It’s Christmas Eve and it has been raining all day in a kind of incessant Blade Runner post-apocalyptic way: a muddy Christmas! Gasoline is suddenly well under three bucks a gallon so it’s hello greenhouse and goodbye ozone. Hunting season upstate and my dog has found a bag of guts a neighbor has left outside after butchering his doe. Yet the main thing about today, beyond the appalling weather, my rancid mutt, my worries for the environment, and the anniversary of the birth of the Infant Jesus is that I finished reading a great novel and I am surging with energy and feeling the aesthetic thrill of having experienced something original and important.
Culturewatch
Uncool World
Questlove says it all well.
American hip-hop is usually based on imitation, and it is meant to produce artists who are users of the existing tradition, not creators. And because of that, black culture in general—which has defaulted into hip-hop—is no longer perceived as an interesting vanguard, as a source of potential disruption or a challenge to the dominant. Once you don’t have a cool factor any longer—when cool gets decoupled from African-American culture—what happens to the way that black people are seen?
IMMA LET YOU FINISH
“Shake It Off,” director Mark Romanek’s recent clip for Taylor Swift, depicts bad new trends in beautiful old ways. It works the same way as the best ‘80s-‘90s music videos—using semiotics to express up-to-the-minute changes in pop culture, producing the sort of imagery commentators and marketers now glibly call “iconic.”
Wonders Come to Pass
in 1856, Walt Whitman predicted
the coming of a race of fierce and athletic girls
Gentleman in Distress
For a guy who once conceded nothing to Holden Caulfield when it came to abhorring the “phoney,” it takes a well-seasoned blend of irony and humor to walk around sporting designer-distressed boots, jeans and safari jacket. But I am over-seventy, a serene sail toward a gradual retirement from the practice of law hastened by the two M.I’s, which fell upon me within two months of one another and led me to open heart surgery, an experience that illuminated as effectively as thunderbolts hurled by Zeus the likelihood that I would have neither the energy or time to rack up such character-defining “worn” spots and “scorch” marks on my own. True, the red wine and dark chocolate I imbibe for cardiovascular benefit place legitimate stains within easy reach. True, my blood thinner gives my slightest nick a shot at heightening any fabric’s coloration. But with my rowdy ways laid nearly as deeply to rest as Janis’s and Jimi’s, and with Lipitor and Metropolol as regular benchmarks of my conversation as Mick and Keith once were; I feel entitled to some short cuts.
Doing the Math
Up until 9th grade, math was one of my favorite subjects. Like most people, I loved the palpable rightness of its solutions. Then I went to a magnet science & tech high school, and suddenly I sucked at math because big brain robotoid kids with underdeveloped social skills were the majority of the student body.
Wait Till Last Year
Bob Liss finished this report on LeBron James’s role in last season’s NBA playoffs a few days before James announced he was “going home” to play for the Cleveland Cavaliers next season. Liss takes in the news in his postscript to this piece.
Existential Bugsquash
The costumes are wrong. They have to be discarded. We have to start out naked again and go from there.
Roger & Me
Ms. Levin completed a manuscript about her life as a tennis fan and player (Comeback) a few years ago. She picked up on the beauty of Roger Federer’s game early in his career and her text tells the story of her responsiveness to him. What follows are Federer-focused passages from her tennis memoir. Take it as her tribute to Federer in the wake of his inspired performance at Wimbledon this year.
Double-Happiness: Al Green and Zinedine Zidane
I
“Yo’r my pride and joy…Everything for a growing boy.” Al Green chuckles at his own double entendre (cum Marvin Gaye reference). “That’s extra,” he teases, adding a phallic riff to the polymorphous plenitudes of his 1973 live concert on Soul. The flow of the sexiest singer ever is beyond quid pro quos. Green embodies erotic variousness. He muses, sighs, cries, laughs, murmurs, shouts, baritones, moans low, skies for notes in his upper register. Miss this high drama and you’re missing a Mississippi—not a mere stream of consciousness. Thanks to Joe C. (who posted the 56 minute clip at Peter Guralnick’s website: peterguralnick.com) for allowing me to dip into this river again.
Mumblecrit
“I don’t care what any of these snobs say!” said my freshman-year Postmodern Lit instructor, not bothering to identify the snobs. “Titanic is a damn good movie, and ‘My Heart Will Go On’ makes me cry!” His line of thought, though tangential to the class discussion that day, didn’t come from out of nowhere, as it was early 1998, well within the James Cameron blockbuster’s imperial moment in global pop culture. Apparently, enough backlash had built up by then to provoke my instructor’s gratuitous but highly revealing outburst.
Rank Culture
My initial reaction to ArtRank (see below) was one of disgust—An every-day, 2k14 kind of disgust that also gets called forth when I see the ungodly short shorts of teenagers today, which are as discomfiting as they are fascinating when you think about the exact point at which an ass becomes a leg.
It seems every generation finds there’s always more cheek to show…
The Question of Taste: Bill Berkson
Bill Berkson is a poet (originally associated with the New York School) and critic who’s been writing about art since the 60s. His books include The Sweet Singer of Modernism and other Art Writings, which Dave Hickey called “an indispensable text for anyone interested in late-twentieth-century culture.” In this dialogue with Jarrett Earnest, Berkson digs into the democratic roots of his own taste:
When people like you and I were growing up we were immersed in what is often considered low culture, but one cultivated specific habits, tastes, within what was generally available. In high school I began to meet people who hated modern life and the culture that went with it. They wanted to live in the Renaissance; everything had been downhill for them since 1700 or whenever. They wanted no part of our modern vulgarity, whereas I was so deeply immersed in it I came to fine literature quite late. I read comic books and pulp novels if I read anything at all, and whatever was required for book reports, you know, and I watched endless movies, and it’s like what Creeley says in that lovely poem: I did, maybe still do, have “a small boy’s sense of doing good,” and “ride that margin of the lake.” A small boy’s notion is that of a knight on horseback by the sparkling water—in Idylls of the King perhaps, but no, it’s Robert Taylor in love with Elizabeth Taylor in a Technicolor Ivanhoe. To disdain such a homegrown culture would be untrue; instead you develop a taste for what’s great within it, according to what you really know and go for.
An Opening of the Field
Exploring the art and coteries of the artist Jess (1923–2004) and the poet Robert Duncan (1919–1988), An Opening of the Field celebrates the vibrant household of two extraordinary men who lived together as lovers and collaborators at the epicenter of the San Francisco Bay Area’s glory years of artistic ferment.
From Farce to Koan: Knicks Lure Phil Jackson Home
I. Follies and Foibles
Finding fresh metaphors for Knickerbocker managerial incompetence requires a stretch. Celebrity coaches and general managers like Larry Brown, Donnie Walsh, Isaiah Thomas, and Don Nelson have become distant memories, nearly absorbed into the long history of franchise ineptitude that Red Holzman’s great teams made everyone forget, and to which Pat Riley’s thug squads lent a different coloration.
The Anti-War of Harvey Kurtzman
In the early 1950s, Entertaining Comics was king of the ten-cent jungle. EC invented the horror comic (Tales From the Crypt, Vault of Horror, Haunt of Fear). It issued the first “scientific” science-fiction (Weird Science, Weird Fantasy). It re-invigorated the crime comic (Crime SuspenStories, Shock SuspenStories), with a social conscience. And with the blessing of its owner, William M. Gaines, it packaged them with an unprecedented—and splendiferous—amount of sex and gore. Unfortunately, when a public outcry linking comics to juvenile delinquency—to the outraged, befuddled sputterings of Gaines and avid pre-teen readers, like myself—it was an antipathy toward and a ban on just such content that forced him to gut his line.
Black Mountains Beyond Mountains
First thanks Claudia Moreno Pisano for enabling us to reprint the following slightly compacted excerpt from Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn: The Collected Letters, which is edited and annotated by Ms. Pisano. This swatch of the correspondence between Baraka—soon-to-be-magus of Black Arts—and Dorn—Black Mountain poet—gets to the heart of their relationship in the 60s. Their calls and responses here were sparked by a disagreement over Castro’s Cuba that’s picked up new resonance since it’s easy to hear echoes of the Cold War in our time. What may be most striking now, though, is not the poets’ efforts to go international but their shared clarity about the depth (and width) of white supremacy in America.[1]
High Low Country: The Baraka/Dorn Correspondence
I’m sure you’re going to somehow manage to say the opposite but mean the same, which we two I like to think always do. It is a good necessity. I just hope we don’t get caught, isolated from each other, across the river, waving.
—Ed Dorn
…[R]isk is something I need…I don’t expect to be right, but it does profit my energies when I am. Moreover it’s the swing itself I dig, if I feel it. Ditto I think you go by that. But I do feel close to you, whatever I say or however.
—Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones
The MLA: Singled Out for a Double Standard
In early January, the Delegate Assembly of the Modern Language Association Convention—perhaps the largest and most influential academic gathering in the humanities—passed, 60-53, a resolution urging its members to “contest” restrictions on the freedom of travel for American students and faculty members of Palestinian descent to universities in the West Bank. Another resolution, urging solidarity with scholars supporting boycott, divestment, and sanctions, against Israel, was not brought to the floor, but referred to Executive Committee for discussion. The issues were aired at a tense session entitled, with cheerful understatement, “Academic Boycotts: A Conversation About Israel and Palestine.”
Beat Better, Beat Worse
Meltzer sent this piece, written a couple years back, in response to First‘s Call for remembrances of Amiri Baraka. It ends with a reflection on Baraka’s music writing. You’ll find that excerpt in our Baraka tribute. But the rest of this piece is echt Meltzer as well so here’s the whole enchilada.
Poetry and Money
Aram Saroyan considers the life of Lorine Niedecker and takes in the material conditions underlying the creation of poetry. (Oliver Conant follows up with a poem that speaks to what the French call “the social question.”)