. The afterglow effect is all-in-all. It doesn’t help that poets so often stand in the way of their own work— bickering, being pointlessly uncompromising, believing the world owes them a living. But all art-forms have stories of artists who for whatever reason couldn’t catch a break during their life-times, but received validation, vindication, and valorization after they died. Here are two exemplary ones, and something a bit different.

Nick Drake made three gorgeous, little-heard albums between 1969 and 1972, and died of an overdose of anti-depressants in 1974. He died feeling himself to be a failure. However, over three decades word of his albums spread, and as of now he’s almost a household word. Drake’s case is comparatively simple— for Nick, there were specific reasons why he couldn’t become famous. He refused to tour, do interviews, or any kind of promotion. He found any kind of social contact whatsoever almost unbearable, and was wont to retreat behind a wall of absolute silence. The miracle isn’t that Nick Drake didn’t make it; it’s that the three albums (Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter, Pink Moon) got recorded at all. Nick was extremely lucky to find, in producer Joe Boyd, arranger Robert Kirby, and even famous accompanists like John Cale, people that could make his visions concrete realities. Nick’s rise began in the late 1990s, when Volkswagon began using his song Pink Moon (title track from the album) in a car commercial, and was consolidated when Fly from Bryter Layter showed up in The Royal Tenenbaums. Nick even got a nod in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. All three of his albums are now respected as popular classics; there have been biographies and movies. He had to get out of the way for this to happen.

It’s become such a commonplace to think of William Blake as a leading Romantic poet that it’s easy to forget that for almost the entire nineteenth century, he was no such thing. Blake is extreme— it took almost a whole century for his work to catch on. It’s also astonishing to go in depth with Romanticism and find that William Wordsworth actually knew of Blake as early as 1812, and approved of him (over Byron). So, what’s with the hundred-year gap? Blake’s multi-media presentations (text/paintings) were prescient, but also made Blake difficult to fit into known frameworks of poetry presentations. In art, it’s not enough for people to know you; people need to know what to do with you. No one knew what to do with Blake for a long time. Blake’s posthumous fortune was tied in to his being very in tune with the Zeitgeist of the twentieth century, rather than the nineteenth. Nietzschean iconoclasm, also initiated in the nineteenth century, began to take hold as an influence in the twentieth (sometimes in benevolent contexts, sometimes in evil ones), and Blake’s iconoclasm, which challenged traditional notions of morality and religiosity, fitted in squarely with this. It made Wordsworth and Coleridge’s parochialism seem stiff, pompous, and outdated in comparison. Blake can even cut it with a po-mo crowd in a way that the other Romantics can’t; his longer texts, their outrageous mythologies and trailblazing irreverence, fits in with the irreverence of post-modernism, in a way that Byron (the next obvious choice) can’t match. Where Romanticism was concerned (and the New Critics somewhat aside), the twentieth century belonged to Blake, even as it dawns on us that the twenty-first century has made things up for grabs again.

This one is more a suspicion than something that’s actually happened: has David Lynch ever had a box-office hit? Certainly not on the level with someone like Spielberg. But I think Lynch’s films will continue to grow and gain in importance as time goes by. It all has to do with Lynch’s unique vision of American, which exposes the seamy underside of the American dream: the places where acquisitiveness becomes perversion, sex becomes transgression, suburbia becomes Hades, and bright facades hide absolute darkness. In Lynch’s films, there is no innocence beneath the surface. Even the quirkiness that is Lynch’s trademark is not the quirkiness you’d see in, say, a Wes Anderson movie; with Lynch quirk has more to do with kinkiness than with lovability or even likability. We watch Nicolas Cage play Sailor Ripley, and as much as we like and enjoy the character, it’s hard to forget that he’s capable of murder. Or with Kyle MacLachlan as Jeffrey Beaumont, the coming-of-age that happens is so ridiculously atypical that it’s hard to feel about Jeffrey, at the film’s end, the way we do about the various characters in American Graffiti. It’s almost a kind of Alice in Wonderland, but with so much real violence and perversity thrown in that it’s difficult to have a normal negative or positive response. Once you’ve accepted Lynch’s vision, then you decide if you like it, but acceptance comes first. And it’s this uncompromising edge to Lynch that gives his films their unique power, and one that may translate over a long period of time, so that a cult blossoms into something huge.

Severed Alliances

Art, like politics, is a realm full of severed alliances. Art-partnerships are very common, because many artists thrive on certain kinds of relationships. We all have people who give us ideas, who inspire things, who make us think things we haven’t thought before. It’s also not uncommon (unfortunately) for artists to use each other. Artists are notoriously amoral (or even immoral) where their work is concerned. Many of us have a drive to create, by any means necessary. That means that if you see someone or something that will help with your work, it’s difficult to avoid wanting to use them. The best art-partnerships involve genuine reciprocity, two sensibilities that genuinely mesh and produce distinct products that each individual would be incapable of producing alone. However, the dark side of this is very striking. When art-partnerships end, all kinds of carnage can result. This is especially true of highly successful collaborations involving large amounts of capital (and not merely cultural capital). Severed alliances can mean broken careers and broken hearts; sometimes, even worse. But it is worth looking at broken alliances because they are key to understanding the humanity of artists, all of whom have a good end in mind (to create) but many of whom are led to bad places by all the contingencies that attend a life in art. No one that’s been through an intense art-alliance can deny the exquisite ecstasy and agony of the process, as creation turns to destruction and back again.

Brian Jones founded the Rolling Stones. He was their original auteur, and the architect of their early sound. He left the group in June 1969, and died four weeks later. Brian’s severance from the Stones is unique in rock history. Brian had enough charisma to generate a feature film (Stoned) and any number of biographies, but his status in the Stones’ history remains misunderstood. At the heart of the mystery lies Brian’s relationship with Keith Richards, the other guitarist and principle songwriter of the band; they started very close, and grew very much apart. In many ways, Brian was outmatched. You can make an argument that, as a guitar player, Keith Richards simply demolished Brian Jones. You can also say that, as a songwriter, Keith demolished Brian. But I (and many others) believe that Brian added something definite to the Stones equation. Brian had a class and an intelligence that the other Stones didn’t. All you have to do is watch an early Stones interview to see that Brian was singularly articulate; Mick Jagger and Keith look (frankly) like louts in comparison. In Swinging London, Brian was easily as popular as Mick was. But it does seem that in many ways, the Stones success was the worst thing that ever happened to Brian. He was a delicate (if oversexed) lad thrown into a cage (the rock biz) with jealous animals, and never recovered.

This must be the first time in history that anyone has compared Brian Jones with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but there are parallels. Coleridge and William Wordsworth started off as best friends, very much partners in crime. Lyrical Ballads was a joint endeavor that initiated British Romanticism. Only, after a certain point, it became quite clear that Coleridge could not keep up with Wordsworth. Wordsworth was more focused, more practical, more materially ambitious, and more prolific. So, as the project evolved, Wordsworth commandeered it away from Coleridge, and the most famous art-partnership in the history of British literature was severed. Unlike Brian Jones, Coleridge did achieve an amount of revenge; when he published his Biographia, he made clear in no uncertain terms that he felt that the ideas that Wordsworth had generated alone (presented in the 1802 Preface) were a bunch of bullshit. Coleridge criticized Wordsworth for attempting to tell the world what the “real language of men” was. At that point, Wordsworth was still struggling to find an audience (a fact that gave Byron massive amusement), and the last thing he needed was for his erstwhile partner to drown him in criticism. Still, it is worth noting that though time effaced the bond between Wordsworth and Coleridge, a few centuries have restored it. Their names are always linked in anthologies, academic texts, and they are often taught (as they were taught to me at Penn) side by side. Just like those early, ageless pictures of the Stones may, in fact, define them for the ages.

From the sublimity of goyim-life to the neurotic: I think it would be an exaggeration to say that Woody Allen made all his best movies with Diane Keaton, but who can argue with Sleeper, Annie Hall, and Manhattan? Woody was enumerating, with great precision, the exoticism of the shikse, and Diane Keaton was as “uber-shikse” as you can get. She also had her own kind of neuroticism, which acted as a foil to Woody’s: those tics! These two personified one part of the 1970s Zeitgeist: the emergence of psychoanalytic bourgeois culture. Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk about their problems, and doing this was no longer self-indulgence. Woody and Diane were a perfect “therapy couple”: each with their own issues, mostly related to (what else?) sex and death. Woody became a “thinking woman’s sex symbol,” and Diane Keaton a thinking man’s. This severance seems far more amicable than the other two: Woody and Diane are still alive and working today; but their partnership could only produce what it produced, and have the kind of relevance it had, at a certain moment in time. The moment ended, but the movies (as always) remain, and both are assured of a place in cinematic history.

What IS Romance?

A woman friend of mine recently asked me a question that sounded a little absurd at first: “What IS Romance?” When I thought it through, I realized it’s an interesting question, for a simple reason: all art is romantic, because the impulse to create art is romantic, in and of itself. Strictly speaking, the world doesn’t need art. There is no necessity to art whatsoever; if you create art, you clearly have the romantic notion that art matters. Needless to say, I do have this romantic notion, as do most of my friends. But the question as to what romance is remains. It could be defined as any number of things: charm, magnetism, charisma, vibe, even “enchantment.” Romance is what enchants us, things that “click” with us for whatever reason. I don’t want to tie Romance in to Romanticism, the nineteenth-century movement that produced a lot of my favorite artists, because what I’m talking about is more universal, more general. Romanticism, the movement, is an objective phenomenon: it’s specific, we know who the players are, what they did. “Romance” is a subjective reality, and it has to do with what moves us, what makes us notice things, what restores the liveliness to life. It’s also about transcendence, ecstasy, things we get from sex. So, what follows are three works of art that hold great romantic associations for me, things I value because they take me to that place, where all the boundaries melt and the world becomes symmetrical.

To write about Derek and the Dominos as a romantic artifact is a cliché, but a cliché that works. The facts: this (Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs) is Eric Clapton’s masterpiece, produced as a result of a love triangle involving himself, George Harrison and Pattie Boyd. It’s the most famous love triangle (possibly) in popular music history. But those are the facts. This album is romantic to me for other reasons: I bought it on vinyl at the Princeton Record Exchange when I was 12 (fall ’88), and I listened to it that first night while talking to N (who appears in Chimes) on the phone. It was a romantic time because N was the first girl that ever really enchanted me. I also associate this album with one of my near-marriages, and I don’t mean to get confessional but it was a difficult relationship with incredible highs and devastating lows and this was the soundtrack for much of it. Not to mention that the woman in question looks almost precisely like the woman on the cover of the album. The album itself is splendid, and if it’s a “wank-fest” it’s the most heartfelt wank-fest in rock history. Clapton’s great, but Duane Allman makes the album. The title cut was used by Martin Scorsese in Goodfellas for one of the key murder scenes, and it’s easy to see why; it’s one of the most dramatically emotional works of popular art of the twentieth century. Now that’s romance.

It’s a shame that Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnets have fallen off so many poetry radars, because for their time they were something new under the sun. The formal elements of the sonnets were simple and standard; what was unique were the thematic elements. To make a long story short, Millay was the first female “Don Juana” to emerge in America (or English) poetry. It wasn’t just courtly love and stolen kisses; this is a woman that (to be crude) put out in a very twentieth century way, and wrote about it. She created the kind of seductress archetype that Sexton and Plath later fulfilled for her. The sonnet, in and of itself, is a romantic form (and also, of course, associated with Romanticism as a movement). It’s short, it’s meant to evince musicality, and it was invented by (among others) Petrarch, intent on wooing Laura. Petrarch never got his girl, but the form he invented has sufficed for thousands of poets over seven or eight centuries. Millay was, to my knowledge, the first woman poet to write graphically sexual sonnets and get away with it. It’s my predication that she’s one twentieth century figure up for rehabilitation, along with Hart Crane and a few others. In fact, I find even the liminality of Millay’s position seductive. She’s a big textual question mark, and it makes her, textually speaking, more “available” than female artists like Virginia Woolf and Georgia O’Keefe, with their assured places and (comparatively) stable reputations.

Sex and death: always romance when they intermix. Bernardo Bertolucci probably didn’t realize, when he envisioned Last Tango In Paris, that Marlon Brando would be improvising large chunks of the movie, but that’s what happened. Brando’s extemporaneous ruminations here are extraordinary: candid, brutal, surprising. The extremity and desperation of Brando’s performance, and of his chemistry with Maria Schneider, make this one of the darkest romances ever put on tape. Where is Maria Schneider now? Who knows. But when your first major role is in a masterpiece, maybe it doesn’t matter. And that the movie has some levels of infamy (did someone say butter?) makes it even more romantic. Paris, the city of romance, has never looked this bleak since Charles Baudelaire picked up pen and paper. But it’s a bleakness redeemed by revelations of humanity. The way the film ends is as strange as the rest of the movie, and not particularly believable, but it doesn’t have to be. What’s important is that the level of extremity be maintained, and it is. I’m a bit sorry to make this blog “Brando central,” but, as a presence in film, the man has few competitors.

First Time Charms

It really only happens once in a while: you see or hear something, and your life changes instantly. Some angle, some form of light, some way of being-in-the-world has been released to you, and all the wonder and the joy that goes unnoticed is alive again, and in your face. I’m talking about works of art that you don’t need to sit with, that you don’t have to digest, that don’t “grow on you,” but become a part of you immediately. It hasn’t happened to me in a long time (honestly), but it’s nice to remember these epiphanies because they are so unusual, and because the dust never really settles from them. So, three epiphanies, but I must preface here that when I look at what I’ve chosen, they are uniformly “dark” works of art. These are not “you light up my life” experiences; for whatever reason, the stuff that usually grasps me is tinged with darkness. Perhaps it’s my Scorpio Ascendant. Whatever it is, these three works put a permanent dent in my consciousness, and they are the “darker than darker” that has the power to seduce me over and over again.

I’ve chundered on about Big Star quite a bit here, but the first time I heard them really was an epiphany. It was the summer of 1995: I was living in a dorm room in State College. A friend of mine, who now writes for the New York Times, came up to stay with me for a few days. My diet at the time consisted of sugar cookies (which I filched from the Dining Commons where I worked) and water. I was always a little bit “out there.” Anyway, he came up, and he brought a copy of Sister Lovers/Third with him. We listened to it one night before we went to some party, it was about 90 degrees and the floor was uncarpeted, and the minute I heard Holocaust, I was pitched headlong into my own future. It was everything I ever wanted to hear: otherworldly, Beatles-esque, morbidly depressing but beautifully melodic and intimate. It was, in short, like finding the fifth side of the White Album. It was also like watching Faces of Death or some snuff flick, experiencing Chinese water torture, or seeing blood drip from a wound. What can I say? I’m a Scorpio. I like this stuff. And Sister Lovers became a large section of one of my books and a reference point that will never grow old for me, as long as the White Album still needs a fifth side.

Sometimes I wrestle with the feeling that British Romanticism was the peak of English language poetry in the last 500 years, and that nothing I (or anyone else this century) can do will measure up. Certainly no poet of the last 100 years has ever done to me what John Keats’s Nightingale did the first time I read it. I don’t know if words can adequately convey how there I was when I read this for the first time. I saw the whole thing: flowers, birds, trees, a dark forest, nightfall, and all with stunning immediacy that had no connection to any sentiment you could call “flowery.” It was (and is), in fact, all very muscular, very potent, very present. The funny thing about the situation was how banal the actual circumstances of this reading were. I was working on the third floor of the Barnes and Noble in Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, late 2000. It was about 9 pm (only an hour to go!), I was bored shitless (as usual), and I picked up the Keats in a desultory attempt to find something interesting to browse (I was already well into poetry, but for some reason had never given the British Romantics a fair shake). I stood by the poetry shelves and had to snap myself back to reality. But the damage had been done, Keats led to all the others and I’ve never been the same since.

It’s become a rite of passage in American society for young, male, middle-class, suburban adolescents to go through a Jim Morrison phase. I went through mine rather early, but while I did it led me to Apocalypse Now, which remains my favorite movie. For some reason, it made sense even to my 12 year old brain. I knew there was a sense to the madness of Kurtz, I understood that sometimes madness is sense, and it still makes me shiver to what lengths this madness can be taken. That Morrison’s music is actually in the Coppola masterpiece is merely the icing on the cake, let alone that Brando is a pivot point in the movie too. This movie is one of those magical works of art where everything comes together for me, everything works, I don’t have lingering questions or qualms with anything, “everything’s in its right place.” It is also a generally regarded masterpiece, undeniably one of the great movies of the late twentieth century, and the fact that the Doors and the Stones are in it points to the ascendency of rock and roll out of the cultural minor league. If there is one great lesson to be learned from this movie, it’s this: extremity is magnetic, both in people and in works of art. People want to see extremity because it reminds them of sex and death, the extremities everyone touches. This movie is a case in point.

You're Under Arrest...

Though this is at a tangent to the new positivity I’ve been espousing: we all know the Culture Police. We find them standing behind us in movie lines, serving us coffee, plunking themselves down in the front row at readings. These guys and girls know everything, or think they do. The most important thing they know is this: what we should like and what we should not. The old “what’s in, what’s out” routine, except applied to a few centuries worth of art. I’ve found that the standards of the Culture Police are just too high, and I keep getting arrested. If for every night I spent in Culture Jail I had a dollar, I’d be a rich man. Here’s a good ten-cent academic word: “reified.” When something becomes reified, it becomes hardened into deadness, into immovability. Certain works of art do, in fact, become reified as classics, and then we have no choice but to love them. But there’s a certain value to truth-telling and I thought it might be fun, for once, to “Incarcerate the Culture Police”. This is No Explanations in Reverse: works of art or artists that I’m supposed to like but don’t, and without even having a good reason. All this will happen while the Culture Police are chained in the basement, eating the Doritos I have thrown down to them. For once, I can admit that I find some classics baffling, distasteful, or mediocre. Then I’ll decide whether to take the handcuffs off.

There’s no self-respecting indie rock guy or gal who doesn’t love Talking Heads. They introduced (with a handful of others) post-modernity into rock, disjuncture into lyric writing, and surrealism to MTV. They epitomized a certain kind of cool: urban, artsy, edgy, very New York (like the Velvets before them). The truth is this: I’ve never been moved by a Talking Heads song. I feel like a 17 year old admitting virginity, but that’s the truth. It could be any number of things holding me back: the iciness of David Byrne’s songwriting approach, the condescension towards those less artsy or (G-d forbid) not from New York, the sense that this is all a little too clever, a little too inhuman, at too much of a distance from any kind of relationship to human emotions. Or, maybe I’m just deficient. I served a two week sentence for this a few years back, and had to watch Burnin’ Down the House and Up All Night play endlessly on a battered old TV. Those videos did bring something unique to Middle America, but somehow I feel nothing. A good deal of post-modern poetry has the same kind of effect on me. I admire the technique but it’s just too far away from feeling, and we are what we feel. So, loving Lou and the Velvets will have to be enough, and they can’t throw me in the tank for this twice. No double jeopardy in Culture Land.

Along with T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens is probably the most elegant Modernist poet. His aphorisms pack a mighty punch, he was one step on the road to the experimental poetry I am involved in now, and he has gained incredible literary credibility over the last fifty years. But what is he, really: elegant or incomprehensible? If you look at Stevens closely, it’s easy to see that he often keels over into nonsense. But, of course, with the Culture Police hanging around, you’re not supposed to notice this. The elegance of Williams’ short poems is more enjoyable to me, because they seem less like mind games and more like exquisite vignettes. Stevens’ impenetrable surfaces make you feel like you’re looking at a hunk of ice. The crystalline beauty of his lines does not, for me, redeem all that’s glacial in the poems. Stevens is very much the kind of artist you either get or you don’t. If you’re a mainstreamer, you can admit to disliking Stevens without getting locked up; but a hard-core experimentalist that doesn’t like Stevens? I’ve been charged with apostasy! Now that I’ve actually gone public with this, I’ll expect to be locked in solitary confinement with his Collected until I get it (or say I do).

Citizen Kane is probably the most acclaimed movie of all time. Thus, it’s a huge cultural transgression to either not get it or not like it. Orson Welles is an American cultural demi-god, up there with Jackson Pollock and Walt Whitman. Yet, you can guess what comes next; I saw the movie, found it heavy-handed and joyless. I was depressed without being edified. I didn’t feel any affective connection to Kane. I did appreciate all the levels of allegory at work: America’s national sickness as a country of back-breaking commodity fetishists. Protestant work-ethics, greed, corruption, wealth, celebrity, “no second acts in American lives.” All that jazz came through, but I didn’t see much to enjoy. It was like being fed a meal of string-beans and broccoli. Whenever a work of art is hyped through the roof (especially when it’s been hyped for decades), an impossible situation arises when contexts change, tastes change, audiences change, and the work of art in question can’t mean the same thing. I think that, in its time, CK touched a nerve, connected on a lot of levels, but I think it might be possible that some of those levels are broken down. Or, maybe I’m the one that’s broken down. But you won’t find me asking the Culture Police for a diagnosis…

Consolations

Much of what I’ve been writing here recently has a negative tinge. It would be a bit much if I didn’t try to break things up once in a while with some positive reflections. I don’t know if this post will inaugurate a “new positivity,” but it is worth looking at the consolations art offers to its practitioners. Every art-form has its own consolations and so every artist has a different set of balances, of weights and measurements to see what’s working and what’s not, as art and life conflate, then separate, and then conflate again. These consolations are the reasons why different artists choose different mediums. Some of us like instant gratification, some like patient exertion. Some like a little bit of both. There are things that I think everyone wants: an audience, respect, acknowledgement, a sense of adventure/discovery, and to be on some kind of cutting edge. But different contexts make different demands and we all have to compromise sometimes too. So, here’s the round-up of the consolations of the different art-forms I’ve been addressing here lately, as they appear to me (up close or from a distance), and as they might encourage or discourage participation.

I’ve been ragging on poetry quite a bit, but I will say this for it: it has the richest history of any art-form I know of, literally thousands of years. There may not be much of an audience for poetry left, but it is assured that there will always be some kind of audience for it. For those who like to live slowly, poetry can offer quite a bit of consolation: poets remain “young” until they hit their forties, and expectations for younger poets (like me) are pretty low. It’s the “silence/slow time” thing about poetry that makes it attractive (though it hinges on avoiding the “public” arenas of poetry), and the fact that obscurity, for an artist, can be a blessing. Obscurity is (sometimes) a guarantee of freedom; no one telling you what to do or when to do it, no one demanding anything, no public with wants and needs all its’ own. Not everyone wants to do the “public artist” bit; the cautious, deliberate artist plodding away in his/her garden is not an unattractive archetype. Plus, the “production costs” with poetry are non-existent. There is no “business business” to attend to (or very little), few material considerations, and all the viciousness doesn’t have to burn or even exist, depending on where you live and who you pay attention to. Poets can keep writing good poetry until they are very old, and the poetry game does not hinge on youth or physical appearances.

The consolations of rock: there is a depth of exchange between great rock bands and their audiences which I don’t think any other art-forms can come close to. For moving people emotionally, really affecting their day-to-day lives, music is the most expedient art-form imaginable. People listen to their favorite songs and albums over and over and over again, in a way that is more fixated and more personal than any other art-form. With music, when it’s good, nothing cuts deeper or reaches more people. Plus, bands that really function as bands can create genuinely responsive communal atmospheres, where other art-forms offer only competitive games and redundant fractiousness. There is also the bonus (which may not last forever) that music (specifically rock) is not yet bound up in academia, so the potentially inhibiting weight of academic thought (at its worst) cannot reach the musicians who forge definite affective connections with their audiences. From fans, successful bands and musicians receive a kind of unconditional love that an artist like me can only imagine. To have a wide public who love you no matter what (thanks, Badfinger) could be construed as a blessing or a curse, but I think the blessings outweigh the curses of the situation. And playing music live is simply much more fun than doing poetry readings, and there’s no way around it. More fun not only for the performers, but for the audience as well.

In 2009, there seems to be no question that movies bring in the biggest numbers. At this point, it’s not even close. So, to reach absolutely the widest possible audience, acting, directing, or writing movies is the way to go. When people choose favorite actors and actresses, it seems to me that some slack is cut; there has never been a great actor or actress who didn’t make at least a few duds. Plus, people who work in movies get to live with the dynamics of group interplay all the time; I imagine that it’s always fascinating, whether it works or it doesn’t. Acting, like poetry, can be done for an entire life-time, especially for actors/actresses who have derived their popularity not just from looks but from talent. And film has its own rich history, and a continuing future that looks more promising than any other art form I can see. The confession remains that I haven’t made yet: I do have a hope that at some point in my career as an artist I can do something with film; anything, from doing a soundtrack, helping with a script, or even acting. It’s not that I’m bored or jaded with what I’m doing; just that I can’t help but wonder what different contexts are actually like from the inside, and hope some day to find out.