'She should just talk'

I have two thoughts about the sudden and sad passing of poet and writer Maggie Estep. I can't admit to having been a particular fan, but for those few years in the 90s, if you were an English major, you pretty much had to have an opinion about her and the entire downtown Gen X poetry slam thing.

First, if I knew back then just how fickle, fleeting, and rare pop culture's interest in poetry was going to be, I wouldn't have spent quite so much time making fun of it. Looking back, it's incredibly hard to believe that a) MTV was once a cutting edge and trend-setting cultural institution, and b) had a more than passing interest in the doings of Lower East Side poets.

While it was happening, while poets were appearing on television channels aimed at cool young people, I thought the barbarians were at the gates. To me, poetry was a Very Serious Thing. Artists like Maggie Estep were not only misappropriating the legacy of the Beat Generation, but were making poetry shallow, silly and — ugh — popular. Sure, it didn't last, but I would love to know how many readers and writers she inspired with her work. I can begrudge now that what she was doing was interesting in its engagement with technology, and awareness of the collision of cultures that the media environment at the time introduced to one another. And I think it was brave, in the sense that she had to put up with snobs like me laughing up our sleeves (but despite admitting all that, the weird cadences of "slam poetry" still drive me straight up the wall).

The second thing is that I'm grateful I got to spend a few minutes with that famous Beavis & Butthead clip, which Estep's obits note was one of the biggest audiences her work had. It's funny what happens when you grow up. In high school and college, I used to love the cartoons and put up with the commentary on videos. Now that you can watch the videos online, and the commentary pieces are unavailable because of copyright baloney, I realize just how absurdly insightful and hilarious those parts were. What I wouldn't give to find somewhere on the internet the original, unedited B&B's of my youth!

The new ICA in Boston

The new ICA on the waterfront, Nov. 22, 2013

The homer in me can't resist putting it this way: on a recent trip to Boston I had a chance to finally see the second-best contemporary art museum in Massachusetts. The Institute of Contemporary Art is a perfectly respectable museum, with a marquee new building, but it's no MASS MoCA.

I had once visited the ICA's former home, in a converted firehouse in Back Bay which it had quite clearly outgrown. But that it took so long to get its new facility says a lot about the politics of art funding around here. In the 80s and 90s, while MoCA was struggling through its long gestation, no institution complained louder and longer than ICA. The couldn't believe the state would spend tens of millions of dollars on a brand new contemporary art museum in the middle of nowhere.

Maybe they had a point, but since I live here in Berkshire County and not in Boston, I can't give it too much thought. Boston has a lot of cultural offerings and economic opportunities. We get the short end of the stick often enough — there are real reasons why in many ways we feel closer to New York than to Boston.

The new ICA, like MoCA, was built at at time when museums must be considered more than simply places to store art. Today, they have to be part of a broader economic development scheme, in their case an effort to bring something to the desolate stretch of waterfront between the Moakley Federal Courthouse and the cavernous new convention behemoth. It seems like that project is coming along in a rather fitful way. Walking to the are from South Station, it feels like lots of parking lots and glass towers, not like a neighborhood in any meaningful way. In a city with such a deep history, and with so many vibrant and ancient communities all around, the ICA finds itself anchoring the one part of Boston with no personality whatsoever.

The building itself is quite an achievement, in a very showy way. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, it shows off its engineering skill and cutting edginess every way it can, through its contours of glass, steel, and concrete. The effect can be disorienting — it feels to me like it was built upside down. Many of its enthusiasts talk about how open it is, how it interacts with the water in front of it. All true, I guess, but you might also note how noisy it is, and how many of the spaces don't make much sense. One of the weirder features is something called the "mediatheque," a long narrow pod emerging from the belly of the building which is filled with rows and rows of computers, and where visitors are invited to relax and watch videos and other content relative to the exhibits. That's alright, but scourge of concrete building, I couldn't help but notice the giant crack in one of the upper steps.

The building got me thinking about architecture in Boston, and led me to a strange realization: the much-maligned Boston City Hall might be the last truly brave and interesting thing built in that city. Partly that's for the simple reason that it came from a distinct school of thought, and had the guts to stick to it. Whatever would replace it — and the new mayor has already said he's open to the idea — would be timid, flashy, and as brave as an investment banker's new BMW. You only have to look around the Financial District from across the Fort Point Channel to see how dumb and bland things have gotten. One mediocre high-rise with a cheap gimmick feature next to another. And don't even get me started on the TD Bank Garden.

These are building that just do their job. And the job of the new ICA is to shout, "Look at the neat arty thing sitting over here!" And the exhibits on display didn't really convince me that any serious path-breaking work is going on. A retrospective of the work of Amy Sillman, which was entertaining, along with an obvious show of new work considering the boundaries of painting, and the work of a photographer who takes unflinching images of postindustrial society. In other words, nothing really surprising.

There is so much awesome stuff in Boston. A day at the Museum of Fine Art is as great an art experience as you can have in America. On my last trip, I paid my first visit to the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum, which boasts an astonishing collection hiding in a quirky setting (perhaps too quirky at times, but that's just me). Boston also has an amazing aquarium, a stupendous science museum, and a world class symphony. But contemporary art remains an afterthought.

Anyone who ever had a heart...

It's been nearly two weeks since Lou Reed died, and after reading as many tributes as I could find, and listening to most of his albums since, I'm pretty confident that most listeners got him all wrong.*

I've never been a big proponent of the New Criticism school of literary criticism, the idea that all you need to understand a work of art can be found right in the text itself. I was an English and History major all those years ago, after all. But as a mindset it is a pretty effective tool when sorting through popular culture — and it really lights up Lou Reed's work, which is too often befogged by his reputation and easy assumptions.

Lou Reed's work meant a lot to me, and since he died I've been struck by the strange number of ways his words and music are woven into my life. The first song I listened to after my daughter was born was by Lou Reed (it's how she got her middle name, in fact). Certain songs can summon thoughts and feelings with magical thoroughness: each time I hear "Sunday Morning" I'm back on certain New York streets at certain late hours remembering certain things — an insane feedback loop of nostalgia, sorrow, and regret that is so intense I don't want to talk about it. Some memories I can't even make sense of. Like that one afternoon shortly after I'd moved to Williamstown and was overwhelmed with how remote and lonely it felt, and the song "Dirty Boulevard" came on WEQX. Something about hearing it at that moment made me so happy I nearly cried.

This is all means quite a lot to me, but what I want to talk about is how he lives in our culture. The conventional line, which you've heard over and over again since his death, is that he was a consummate outsider, a poet of rough, beautiful, alternative lifestyles in the big, bad city. A chronicler of those things in the night that are frightening yet strangely attractive.

Well, a little, maybe, but no.

Let's go to the text. Consider the song "Perfect Day." The prejudiced reading is that it must have something to do with how groovy it is to get stoned in the park. But there is nothing in the song that suggests anything of the sort. You have to — and too few people can for some reason — take it at face value: that it is about how nice it is to spend the day with someone you love. Anything more and you are missing the signal by broadcasting your own noise.

The shocking truth is that Reed was an almost perfectly irony-free romantic, which is so weird and counter to his counter-cultural reputation — not to mention the generally accepted understanding of his prickly personality — that he becomes revolutionary.

The songs are crystalline images of very powerful emotions, and they work best when you trust him and meet him on his own terms. A real favorite song of mine is "Coney Island Baby," which captures the weird longing to be accepted and terror of boredom that is as perfect a summary of teenage longing as you'll find. But to really get it, you have to understand what it means to want to play football for the coach, and not think it means something kinky or sarcastic. You have to believe in the "glory of love" with all the seriousness and logic half-formed youth can muster. And, of course, you have to let "I swear I'd give it all up for you" be the last word.  Doesn't matter what "it" might be. You probably felt that way once. I hope you did.

Throughout his work he was exploring what we have in common. Think about Transformer, an album that can't shake its reputation as a roman a clef about drag queens, junkies, and whores. But none of that really matters if you don't know, or even better, can get past, the novelty of it. If it weren't such a plain amazing song, it would astonishing that "Walk on the Wild Side" is the song everyone knows from his solo period (and I'm still figuring out how my state senator tweeted his memory of driving down Route 7 blasting the song with his dad in the car… his dad being our long-time district attorney). This is very human and universal, like the best art is, about alienation and loneliness and redemption. About fun and the desperate lengths we go to make our lives less dull and sad. It's a fortunate, collateral effect that it happens to maybe make you realize how much you have in common with people you might too quickly dismiss as marginal.

And I really think that Lou chose his subjects out of an abundance of compassion. Even his legendary prickliness is a function of his intense sincerity and earnestness. He couldn't be bothered with the deep artifice we demand of public figures. He obviously had many deep personal relationships, so he wasn't a total misanthrope.

When you look at the work all together, you see what values are at work. Tolerance, community, curiosity, cynicism about nothing but cynicism itself. His art is about the incredibly ancient and durable and maybe trite idea that life is really worth all the trouble if you are honest with yourself and look at it right.

* Not really true. As with so many things his wife Laurie Anderson gets it: "Lou was a prince and a fighter and I know his songs of the pain and beauty in the world will fill many people with the incredible joy he felt for life. Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us."

Anselm Kiefer arrives at Mass MoCA

'Narrow Are the Vessels'

Whenever a new building opens at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art it's a treat. Especially when it is a facility dedicated to a major and controversial artist. As the Globe's Sebastian Smee noted, the new building is about a lot of things — a career coming into focus, a museum continuing to stand on its own feet. But it is also about pioneering a new model of private / non-profit partnership in the arts. And for the Berkshire art world, it is another exciting step, as MoCA cements itself as the kind of place that attract Big Name international artists like Xu Bing, and lends some of that sheen to exciting young artists like Jason Middlebrook.

I went to visit the new space when it opened late last month. The building, which is near the Hadley Overpass on a previously unused portion of the campus, is as grand and severe as Kiefer's work. It is pitch-perfect for the works on display, and my only complaint is that it is much smaller than I would have hoped (only three works, really, but each of them is a doozy).

It begins with Narrow Are the Vessels, which MoCA-goers will remember had been in the main gallery for some time awhile back. The piece is a pile of long slabs on concrete, with rusty rebar jutting out in a menacing way, and crumbling bits of cement scattered on the floor. It looks like the aftermath of a bombing or an earthquake, the product of some sort of violence. But you realize after a few minutes that you've never seen concrete with such graceful curves and undulations, and wonder what this might have been before it became wreckage.

One of 30 paintings on display

Within a gallery inside the gallery is the 30 painting series Velmir Chlebnikov, a tribute to the "Russian poet and futurist who created complex analytical systems based on esoteric mathematical calculations meant to reveal vast paradoxes in logic and in the progression of history." In particular, it is about famous sea battle through the years, and seeing them together evokes the cycles of tides and weather and water that will haunt you if you go to the sea in the right frame of mind. Each canvas is encrusted with pain, and suggests its subject the way J.M.W. Turner's seascapes do. They speak of dark nights on a moonlight sea, the silent frightening depths, the fog, the lonely strand and scattered wreckage washed ashore.

Each of the pieces is about the patterns that emerge from chaos, about the grace and beauty of these moments in the present, and the ways they harden into memory and history. It is lyrical and human, and not as cold and distant as it seems at first. It's a perfect addition.

The Garbage Patch's pavilion at the Venice Biennale

A work by Maria Cristina Finnuci at the Ca' Foscari reminds us of the problem of stray plastic in the ecosystem. 

Life under the boot

There is a photo from my wife's family that haunts me in an unusual way. It shows my mother-in-law when she was still a small girl, standing on the balcony of the family apartment, being hugged by her father, my wife's grandfather. It is taken sometime in the late 1940s, and they are all smiling and laughing.

As a Western who has read and studied those years, something startled me. That during Stalin's reign -- when millions of people had already starved, perished in unimaginably horrible wars (which her father had just endured), vanished into gulags, and generally lived beneath a permanent dark cloud of arbitrary arrest -- people could laugh and hug one another seemed very strange. It had not crossed my mind in such horrible times, people would still behave like people.

I thought of that picture again this month when I on something of a whim read Martin Amis' 2002 book Koba the Dread, a sort of literary memoir to remind everyone that Stalin was awful. I was curious to read it to see what sort of animal this book was. I remember when it came out, how left field and strange it seemed that the guy who wrote London Fields and a treatise about arcade games felt obliged to abruptly join a sprawling, quintessential 20th century argument. I wanted to read it now just to see if there was any news on that conversation.

It didn't take long to realize there wasn't. Amis spends most of the time relitigating familiar arguments, and the text is mostly a synopsis of Robert Conquest's work, with memories of his father's journey from card-carrying Red to loudmouth Tory, and some gruesome, heartbreaking details from firsthand accounts by Nadezhda Mandelstam and other survivors.

He sifts through a lot of material gracefully, which might make it a useful first read for a "lay reader" who doesn't think regularly about Nikolai Yezhov's gruesome end, or the psychogeography of Kolyma. As Michiko Kakutani wrote at the time in the New York Times, "as flawed as Mr. Amis's book is, it does a credible job of conveying just how Stalin went about 'breaking the truth,' and it should send readers running to better, more scholarly books on this tragic period in history."

But ultimately, the first questions that arise when you hear of the book continue. Why did Amis, who by his own admission never really engaged very deeply in the politics of his times, suddenly feel he had to weigh in on all this?

I'm sensitive to this because of my current work. When I step away from my manuscript, I see that I'm basically trying to "explain" a group of people who for specific reasons bought into the Soviet scheme, and may or may not have had doubts about it along the way. I've been struggling to find the line between justifying what no sane person -- aware of all the facts -- could possibly endorse, and trying to explain how intelligent, well-meaning, and daresay decent people could have dedicated their lives, their work, and sacrificed their freedom for it. Seems to me someone has to think about these things on their own terms without rushing to judgment.

It is about seeing complexity, a skill not just useful when looking into the past. It is self-evidently ghastly to prosecute twelve-year olds for political crimes, but you'll never know why if you can't appreciate how at the same time loyal Party members in the state bureaucracy also loved their children.

Imagine you live in Germany in the 1930s, or in North Korea today. No matter how much you wish it to be true, the statistical reality is that you would not be a member of the underground helping save your Jewish neighbors, or standing at the side of a weep-athon for Kim Jong Il shaking your head. You would be trying to keep yourself and your family alive. You'd be hoping the Gestapo walks past your door and leaves you alone, you'd be on your knees making sure everyone could see you wailing for the departed Dear Leader.

Mob dynamics are terrifying, and easy to underestimate from a distance. And the best inoculation against their danger is an awareness of what human nature really is like. Our Founders understood this, and did everything they could to protect us from it while preserving democratic order.

And still... too many give in to the worst parts of our collective consciousness. There are too many today who howl with rage and delight when some hateful fool tells them we need to round up "illegal aliens," or deny rights to adults based on who they have consensual sex with, or rail about how elite liberal snobs use higher education to indoctrinate young adults (who, presumably, could think for themselves). The past isn't dead, as Faulkner warned, and it isn't even past.

My 2011 'list'

I love year-end "best of" lists -- most of us are too busy with everyday life to keep up with everything we would like to, and this is our one chance to catch up before the whole caravan moves on. Since we can't be a fanatic fanboy about everything we'd like, we have to accept we're all amateurs now. 

I'm at that point in life where I can't even keep up enough to offer a whole list of my favorite cultural production of the year. There are just a few things I want to rave about before the calendar flips...

MUSIC I think it is amazing that a serious, unflinching examination of the English experience of the First World War would be the year's only album that matters. PJ Harvey's Let England Shake doesn't compromise much, in its allusions, its poetry, or its assessment of the vast dangerous gulf between the language of valor and patriotism and the blood and terror of war. By wisely looking through the lens of a distant trauma -- the trenches and fields of a war a hundred years ago -- it meditates on the deep social costs of what we can politely call "conflict" in a way I can't remember anything else in recent memory has.

I've never been great at writing about music, so I can only fumble around for the right words about it. Much of the haunting, relentlessness appears to have something to do with the autoharp, and her particular singing style of late -- that choking, high shriek I believe she debuted on White Chalk that some of her long-time fans find grating. Her choice of samples ranges from the cliched -- that bugle in "The Glorious Land" -- to the inspired -- a new generation of listeners has now met Niney the Observer thanks to "Written on the Forehead." But one thing that is consistent is the way she can still make your skin crawl, as in "All & Everyone," which with little sentiment or irony imagines what it was like to die at Gallipoli.

But what's more interesting is how this album fits in Harvey's catalog. It seems crazy to say it about sometime whose first album I remember hearing in high school, but this album puts her in that exclusive company of artists like Dylan and Lou Reed and -- for some reason the analogy always springs to my mind -- Neil Young. These are all artists who came to sudden, youthful fame in a particular genre -- folkie, art rock, country rock, and the riot grrl whatever -- but were so talented and brave and devoted to their craft and vision that they had to grow and evolve with each subsequent album. Through the years, they've managed the unique task of growing up to become interesting adults, and you reach a point where the brand is so strong you pay attention to whatever they come up with. I can't wait to see what Polly Jean creates next.

MOVIESThere was a moment maybe halfway through Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life when I realized just how well conditioned we are as viewers these days. We expect every scene in a film to be busy, to be working. But there was one moment in Malick's film when one of the brothers is sitting at a table painting. As is Malick's meditative style, we linger around for a few beats longer than we expect. The scene is meaningless out of context, it only "advances" the story in the context of the dozens of other scenes around it.

Why, I would like to know, are filmmakers so terrified of taking their time? Why do they insist on assuming we have no memory, no patience, no attention span?

Actually, don't answer that. I saw a preview of Jack and Jill before I saw Tree of Life at the Mammut shopping mall near Moskva Ter, which managed to make me shrink into my seat in shame, even in a dark room where no one could know I was American.

And of course, it isn't hard to find the reasons that a movie like Malick's is a tough sell. As I left the theater, I heard two young women speaking -- in English, oddly -- about the movie. One was complaining about how she couldn't figure out what this and that "signified." This inability to handle the idea of a sweeping, non-linear, subtle movie has become part of this film's lore already. There is the story about the theater posting that it wouldn't be giving refunds if you asked for one because you couldn't figure it out. The quotes from Sean Penn about how he couldn't figure out what he was doing there (frankly, neither did I, his performance was rather statuesque).

I wanted to patiently tell her not to pull a muscle trying to figure it out. A movie isn't a math problem, for crying out loud.

Sometimes, you have to just buy the ticket and take the ride. That's the charm of film -- you give your time and your attention and you get taken someplace. It requires a great degree of trust, and Malick more than earned it. A few others have for me too. Stanley Kubrick, for example, is the same way for me.

The easy knock on these filmmakers is that they are pretentious, and self-absorbed and obtuse. But really, that's just ambition. And there's a reason I dropped my 1,200 forints to watch this instead of Jack and Jill.

There's nothing wrong with understanding that film can be poetry and it can be prose. And hell, it can be painting, and it can be music.

BOOKS

I like books. Quite a lot. And I feel I should have something clever to say about the year in literature. But still after all these years, I continue to to be aware that there were hundreds of years of great literature before 2011. I'm still catching up.

So, to borrow James Wolcott's appropriate phrase, I haven't spent much time this year "preparing Joan Didion's reliquary [or] fawning over the latest literary genius farted aloft from the borough of Brooklyn."

Woody Allen chugs along to Paris

I always like say that my Russophilia killed my Francophilia. I grew up a young man with a Romantic streak, a fascination with Europe and travel, and all kinds of cultural aspirations. But after long experience with Russia, somehow Paris has become very quaint and safe, a bourgeois fantasyland.

So I started to tune out of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris sometime during the first real scene of dialogue, as Owen Wilson mooned to Rachel McAdams about how inspiring and perfect the whole damn place is. Especially how breathtaking it is in the rain. The rain, for some reason.

A few quick points:

-- Woody Allen, more or less, has been functionally retired to me since 1997. I think a great number of the fans of his early work would draw that line at different points. But at the very least, the guy has got to slow down. There might have been an interesting movie in here, which with some patience and teamwork and at least another year in the oven, it could have emerged into something really valuable.

-- There's really nothing wrong with rehearsal. Allen's way of having actors interact has become a mannered charade of how late 20th century New Yorkers interrupt each other, say "Really?" in a forced way, and awkwardly try to purposefully look at one another when they aren't yapping. Loved it all when Diane Keaton did it, but man, every new generation that tries it out just looks dumb.

-- Woody needs to have a drink with an actual conservative every now and then. I love making fun of wingers as much as anyone, but even I cringe at the caricatures Woody routinely trots out to get a few cheap laughs from the Upper West Side crowd.

-- I love the "Lost Generation" -- far more than most do. So I enjoyed all the imitations of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Dali. But I realize they were cartoons, and I think I was kinda laughing at them, not with them.

-- "Prufrock is like my mantra!" ... Really? this line got through a rewrite?

-- I know everyone thinks it when they see it... so I'll say, *SPOILER ALERT* that you should do the math and figure out the age difference between the last two characters on the screen. (okay, I checked IMDB, it's 17 years). It's just gotten creepy already. Is he really so surrounded by yes men that he doesn't realize this? If this movie had any emotional honesty, Carla Bruni (one year older) should have appeared at the end.

-- So, New York, London, Barcelona, Paris... someone wake me up when he gets to St. Petersburg.

Abstract Expressionism in context at MoMA

A big part of Abstract Expresssionism, if we get right down to it, was to push art out of context. So yea, I appreciate it's a bit ironic for me to say that a current retrospective of the movement lacks context. The current big show at the Museum of Modern Art is really just that -- out of time, at sea, and serving purposes that are hard to grasp at first glance.

This show is something that has been on my radar for a long time, and since I live far from the city, getting there requires a bit of planning. I have been a big fan since high school, and i wrote my thesis in college about Frank O'Hara, the poet, man-about-town, and associate curator of painting at MoMA who was close to the movement.

MoMA's show pulls together a large number of highlights from the movement -- much from the museum's own collection. It is a greatest hits collection, but one that lacks a sense of nostalgia, passion or affection for the work. I've been struggling to find the right word for how all that feels -- not elegiac, nor like an obituary. It isn't a tombstone, but more of a cenotaph. At the same time, the show seems to be missing the sort of intellectual heft you'd expect from one of these once-in-a-generation reassessments. It is almost taxonomical -- this is what Abstract Expressionism is, this is who did, here are the best examples of it. It feels like the first draft of an art history textbook for high school students.

But the question of context is always right there, because it is a tricky issue when it comes to this work. Group shows about Abstract Expressionism in general seem to fail, because they don't make coherent points with each other as much as they do with themselves. Solo shows of particular artists can be brilliant. I have distinct, happy memories of shows devoted to Hans Hoffman, Clyfford Still, and my personal favorite, Barnett Newman. The MoMA show seems somewhat aware of this, and does a good job of tracing the development of Pollock from the student of Thomas Hart Benson to "Jack the Dripper." But everyone else seems to suffer from a selective approach.

And yet, even though Abstract Expressionism is so often a punch-line, (for the record, why do people still insist on dismissing AbEx by saying that "any four-year-old could do it?" I spend a lot of time painting with a four-year-old, and I tell you, she never does anything like this), the show was packed. Part of that is because New York museums are always packed (sorry, I'm desensitized to Berkshire museum going, which is usually blissfully quiet and solitary in the winter). So it hard to avoid the idea that this show was a crowd-pleaser, MoMA making its once-in-a-generation effort to present a comprehensive show about a movement that is intimately bound up in their own history. It is a reminder that this happened.

It's okay to say, 'this is it' right now

The main reason it is taking me so long to make progress on the historical novel I'm working on is that there are so many ways to trip up. Recreating the past is a minefield of anachronisms, missteps, and potential howlers that you have to carefully creep your way through.

For example, you can never tell which common phrases might not have been around during the time you are writing about. In the past few days, almost randomly, I've learned from both A.J. Liebling's Mollie and Other War Pieces and Paul Fussell's Wartime that using the phrase "This is it" in its modern usage (to signify the start of something dramatic or momentous) is an invention of American infantrymen during the early days of the Second World War.

I guess it one of those small points, but if historical novelists don't lose sleep about them, who will?

Person who died

I never really bothered to have a strong opinion about Jim Carroll, the poet, diarist, and rock star who died suddenly last Friday at the age of 60. He swam in the same current as many of my favorite writers and musicians, so I've long known and admired much of his work. But I've never felt much more than that. He was in all the right places, knew the right people, but it always felt like he was opportunely a few steps behind.


Take his cult classic, The Basketball Diaries, which never struck me as even a very good example of writing about drugs. Looking at it again recently, it seems to me it isn't much more than a disjointed collection of clever observations, with a certainly dated shock value, which all suggest raw talent that might lead to something solid with the right influences. But the book itself never gets too deeply into why this nice Catholic jock would go so far off the rails, nor about what any of these misadventures might have to tell a disinterested reader.


His poetry was, I guess, alright, but not really that distinctive from a lot of the kind of stuff happening around New York in the good old days. The Jim Carroll Band, his game effort at rock n' roll/poetic fusion, never went far enough (see the perfectly serviceable version of "Sweet Jane" below, which really doesn't give you any reason not to just listen to Lou's original version again).  


 The only thing he did that is truly timeless is the song "People Who Died," an unrelenting, upbeat, almost hypnotizing rocker that transcends the ghoulishness of its subject matter to become a very profound assertion of life in the face of impermanence. But even then, the song was just an adaptation of a poem by his friend and mentor, Ted Berrigan.


Carroll gave a reading at Penn when I was there, and I came away impressed. The thing that I remember most was his voice -- this incredible, authentic New-Yawk honk, which sounded incredibly strained and weary croaking out of his tall, frail body. There was something in the way he read that suggested a kind of humility. The kind of deep appreciation many recovering addicts possess, especially one that pissed away what many think could have been a really promising career in professional sports. There was something about him that made you want to root for him, a kind of everyman sense of wonder and awe.


Of course, there is another way to look at this -- Robert Christgau acidly described him as being a phony "who's been charming suckers ever since he ran away from home." (He then goes on to acknowledge that charming this successfully takes real talent. "He's got a great eye, a great memory, great connections. He knows how to put himself across.") I wouldn't be that uncharitable though. You have to imagine him as a fifteen year old kid with a lot on his plate -- one of the best young basketball players in the city, already turning tricks around Times Square to fuel a drug habit, and still finding the time to stalk Frank O'Hara as he walked home from work, just to see what he saw and maybe get an insight into what made his poetry tick. They really don't make them like that anymore -- poetry has become ossified and ridiculous, promising athletes are channeled into the game so thoroughly they barely develop personalities, and the great American stewing pot of New York is a pathetic shadow of itself. He swam in some amazing slipstreams.

Stuff on teevee

Very busy couple of days here in Moscow. To my real amazement, it seems the Champions League final at Luzhniki on Wednesday really did go off without any trouble. The cops even put on their dressy uniforms, with the dress jackets and clean white shirts rather than their day-to-day paunch-enhancing light blue blouses.

The game was on western European time, so it didn't get underway until about 11 p.m. here, and didn't wrap up until nearly 2 a.m. as a result. Then I had to write my column about it all. I had already written something about Saturday's Russia Cup final between CSKA Moscow and Amkar Perm -- specifically about the way it ended in a penalty shoot-out. But since the big game ended the same way, I felt there was no way I could avoid hashing it in. (UPDATE 5/24: I wish I'd had more time to think through my column about the game. The commentary about the nature of these kinds of events has been very interesting, like this and this. I think I may be on to something.

It very much feels like we are going through a great clump of big events right before the slow, dull dacha season arrives. For example, this weekend we have the Eurovision finals in Belgrade. Last year, I was able to watch my first Eurovision, and was swept away by its unapologetic cheesiness, circus-like nationalism, and phenomenally curious voting patterns.

Alas, this year, I'm a bit depressed about it, especially since Ireland's entry -- a singing turkey puppet named Dustin -- was dismissed, I don't see anyone carrying the torch for us ironically-inclined viewers. Plus, I've actually heard that Russia's Dima Bilan is tipped as the favorite, which makes my head hurt. For those of you who don't follow Russian pop closely, Dima is the owner of Russia's most famous mullet -- which is saying quite a lot in this mullet-mad nation. He is very popular with teenage girls -- and apparently with certain kinds of older men thanks to some risque photo shoots in his impressionable youth.

The very fact that he became Russia's selection this year demonstrates the scandalous web of influence-peddling and nepotism that ruins the spirit of competition and international friendship behind this long-running event (pfff... tryin' to keep a straightface). Dima already had his chance in 2006, and brought shame and dishonor to the Russian people with his embarrassing second place finish. This year is nothing more than his management's effort to make another futile push into the wider European market.

I hope it doesn't work. This song, which I've seen a couple times on the music channels, is so awful that it stops being funny. It is in English, but that kind of Eastern European cheese-pop English that you don't recognize unless someone tells you, "hey, I think this song is in English!" I can't tell what the hell the lyrics are about, but judging by the video, it is about a very sick and incredibly picturesque little boy. Judging Dima's interest in him and the obviously Western quality of care at the hospital where he is staying (no nurses demanding bribes for painkillers, the floors look like they've been cleaned since the Andropov era, etc etc), I guess he is the son of a well-placed oligarch, but that's neither here nor there. The point is he is awfully sick, in a Dickensian sort of stoic heart-stirring way, and Dima organizes a "beneficent" concert for him at a hockey arena. He performs this song about hope and shit with some dude pretending to saw away on a fiddle and a fashion photographer hovering around. The coup de grace that makes this about everything wrong with today's Russia arrives when jackass ice skater Yevgeny Plushenko makes an appearance and twirls around to inspire everyone or whatever.

And this thing is tipped to win the whole thing. I am so profoundly disillusioned that I almost can't be ironic anymore. I think I'll skip the crappy songs and just watch the voting -- which seriously ought to be the subject of a colloquium at the Council on Foreign Relations or something. Fareed Zakaria ought to write a book about it.

And you know who definitely can't be ironic? Russia's state-run First Channel, which will broadcast the final. They've been running a promo with a definite message. It shows the Russian national hockey team winning the World Championships in Canada last week, plus Zenit St. Petersburg winning the UEFA Cup this month, and ends with Dima's quest for glory. So you see, Eurovision -- just like international sports -- is really about proving the amazing super-awesome glory of Russia over all the suckahs. Take that Estonia! Shove it Ukraine!

UPDATE (5/25): Ungh. Dima's "live" performance, and the nationalist backwash here the morning after, have been even more loathsome than I had imagined. The 12-year old girls of Europe have let mankind down. I voted last night -- only because how often do I get to vote in the Eurovision finals? -- and was ready to go with Azerbaijan, whose entry included men dressed as angels and a guy sitting on a throne pouring fake blood on a writhing dancer. But I chose to go with Spain's entry, which seemed in the light-hearted spirit appropriate for things like this.

Norman Mailer

It is very easy to make fun of Norman Mailer, and I think he was aware of that, and that’s what made him great. His death this weekend is sad enough – he never got that Nobel prize – and as mundane as it sounds, an era passes and I’m sad about what’s left.

I always took Mailer with a grain of salt, but he was such a figure that I realized I’d been thinking about him on two discreet occasions in just the past few days. First, I was wondering about what he thought about how rubbish the Village Voice has become. He was one of the founders in 1955, and I’ve always wondered if he ever bothered to check in with it in recent years. I’ve taken the paper’s collapse personally – in high school I would pay $2 for the thing at Lizotte’s newsstand in Northampton, and in college I had a subscription outright (this was before the Internet, and it feels like ages ago). I would read the things cover to cover, feeling my world open up as I read about the huge horizons of the big city, about bands and musicians and artists I hadn’t heard about yet. Within a few years though, it had collapsed into a dogmatic chaotic mush so predictable and bland that it wasn’t even worth its new cover price (free). Then a few years ago, those New Times twits bought it out, and brought their manner of sun-belt “alternative” writing to the grandfather of it all. Out went the stable of legendary – if somewhat lazy – writers, and in came a handful of underpaid kids. It is a shame, because I have always loved the idea of the alternative press, and I guess the future will be on the Internet somehow, sometime. And maybe it would take people like Mailer to ever get it working.

On a more broad level, I was thinking, as I often do, about how contemporary fiction and why I don’t give a damn about it. My latest round of thinking about it started when Nathan Englander’s much awaited second novel came out earlier this year, and as I read about it and heard the interviews, I became aware of an overwhelming feeling that there is nothing less I’d like to do than actually read the thing. I realized I read a lot of book reviews, and usually feel exactly the same way. There is nothing to get excited about, and Mailer was nothing if not exciting.

There is so much to like about his work. I remember reading The Naked and the Dead in college in giant hundred page chunks at a time. It was paced so well, and even though it was written just after the war ended and lay in plain sight for decades, it still shook and challenged everything I thought I knew about the war. I also greatly admire the manner in which he later turned to nonfiction. He was candid about how when he was young being a novelist was the most heroic thing you could do, but that in the 1960s nonfiction more and more took its place, and he brought something to that revolution. And later went back to fiction because it was important enough. He always had a way, even at his most obnoxious, to make you think. I saw him speak at Penn, and unfortunately all I can remember is that he spent a lot of time comprehensively attacking fluorescent lighting -- I agree with him, and to this day I think about that talk every time I’m in a quiet public room and hear that damn buzzing. I remember staying at a bed and breakfast in Maine with a ton of books on the shelves, including a host of Mailer’s works. I started flipping through a first edition of The Prisoner of Sex. I thought that I could detect in it the physical effect of writing on a typewriter. Something I can’t put my finger on about the fast pace of the writing, as fast as thought, mixed with a jangly and illusory confidence that comes from not thinking enough as the words hit the paper, and not thinking you have to rewrite as carefully as they should. There are a lot of things not to like about the man and his work. The egomania, the self-indulgent prose, the idea of the arts as a competitive sport, the attitudes toward women, the glorification of violence... But he was a man who was always looking for a fight or an argument, and always seemed willing to go out for a drink afterward. This honesty, friendliness, openness and risk-taking, are the best attributes of America. And it is something we are losing very fast.

Telegrams and Anger: Mass MoCA vs Christoph Büchel edition

It is amazing how quickly you fall back into things. I was no sooner back from our mercifully Interwebs-free vacation on the Adriatic for only a few hours before something on the other side of the world to cause worry. I’ve been following the Christoph Büchel/Mass MoCA standoff from afar. I had covered MoCA for years at the Eagle, and had reported on the opening salvos of this preposterous dust-up. I was at first amused by it all, but now I’m disappointed that the arts world appears to be too far up its own ass to give the museum the full-throated support it deserves. The story is really quite simple, but is unnecessarily confused by people with an agenda to push. Mass MoCA, despite its modest financial resources and out of the way location, has become one of the most cutting edge spaces for large-scale installation works in the world thanks to its cavernous Building 5 and a team of dedicated staffers who move heaven and earth for them (even when they are flops, like the Höller exhibit “Amusement Park” that had been installed before). For this year the plan for the space was the first big North American project by Swiss artist Christoph Büchel, which ran into serious snags as his proposed project ran way over budget. He eventually walked out on the project in a huff, and the rest is litigation. MoCA made the unfortunate decision to open what they had to the public, raising questions about betraying the artists intentions, and sued for violating his contract. It is an unfortunate turn of events – I wish MoCA had just sued for damages for costing them a season they could ill afford to loose and make him pay to clean his crap out of the building himself, but the museum had to do something with its marquee space during the vital summer tourist season. Last week, a federal judge agreed with the museum, and saw past the scaremongering of Büchel’s lawyers about how the rights of all artists are now infringed because, I guess, they’ll now have to sign specific contracts and fulfill the obligations in them. The response of much of the arts community, and the reporters and writers that are supposed to be covering it, has been amazing. Now that I am a private citizen and not a reporter covering Berkshire county, I can admit that I am a great admirer of MoCA and the people that work there. I know what they do and have done, how much they mean to the community where I have so many ties, and how despite its size and reputation, it remains still an experiment resting on a very shaky foundation. So the public pile-on they have had to endure for the sake of this art-world princeling is too much. I saw it first in a July essay by the Boston Globe’s art critic, Ken Johnson, who had the nearsightedness to write that the whole affair “affirms popular perceptions of our most innovative contemporary artists as frauds and charlatans.” Of course, the only honest answer to the question about where that reputation comes from is behavior like Büchel's. Johnson seems to assert that museums should just shut up and enjoy the ride, which seems to me a variation on the sick old adage about what to do if you know you are going to be unavoidably raped. It got worse when Roberta Smith of the Times weighed in, also rising to the defense of those suffering toilers in the trenches of art, who are attacked by an uncaring public and whipped by the taskmasters at non-profit museums who makes them weep blood for their work. “Never underestimate the amount of resentment and hostility we harbor towards artists,” she writes, strings soaring in the background as the camera pans the Sistine Chapel. “It springs largely from envy. They can behave quite badly, but mainly they operate with a kind of freedom and courage that other people don’t risk or enjoy. And it can lead to wondrous things.” And continuing: “In the end it doesn’t matter how many people toil on a work of art, or how much money is spent on it. The artist’s freedom includes the right to say, ‘this is not a work of art unless I say so.’” If we are interested in cute postmodern games about authorship and authenticity, we ought to at least acknowledge that much of the best twentieth century art was supposed to makes us ask just what magic, Olympian power put the crown on the head of the “artist” and made his declaration of “art” more important than my declaration of “bullshit.” (And, when he is not quite so dyspeptic, Büchel himself is apparently big on these sorts of questions. From the press materials for his recent London show Simply Botiful: “Büchel repeatedly manipulates and exploits the perceived power of the social and legal contract, subverting the relationship between artist and audience while insisting on a more active political role for both.” There are moments when the hypocrisy of all this is so overwhelming I have to think it’s actually one big meta-exhibit. If so, I really wish he’d done his homework and screwed around with some money-pile like the Guggenheim). Smith uses very high-minded talk to defend a system that is strangling all those noble and sublime things she is yabbering about. As my former colleague John Mitchell of the Transcript notes on his blog, this is “a piece of NYC art world insider crap… [that] speaks about MoCA as if it were a billion dollar movie studio seeking a final cut rather than a non-profit art museum still working to become self-sufficient.” True. Büchel's supporters have reduced this to a matter of intellectual property, with the assumption that the museum is assuming a role that does not belong to it, for some nefarious, unspoken reason. What to the right-thinking aesthete could it possibly be? Power and glory? I don’t think there is a moment in MoCA’s history that could suggest they are power-mad solipsists. Could it be money? Ah. Contemporary art’s ruling class are the ones that make the fortunes and distribute the crowns for the heads of folks like Büchel: the gallery owners and the elaborate network of enablers that has sprung up to prop up this sad system. Self-absorbed geniuses like Büchel are churned out of the world’s art schools faster than the system can absorb them, and the ones that make it usually have enough sense to keep their ego in check while they’re blowing other people’s money. They don’t know and don’t care where it comes from, as long as it has no whiff of the real world on it and includes lots of encouragement of what a genius they are. That’s how it goes in the “art world,” a sick money orgy with the kind of screwed-up values you’d expect from a multibillion dollar industry, served by groveling arts press that can’t think for itself anymore. It is no wonder so few people give a damn about contemporary art anymore – a pathetic situation which happens to be Mass MoCA’s mission to correct in some small way. This stupid mess has caused incalculable harm to an institution that personally means a lot to me. And as far as I’m concerned that is what, as Ken Johnson might say, makes this a “sad, dumb and shameful” episode.