Lester Plays Vegas (April 30)
Apr. 30th, 2012 07:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotOn one level I suppose all of this is very funny, but if you look past the surface violence and simple abusiveness to the person at the center it's not funny at all. The reason it's not is the aforementioned ambivalence. Jungle war with bike gangs is one thing, but it gets a little more complicated when those of us who love being around that war (at least vicariously) have to stop to consider why and what we're loving. Because one of the things we're loving is self-hate, and another may well be a human being committing suicide. Here's a quote from a review of Iggy's new live show in the British rock weekly Sounds: "Iggy's a dancer and more, a hyper-active packet of muscle and sinew straight out of Michelangelo's wet dreams... who leaps and claws at air, audience and mike stand in an unsurpassable display that spells one thing—MEAT." Ignoring the florid prose, I'd like to ask the guy who wrote that how he would like to be thought of as a piece of meat, how he thinks the meat feels. Or if he thinks it feels at all. Yeah, Iggy's got a fantastic body; it's so fantastic he's crying in every nerve to explode out of it into some unimaginable freedom. It's as if someone writhing in torment has made that writing into a kind of poetry, and we watch in awe of such beautiful writhing, so impressed that we perhaps forget what inspired it in the first place.
--Lester Bangs, "Iggy Pop: Blowtorch In Bondage," Village Voice, 28 March 1977
I remember, not well, someone having written, probably in the early '70s, maybe a letter to the editor, maybe it was to Creem, and someone wrote maybe a brief reply to the letter, maybe unsigned, maybe it was Lester who wrote the reply. The writer was lamenting the absence of Buddy Holly. If Buddy had lived, he'd be doing great things, said the letter, said the writer. And the reply was No! If Buddy had lived he'd being playing Vegas just like any other oldie living off his past, his work no longer mattering except as a walking corpse of a reminder that it once had mattered.
So Lester. He never totally got his shit together, not just chemically but intellectually. But he didn't give up. If he asked a question, the question didn't disappear, didn't get a glib answer from him and then evaporate or hang around like a vague fart, a mist of buzzwords answered by another mist of buzzwords. The questions gnawed at him, repeated, didn't leave him alone.
If he'd lived, I think it would have made a difference. I don't know what his follow-through would have been — he could get lost in an enthusiasm of words and anguish — but I know there would have been one. Maybe it'd just end up as Lester's filibuster. But the questions would ride him, would at least fight to stay addressed. And this is where Lester is different from all my colleagues. I complain from time to time that rock critics, music critics, people in my rockwrite/musicwrite/wrong world, don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation. My complaints don't help anybody, since whatever the message is in my own writing, the idea that there's a joy in discovery, in unearthing the unknown, that you interact with what's in front of you, with the everyday, and see a new world each time you look, each time you act, but only by thinking, testing, challenging, re-wording and re-phrasing — this message doesn't get across, doesn't get felt, I guess. There's a basic unshakable dysfunction and incompetence in my world, which amounts to dishonesty, a pretense of thought without actual thinking.
Don't know that Lester really knew how either, but given that the conversation, the questions, wouldn't leave him, I imagine he'd have given it a shot.
--Lester Bangs, "Iggy Pop: Blowtorch In Bondage," Village Voice, 28 March 1977
I remember, not well, someone having written, probably in the early '70s, maybe a letter to the editor, maybe it was to Creem, and someone wrote maybe a brief reply to the letter, maybe unsigned, maybe it was Lester who wrote the reply. The writer was lamenting the absence of Buddy Holly. If Buddy had lived, he'd be doing great things, said the letter, said the writer. And the reply was No! If Buddy had lived he'd being playing Vegas just like any other oldie living off his past, his work no longer mattering except as a walking corpse of a reminder that it once had mattered.
So Lester. He never totally got his shit together, not just chemically but intellectually. But he didn't give up. If he asked a question, the question didn't disappear, didn't get a glib answer from him and then evaporate or hang around like a vague fart, a mist of buzzwords answered by another mist of buzzwords. The questions gnawed at him, repeated, didn't leave him alone.
If he'd lived, I think it would have made a difference. I don't know what his follow-through would have been — he could get lost in an enthusiasm of words and anguish — but I know there would have been one. Maybe it'd just end up as Lester's filibuster. But the questions would ride him, would at least fight to stay addressed. And this is where Lester is different from all my colleagues. I complain from time to time that rock critics, music critics, people in my rockwrite/musicwrite/wrong world, don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation. My complaints don't help anybody, since whatever the message is in my own writing, the idea that there's a joy in discovery, in unearthing the unknown, that you interact with what's in front of you, with the everyday, and see a new world each time you look, each time you act, but only by thinking, testing, challenging, re-wording and re-phrasing — this message doesn't get across, doesn't get felt, I guess. There's a basic unshakable dysfunction and incompetence in my world, which amounts to dishonesty, a pretense of thought without actual thinking.
Don't know that Lester really knew how either, but given that the conversation, the questions, wouldn't leave him, I imagine he'd have given it a shot.
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Snappy answers to stupid questions
Date: 2012-05-06 06:08 pm (UTC)(1) Ask a good question;
(2) Think of different ways to answer that good question in conversation with others;
(3) Don't give up on the question until everyone reaches some kind of new or shared understanding re: question that makes the world better than you found it.
I think that rock critics (and academics and maybe most people) by and large have problems with all three of these things, but the one that seems most glaring to me at the moment is (1). The problem is that intelligentsia-leaning types (which includes everyone who has responded to this post) are pretty good at merely "performing answers" regardless of the merit of the question or their answer. Tumblr is rife with succinctly-worded answers to terrible questions -- sometimes it's an easy zing on an obviously stupid premise, and sometimes it's an artful re-shaping of something whose intellectual foundation is suspect.
Here's one that's been bugging me today. The original quote draws weird (and untenable) distinctions between autobiography and criticism, pedagogy and artistry (via Mencken), "natural" and "not natural" criticism. That's to say that the original quote is useless -- the undergirding questions aren't worth asking, like "What's better for criticism, the tone of the pedagogue or the tone of the artist?" or "What is the most natural or artful form of criticism?"
These are bad questions because they're nonsense. They don't have any meaning when the terms are so vague and lacking examples that hold true in all or even most instances (which is probably impossible; the line of questioning is doomed from the start). The example given -- comparing the Colin Meloy 33 1/3 to the Carl Wilson 33 1/3 might say something about those two books if there was a single meaningful example from either text to actually found the observation (as is, I disagree about the "success" of the Wilson book, but I won't go into that here, except to say that the question that seems to spur the Celine book is a bad one: "If even Celine can be redeemed, is there no good or bad taste, or good and bad art?")
Mike's response is equally wrong-headed:
"There’s a big and very important difference, it seems to me, between “personal” criticism that’s using art as a kind of thematic center around which to write a memoir or personal essay, which is either not-criticism or not-good criticism, and criticism fundamentally about art that is open and honest about the critic’s personal experience. That doesn’t mean you can’t talk about yourself, or even that you can’t talk about yourself at length; it’s just that this has to be in some way about your relationship with the piece of art and what that says about art, not what it says about you."
This is just wrong on its face. The best piece of music criticism I wrote last year, (take that for what it's worth), a comment on Warren G/Nate Dogg, was not "fundamentally about art" as opposed to "fundamentally about me" -- it's fundamentally about both, and there's no way to separate the two; I am not a "vehicle" through which art is analyzed. I analyze art and art analyzes me.
But why was anyone responding to this quote affirmatively in the first place? Why was there dysfunction on top of dysfunction from the start? (It probably wouldn't be impossible to build something useful on such a vague and untenable premise, but you'd have your work cut out for you.) It's true that it's hard to read carefully, think carefully, and be prepared change your mind, maybe in a profound and uncomfortable way, when your mind needs to be changed to make way for a better or more accurate idea. But that can't be all there is to it.
Re: Snappy answers to stupid questions
Date: 2012-05-07 02:08 am (UTC)Re: Snappy answers to stupid questions
Date: 2012-05-07 02:47 am (UTC)I don't understand why without wrongheaded conviction there's no conversation. I can't think of any time I've ever had wrongheaded conviction about something (at least, something I now understand to be wrongheaded) that a conversation was not improved by my abandoning said conviction. It was true when I was playing around with ideas of "irony" in listening to teenpop music, and it was true when I pegged Aly and AJ to the right wing in their (best) song "Not This Year" based on my own literal misreading of the song (to name two in a long line of mistakes).
In my experience with teaching younger people, the idea that "all theories are kind of wrong, including mine" can be quite empowering for students. For one thing, it makes for better and more accurate theories. And for another, it lets people who might otherwise be intimidated from the mere posturing of thoughtfulness into the process of becoming genuinely thoughtful. (For all I harp on people who relatively close to me, I also acknowledge that there are genuinely and dogmatically anti-intellectual people in the world who have never been given the opportunity, or have chosen otherwise, to follow intellectual curiosity for its own sake.)
But of course, even if my theory is "kind of wrong," it beats your theory that is just wrong. (Especially when your just-plain-wrong theory is competing for eyeballs with mine.) But that doesn't mean that it's wrong because I say so (the bread and butter of academic feuds); it has to be demonstrably wrong.
That's why I brought up the thing that was at the top of my head, the memoir/criticism thing. To say "[talking about yourself] has to be in some way about your relationship with the piece of art and what that says about art, not what it says about you" is just plain 100% wrong no matter how you slice it. And the reason it's wrong is because "what that says about the art" and "what that says about you" aren't separate concepts.
Re: Snappy answers to stupid questions
Date: 2012-05-07 03:03 am (UTC)For me, music is the often the "except" in a world of "generally right" thinking on a number of issues -- most related to education and social justice -- that points to something being more fundamentally off. Pet concerns: Why are progressive educators so afraid of the genuine pleasure that "problematic" (sexist, misogynistic, etc.) content stirs in their students? Why can't feminist websites take Taylor Swift seriously? Why do the people who align with me most closely politically have the worst taste in music? Here, in 90% of general social what-have-you progressive educators, feminists, and kindred political people are with me, but there seems to be this big problem with music, a problem that starts to align me with (for instance) Paris Hilton and now Snooki. (And here comes the rest of it -- hey wait, why am I assuming that Snooki isn't a progressive feminist left-leaning sort? Etc., etc., a lot of my assumptions have to -- and effectively did at some point -- change.)
Re: Snappy answers to stupid questions
Date: 2012-05-08 06:20 pm (UTC)But would the conversation have happened if you didn't start off being wrong and willing to argue it? That's really all I mean here - certainly there is no moving forward in the long run if no one is willing to change their mind. But I guess if we're talking about "conversation" then I believe in the Socratic, at least and especially online -- someone has to argue something at least sort of wrong, that's maybe exaggerated for effect, or contains good ideas poorly expressed, to get a "yeah but" reaction (look at this post!!). And I might think something, but I don't know I think it, certainly won't have expressed it to the best of my capacity, unless I've sharpened it as arms in an argument. If nothing is obviously wrong, it becomes hard to spot what the essay/post/article is NOT covering (there's always a case not covered). You click "like" or "+1" and move on.
Nota bene: of course this argument I'm making is itself an exaggeration for effect in order to get a response (not conscious at the time I first made it, but still...)
Re: Snappy answers to stupid questions
Date: 2012-05-08 01:15 pm (UTC)The sustaining part of the conversation can turn bad or uninteresting questions into good or interesting ones, so long as two people agree to meet somewhere (not "in the middle" necessarily). To be honest, I wish I hadn't brought up the Slate quote and response here at all, as I seem to have created a weird decoy that others who might have engaged with the topic at hand are now shooting at rather than talk about the more interesting ideas at the heart of Frank's post.
Re: Snappy answers to stupid questions
Date: 2012-05-08 02:30 pm (UTC)Where? Is this on that Facebook thread that Chuck was pasting excerpts from the other day? Is there any way for me to see that thread? I'm only friends with you and Tina, and I'm not sure how Facebook works 'cause I'm not trying to be on Facebook or to get any more Facebook friends [oops, left out the word "not" first time I hit submit]: I friended Tina 'cause that was the only way I could look at Campus Restaurant Revisited, and I friended you because that was the only way to get onto turntable.fm. But if I friend someone else (I've got an outstanding friend request from Chuck, among others), then I can't tell the next person who sends me a friend request, "I'm not really on Facebook; I only friended Tina so I could see Campus Restaurant Revisited and only friended Dave so I could be on turntable.fm." I still think that Facebook would turn into another distraction and time sink. Anyway, people need to learn to come to me (I mean that metaphorically/psychologically).
Re: Snappy answers to stupid questions
Date: 2012-05-08 06:22 pm (UTC)Re: Snappy answers to stupid questions
Date: 2012-05-08 09:16 pm (UTC)Re: Snappy answers to stupid questions
Date: 2012-05-09 05:26 am (UTC)The one thing I posted to Chuck's initial post was in response to a piece of Maura's that she mentioned:
Re: Snappy answers to stupid questions
Date: 2012-05-08 02:50 pm (UTC)It doesn't seem to me that I stated my ideas; I merely announced that I had them.
I complain from time to time that rock critics, music critics, people in my rockwrite/musicwrite/wrong world, don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation. My complaints don't help anybody, since whatever the message is in my own writing, the idea that there's a joy in discovery, in unearthing the unknown, that you interact with what's in front of you, with the everyday, and see a new world each time you look, each time you act, but only by thinking, testing, challenging, re-wording and re-phrasing — this message doesn't get across, doesn't get felt, I guess. There's a basic unshakable dysfunction and incompetence in my world, which amounts to dishonesty, a pretense of thought without actual thinking.
The only thing that approaches an explanation of what I mean by "sustain an intellectual conversation" is the phrase "only by thinking, testing, challenging, re-wording and re-phrasing." That's not giving people a lot of information (though it should have given Michael D. enough to know that I'm not remotely akin to a mystic).
Btw, have you posted on that Facebook thread? Right now I don't know where it is or how to access it, or if I can. But if you posted on it, I might be able to see this because it's part of your activity. Though maybe not. I see some of your activity, but maybe some threads are restricted. As I said, I don't know how Facebook works.
Re: Snappy answers to stupid questions
Date: 2012-05-08 04:47 pm (UTC)But this isn't my complaint, that sometimes critics ask bad questions and embrace lunkheaded dichotomies. I'm claiming that my rockwrite/musicwrite/wrong world never sustains the discussion of any question, now matter how well posed, at least doesn't sustain it in a way that leads anywhere. And the community seems to offer no help or impetus or encouragement for exploring a question.