Lester Plays Vegas (April 30)

[koganbot]

On 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.

Comments

Re: Krugman vs. Mankiw

[koganbot]

I also think that in singling out Delong and Krugman, Frank, you're overlooking the vast number of terrible intellectuals that Krugman is "in conversation with" to the extent that he mentions them by name

I'm not overlooking this; it's just not relevant to the point I was making. Micheal said, "I'm not sure I can point to anything in the whole history of thought that actually resembles the conversation Kogan wants." I was saying in response that Krugman and DeLong can sustain an intellectual conversation. Michael was misled by my term "the everyday."

Do Krugman and DeLong see a new world every time they look at the everyday? Well, as I understand it, they build models about macro-economics that, among other things, show how stuff on the macro level has consequences for the everyday, so they can connect layoffs etc. to what's happening macro; not just that layoffs are caused by what happens macro, but when layoffs aggregate they have macro effects. But I don't suppose Krugman and DeLong see a new world each time they look, once they've seen it the first time. But it would be a new world for someone learning macro. I probably shouldn't have written "see a new world each time you look, each time you act," the word "each" being far too total (maybe this is what Michael means by saying I'm relaxing my stringency). But the fundamental idea is that the normal, the usual, will contain whole hunks of things you don't actually understand but that will reveal themselves once you harass it, test it, discuss it. So the "new world" you see (once you start testing, harassing, discussing) is just that there are stories going on that you didn't previously have access to because, e.g., you didn't know macro or you didn't know music theory etc. These stories wouldn't have been available to anybody without intellectuals building up a body of knowledge, and they're not available to us if we're not willing think, test, challenge, re-word, re-phrase, to learn what someone else knows but that we don't, etc.

If there is a new event, but it's part of a story that we don't notice, because we don't have knowledge, then we won't see that new event, because today looks just like yesterday to people attuned to only see the usual. But yeah, each time we look, each time we act, is too stringent. I don't see a new world each time I read a record review, for instance.

I like the word "harass" here. I swiped it from Bacon.

Re: Krugman vs. Mankiw

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

But is there honestly not a single person that can sustain the intellectual conversation? It seems like you have close allies and that by and large the community is dysfunctional. (That relates to my main point, which your subsequent Krugman post affirms -- that economics as a whole has a language where people who disagree can still be on the same intellectual grounds.) But I'm not sure it is that different in Krugman's field (isn't Krugman in your below quote making a similar complaint you are? That "fraudulence" permeates the conversation despite exceptions?). Is Chuck Eddy or Erika Villani or arbitrary_greay or me or any number of sparring partners your DeLong?

Re: Krugman vs. Mankiw

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I mean, maybe we won't stick around -- but we're not critics like DeLong and Krugman are economists. That is solely what they do, and it's in their professional interest to be in conversation with one another. In rock criticism, it's not in anyone's "professional interest" to do much of anything, because there are lots of "interests" but no profession!

Re: Krugman vs. Mankiw

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

And I know you've already said that "time and money" aren't the core issue. You may be right about that. But the time and money thing does relate closely to why so few people take sustained intellectual effort seriously -- that is, why "sustain an intellectual conversation" isn't something that anyone wants to do -- there's nothing "in it" for them. Perhaps there's nothing "in it" at an early enough stage that they just go their whole lives without doing it, whether it's because they can't (are unable to) or won't (just don't even if they could). (Part of the dysfunction of academia that I've seen is that people are explicitly taught how to perform critical thinking without actually thinking critically about things.)