'Never figured you for a Doors fan...'

If you were ever into the Doors, in that way only misfit teenage boys can be, you probably know the outlines of the Jim Morrison creation myth. You know more than that he was a film student, or that he had dead Native American spirits haunting his soul. You know that he was a Navy brat, that his father was an admiral or something, and you probably guessed all sorts of horrible things about what that would mean for his upbringing. How it led to all that ugliness at the height of “The End” and was the torturous forge that created his Art.

So I was surprised to see a news article that quoted the Admiral himself commenting on his son’s life and work. You may have been surprised that he betrayed real affection. “We look back on him with great delight… the fact that he’s dead is unfortunate but looking back on his life it’s a very pleasant though,” Admiral (ret.) George Morrison said in a new authorized band memoir.

Of course, it sounds like there was a little wishful thinking there. “He knew I didn’t think rock music was the best goal for him,” the admiral said. “Maybe he was trying to protect us.” A part of me wonders if he was completely aware of what his son did… and sang.

I think sister Ann got closer to it: “He liked mystique, too. He didn’t want to be from somewhere.” But I’ll go farther with my conjecture: that it is too bad he didn’t live long enough to outgrow his moody adolescence.

The tragedy of Jim Morrison is the tragedy of the band. As a fan in good standing, I’d chart their history like this: two albums of sheer youthful explosion. That mix of youthful energy and insight coupled with not inconsiderable skills that gave us two of the best rock albums of the period. That was followed by slump, in which they produced two albums that are kind of floundering. The first is at least interesting and catchy in its searching, the second is a crashing failure. Then they grew up. Suddenly they produced two very strong albums with maturity, a sense of humor. It is an interesting trajectory, considering the weird pressure cooker of the music industry: they did all that in the midst of a relentless touring and recording schedule with lots of people treating them like meal-tickets. And Morrison’s death – like those of the other big ticket rock stars – was stupid and avoidable. (But kudos to the rest of the guys for soldiering on for two more, terrible, Jim-less albums).

And as with everything that I seemed to like as a teenager, it is hurt by its fans, and by the weird fact that they keep coming – it seems a new group of kids hits the beaches every ten years or so. “Every generation has its Doors fans,” said Dave Brock, frontman of a Doors tribute band in Orange County recently profiled in OC Weekly.

Lester Bangs was onto it during the first big Doors revival, writing in August 1981 about the first Second Coming, including the hilarious rumor about a biopic starring John Travolta. He wondered about why so many kids were so into this stuff, and came to a snap judgment, taking contemporary to task for its “relative lack of passion, expansiveness, and commitment.” “There is a halfheartedness, a tentativeness, and perhaps worst of all a tendency to hide behind irony that is after all perfectly reflective of the time, but doesn’t do much to endear these pretenders to the throne.” (in 1981?)

He writes that the Doors were for the “the one guy [who] used to sit there all day and night toking on his doob and intoning things like ‘Genius… is very close to… madness.’” He wishes that Morrison was a better singer, and teases out the sense of irony and humor the band had at their success and pretension. And in the end…

Perhaps what we finally conclude is that it’s not really necessary to separate the clown from the poet, that they were in fact inextricably linked, and that even as we were lucky not to have been around any more than our fair share of ‘Dionysian’ infants, so we were lucky to get all the great music on these albums, which is going to set rock n’ roll standards for a long time to come.

The Kids in the Hall:

Happy Thanksgiving!

Montaigne’s advice for new dads

I know very well that I have it pretty easy compared to what Olga has to do. I just cook, clean, and change lots of diapers. I’m loosing plenty of sleep though, which I have always handled very badly. Luckily Ol is a pro at all-nighters thanks to grad school and our domestic sanity is somewhat preserved. But overall for me, the experience of early fatherhood has been like going to the coolest, most amazing concert you can imagine, but getting stoned to just shy of incapacity right before in the parking lot. Day to day, I perform a lot of moral and support services, but in the broader sense feel somewhat superfluous. And while Motherhood is sublime, fatherhood is just complicated. I’m sure I’ll have a lot of thoughts on the subject for, roughly, the rest of my life. But I’ll start with one of the first places I turned to for advice.

The day before Mila was born was a cold and drizzly Saturday. We were waiting around the house, pretty certain something was up but not yet ready to go to the hospital, and I spent much of the day in Olya’s gliding rocker reading while she napped. I read some Chekhov stories, and some essays by Michel de Montaigne, one in particular that caught my eye was “Of the Affection of Fathers for their Children.”

Montaigne has a reputation as a particularly sympathetic figure not only to literal generations of readers, but to his contemporaries who regarded him as an accomplished statesman in a time of terrific religious and civic strife.

As the founder of the essay-genre, his personal jottings are loopy, honest, often funny, and usually insightful. On fatherhood, he begins by making plain his sternest his thoughts on children. “I cannot entertain that passion which makes people hug infants that are hardly born yet, having neither movement in the soul nor recognizable shape to the body by which they can make themselves lovable,” he writes. “And I have not willingly suffered them to be brought up near me.”

The foundation of the adult-child relationship clearly must be of stronger stuff:

“A true and well-regulated affection should be born and increase with the knowledge children give us of themselves; and then, if they are worthy of it, the natural propensity going along with reason, we should cherish them with a truly paternal love; and we should likewise pass judgment on them if they are otherwise, always submitting to reason, notwithstanding the force of nature. It is very often the reverse; and more commonly we feel more excited over the stamping, the games, and the infantile tricks of our children than we do later over their grown-up actions, as if we had loved them for our pastime, ‘like monkeys, not like men.’ “

Indeed, those were different times. There was probably an element of psychological self-preservation in all this, as for most of human history childbirth and childhood were incredibly dangerous times. Montaigne and his wife had five daughters, only one of whom survived past infancy.

And it is worth remembering that for about the same amount of time marriage and families were not actually about love and affection in any real way, but about property, kinship networks, and clan survival. Montaigne spends a lot of time considering how to handle inheritances and preserving your family’s good name.

The greatest reward that comes with reading Montaigne is seeing through the customs and the particular times into the mind of a person. His digressions and anecdotes are of his time and his place, but it is in the wandering that you discover what is great and eternal about being human. As when he wanders away from that initial severity.

He betrays himself at times as a soft touch as the essay progresses: in his position on corporal punishment (“I have seen no other effect of whips except to make souls more cowardly or more maliciously obstinate.”) and about being a miser (“A father prostrated by years and infirmities, deprived by his weakness and lack of health of the common society of men, wrongs himself and his family by uselessly brooding over a great heap of riches.”)

And he knows full well the limits of keeping too severe an attitude. He quotes the Marshal de Monluc, who lost a son and was full of regrets. “He had lost, he said, by that habit of paternal gravity and stiffness, the comfort of appreciating his son and knowing him well, and also of declaring to him the extreme affection that he bore him and the high opinion he had of his virtue.” Montaigne concludes “this lament was well taken and reasonable.”

As a new parent I’ve done my best to avoid anything but the most technical parenting advice from books, though I eagerly court advice from friends and well-wishers. I laughed to myself this afternoon while burping her – which I do dozens of times a day – when I realized that all this little creature does is yell, grunt, and stare at me, and I’m completely mad about her. We haven’t even gotten to the stamping, the games, and the infantile tricks yet.

Mila's first night out

Mila visited her first restaurant Friday night: Webster's Fish Hook in Northampton, after a visit to great grandfather. She didn't eat much though, and in fact slept through the experience.

Mila's first Election Day

I’ve been following elections since around 1984, through fits of curiosity, elation, disappointment, drunkenness, fear, and loathing. But there is nothing that puts things in a new perspective more than the way I watched last night’s late late returns come in: when CNN called Missouri’s Senate race for Democrat Claire McCaskill at about 2 a.m., and my nine-day old Mila spat up on my knee.

Considering my line of work, and my desire to avoid having to defend my objectivity in awkward situations, I try to keep my thoughts on our political climate very simple and vague. But I simply can’t hide that it is very important to me that my daughter grow up in a civil society that refuses to be guided by greed, hate, and fear. The fact that any honest person reading that line can tell exactly where I stand should tell you a lot about American political culture in the past few years.

I spent most of the night at the Eagle running our election blog, which unlike the primaries, was terribly boring. The Democratic state senate candidate Ben Downing had it in a walk after very early results. And the governor’s race was not much of a contest at all.

Good. It shouldn’t have been. Republican Kerry Healey’s campaign was one of the most vile in memory, more so because it was perfectly unnecessary. In all the mud and bile she paid to spew across the state, many may have overlooked the fact that she is a moderate on most issues, and probably a very nice person beneath it all. But she chose to take a very dark path – she became her own Lady MacBeth. She could have used this race to build an amiable public persona, she could have positioned herself for a serious run at some of our weaker House seats or even at John Kerry the next time he comes around. But she refused to do that, and she deserves a nice quiet life in private sector oblivion because of it. (The Globe reports on the incredibly weak thinking behind it here)

It is a testament to the fact that things are, indeed, different that Democrat Deval Patrick refused to hop into the gutter as well. I’ll confess that I was a late-comer to the Patrick bandwagon, which lit people on fire around here in the Berkshires. He has a house in Richmond a few towns away, and I remember a year and a half ago getting emails and calls from Democratic folks around the area telling me about meet and greet events with Deval, and my response was “Who? Holy cow, don’t you realize the election is a year and a half away!”. I admit I was suspicious of his background: I don’t believe that success in business in any way qualifies you for elected office, and telling me you were a high-level executive at Texaco and Coke is like telling me you were a third-mate on a pirate ship. But through the primaries I came around and inhaled the spore with everyone else.

So while I was in the newsroom keeping tabs on the local races, the television gave dribs and drabs of what was happening at the national level. I didn’t have a chance to really start paying attention until after deadline, when it was down to Tennessee, Missouri, Montana and Virginia. When I got home I took Mila to the living room so we could watch some results before collapsing myself.

This afternoon I caught glimpses of Bush’s press conference. For the first time he looked and sounded like a beaten man, like someone who has heard the music. He was vicious and ruthless having won, and ferocious and nasty while in the process of loosing. But having lost almost seems to agree with him. I even laughed at one of his jokes (the one about Karl and the reading list). I almost can’t believe I’m saying this, but I have a hunch that the glad-handing bipartisan Texas governor we heard so much about years ago might make an appearance after all because he is all out of options. And if recent political history has taught us anything, it is that the Republicans are probably a more skillful minority party than a majority one (remember Newt Gingrich?). The next two years will be very interesting. But at the risk of sounding like a Massachusetts Republican, thank god there will now at least be a little bit of balance in the nation’s government.

On Halloween night, when we were still in the hospital, I turned on the television to watch the news. On the Albany stations there were a lot of awful ads in the Sweeney/Gillibrand race. We switched to the Vermont channels and there were lots for the Rainville/Welch race. We turned the whole thing off.

Those first few days in the hospital are a real blessing. You have lots of people around to help you out, you have no cares or responsibility beyond the new member of your family, and you have nothing ahead of you but the bright field that is the rest of your life. Yet it doesn’t take long for you to be ready to head off into the big Whatever-it-may-be, to get bored with the hospital walls and the hospital halls and to get back Home. Even though one can’t know what awaits, I knew all along this election day was coming. And in addition to hoping for a happy, healthy baby and wife, Tuesday was one of the things I wished would happen. I hope we earn it.

Axl and Kurt

For whatever reason last night while Mila was keeping us awake I started thinking about that strange rivalry between Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain. It started late one night months ago when I was watching VH1 or some such and found myself trying to remember what I thought of Guns n’ Roses, and how weird and portentous the feud between frontmen Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain was, and whether there is a larger point buried in it.

GNR was very big right when I was in junior high school, and I remember they were everywhere during those years. But by the early 90s the tide had gone out. They entered their baroque period, with the lavish, expensive videos, stadium tours of dubious quality, and Axl veering into a singular rockstar eccentricity while his bandmates just veered. Then came the grunge revolution, and Seattle’s indie scene became the Platonic “alternative” music ideal, with sonic mix of punk and metal and its flannel-clad, latte-fueled aesthetics.

At the time it was clear where the humor was, but looking back the picture becomes blurred. Although GNR came from the worthless Sunset Strip hair metal scene, they had the talent and creativity to beat it, and it is remarkable how well many of their songs hold up. Meanwhile grunge has has revealed itself to be just plain hilarious: all along maybe it was just metal that took itself way too seriously. I can’t listen to Soundgarden or Alice in Chains without chuckling. Nirvana was a rather large exception, and I think they knew it and it was one of those pressures that made them so uncomfortable in the limelight.

One point of friciton in these tectonic shifts was the famous feud between Axl and Kurt. There are stories Axl had wanted Nirvana to tour with them, which came to naught in some incidents at the 1992 MTV Music Awards involving Courtney Love and Axl’s entourage. There are many variations and rumors about what exactly happened, but Kurt seems to have seen Axl as a phoney, washed-up rockstar, while Axl saw Kurt as a heroin-addled whiner. At this moment, each of them seems to have had a point.

Over the weekend I saw an article in the Guardian by a filmmaker who traced Cobain’s last few mysterious days before his death. There are some very interesting moments…

In Seattle, we met up with Duff McKagen, bassist in Guns n’ Roses who’d bought a ticket on Delta Flight 788 to Seattle on April, 1 1994, and found himself sitting next to a crumpled figure wearing sunglasses.

It was the first irony of Cobain’s final week. Having jumped the wall of the Exodus Recovery Center near LA… Kurt found himself sitting next to a junkie rock star on the flight home. Duff is amazingly frank about what happens when two drug addict musicians meet up on a plane. “You cop some dope and then talk about quitting… ‘Yeah, this is the last time right?”

Or this…

Back in Seattle, Cobain proceeded to start scoring inordinate amounts of heroin, heading on out to the seedy-as-fuck Aurora Avenue to score them in Room 226 of the Marco Polo Motel (checking in as “Bill Bailey,” the real name of Axl Rose).

As much as I like Nirvana, I don’t regard Cobain nearly as highly as his fans do. I want to think this was a weird kind of solidarity and connection, a sense that when you strip away the personae they had to put on, they were just people trying to make art and live their lives. But alas, I fear when Kurt dragged himself into the hotel and gave that name, there was nothing more on his mind than a silly joke, made by a floundering jerk.

The years since have seen Cobain’s legend explode – as seen by his remarkable posthumous earning power. Meanwhile Axl has vanished into the studio, working on that mysterious single album that may or may not ever be finished, and is almost certainly going to be so worked over that it can’t be very good. Instead of being a slave to drugs, he’s a victim of his own perfectionism and difficult temper.

Sometimes you see kids running around in t-shirts with images of dead rock stars – Jimi, Janis, John Lennon, etc etc. This thanatos is the great drawback of rock culture, and we could do without it. It’s the kind of thing that turns Jim Morrison from the singer of a pretty good band into, as Lester Bangs dubbed him, a “bozo Dionysus” with an annoying afterlife.

It's a girl!

Olga and I welcomed into the world little Mila Jane Marcisz on Sunday, Oct. 29. She was born at 11:25 p.m. at Southwestern Vermont Medical Center in Bennington, and checked in at nine pounds, twenty inches.