Culture Rover

The death of Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell left me thinking about drummers in general.

When I first heard Mitchell, I was struck by the busy quality of his drumming, the way that his beat was all aflutter on cymbal titters, rolling tom fills, and stuttering bass drum kicks. It was a tidal-wave sound, the unsteadying feel of an earthquake, full of propulsion but always verging on chaos and disruption. It was drumming as a dance with entropy, and it fit perfectly with Hendrix’s guitar playing, which was casual and messy, loose and almost laconic even as it exploded with volcanic intensity. The band’s groove barely held together, which was what made them fascinating and, paradoxically, well, to quote Hendrix himself “groovy, baby.”

R.I.P. Mitch Mitchell

Thinking about and appreciating Mitchell’s messy drumming made me get all structuralist about percussion. I began to sort drummers into two categories, a la the raw and the cooked. In this case, the binary was the messy and the neat.

On the one hand, there are drummers who celebrate the mess, who brilliantly barely keep the beat together in a flurry of percussion. I’m thinking of Mitchell, Keith Moon, and, in a whole different idiom, the jazz drummer Connie Kay, whose soft brushstrokes defined the Modern Jazz Quartet’s style and who lent such a central backdrop to albums such as Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. It sounds like I’m putting down these drummers, but the making a mess of the groove is actually incredibly hard to accomplish — that is, to make the beat both messy and alluring all at once is no easy feat. To transform the backbeat into a beautiful mess, yet keep the groove intact may be the highest percussive achievement of all.

On the other hand, there are the neat drummers, who slice and dice the groove up into terse sections, who use silence and space as percussive elements. Here I am thinking of drummers such as Levon Helm, John Bonham, Ginger Baker, and, in the soul realm, Al Jackson Jr., with his famous delayed backbeat. These drummers reduce and refine, slim down and locate just the right access point to insert the beat. They leave you hanging on, dropping you into the silence at the heart of sound. We might call them minimalists, except they are really more accurately described as maximalists: they maximize the contribution of each percussive sound toward the song as a whole.

Messy drummers and neat drummers: I think pop music would be so much less satisfying without both approaches behind the kit.

When I start to read John Leonard, it is as though I, while simply looking for the men’s room, blundered into a lecture by the smartest man who ever lived.

-Kurt Vonnegut

Image: New York Times

Halloween special: in the bonus features of the DVD The Story of Marie and Julien, Jacques Rivette’s 2003 film, the director insists vehemently to an interviewer that his movie is not about a phantom, but a ghost.

Jacques Rivette in The Story of Marie and Julien

Culture Rover has been haunted ever since. What is the difference? Is it something in the French terms for phantom and ghost that gets lost in translation?

Jerzy Radziwilowicz (Julien) and Emmanuelle Béart (Marie)

It is such a tantalizing distinction: are you a phantom or a ghost? But what does the distinction mean?

Images: The Story of Marie and Julien

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.
-Barack Obama, 3/18/08

As published by Ben Smith of Politico.com (arriving to Culture Rover via Aidan Smith), two photographs from the most ambiguous region of the United States: just west of the Appalachian Mountains, but not far enough to actually be the Midwest, just north of Dixie, but not quite the North, sagging south of the Rust Belt, but as rusty as it gets, the Ohio River valley and the areas around it are a mixed and mongrel country.

Obama sign and confederate flag, Martinsville, Indiana

They are perhaps the heart of the heartland, the most American part of America, and yet they defy description. They resist the usual one-sided assumptions about where culture and politics meet.

Obama sign and black lawn jockey, Mansfield, Ohio

That it is neither here nor there may, in the end, be what makes this region the heartland. It is everywhere and nowhere: red, white, and blue (and black). A place between, a contradiction in terms, whose mixed-up betweenness, whose willingness to wear its contradictions on its lawns, is what makes it the pulsating pump powering the American civic body.

Images: Martinsville photo, Marty Kady; Mansfield photo, unnamed Obama canvasser

Can the heroic grandiosity of abstract expressionism be compacted into a miniature?

Yes. In the Suitcase Paintings exhibition at LUMA, works that typically overwhelm us with scale are brought down to size. No painting is over nineteen inches.

Joan Mitchell, Untitled, oil on canvas, 1961, 18 1/8 x 15 inches

Only, being brought down to size only intensifies the impact of each painting. The suitcases become compartments of transformation. Packed into smaller spaces, the bold strokes, drips, dashes, swirls, and layers of paint suggest a journey to some larger infinite realm: ideas, emotions, and sensations lurk in darkened corners, folded up and crammed in, ready to be unfurled in full at some future destination.

Image: Estate of Joan Mitchell

If asked to name one art performance that sums up the 1960s counterculture, Culture Rover would choose Trisha Brown’s Accumulation, from 1971 (seen here in a brief excerpt at the beginning of Byron Woods’ video preview of the Trisha Brown Dance Company at Duke’s American Dance Festival).

Set to the song “Uncle John’s Band” by the ur-countercultural rock group the Grateful Dead, the piece typically features a female dancer who adds simple movements one to the next until they gather into a kind of balanced, natural rhythm: pared down, vernacular, and earthy.

The dancer steps out in front of the curtain, on the stage apron, as if to signal the informality of the performance. The music begins, a lilting acoustic guitar with maracas and clave sticks ambling along behind the melody. First, the dancer’s thumbs gesture like a hitchhiker’s in search of a ride. Then the hips sway and the dancer steps back and forward as if tangoing with the audience. One leg kicks up and down. The thumbs move again in small circles at the waist. The dancer inhales and reaches up skyward, drawing the hands in to the belly and up over the head in what resembles the outstretched end of a yogic sun salutation. Repeat.

Trisha Brown

The pace is easy-going, the body loose and relaxed. Limbs elastic, without the formal rigidity of classical ballet or even much other modern dance. The beauty of the piece is striking: it has a goofy yet profoundly moving quality of dawning illumination.

The dancer alludes to numerous Sixties roles in the brief six-minute performance. She is, first of all, female. I have come to believe that the counterculture was, despite its retrograde aspects, driven most of all by transformations in gender norms. The changing boundary between femininity and masculinity is key. The dancer is an Even Cowgirls Get the Blues adolescent girl setting out on the road in adventure. She is also a religious seeker seeking out the spiritual, meditating at sunrise. She is part dancer under the psychedelic strobe light flash, deep within herself among the ballroom crowd. She is also dancing in her bedroom alone, listening to a song emanate from her record player, imagining community through the vinyl grooves and electronic signals. She has discovered love. She is pleased, amazed, in the moment. She understands and inhabits her own body in a new way. She feels herself move through space: sweetly, sentient, grounded, in tune.

This performance encapsulates the Sixties counterculture because it is about an individual facing the universe: from the possibility of community with others to the discovery of the self to the perception of humanity’s place within larger, non-human realms. The dancer is not a revolutionary here, she has not mapped out an ideology. Instead, she achieves an openness and dexterity of mind, spirit, and body; she discovers a willingness to interact and transform and a desire to know and feel anew.

This consciousness, as it was called at the time, was the invisible vapor fueling the Sixties counterculture. It was more a feeling than an idea; it was a mood not a manifesto, an affective state not an ideological position (though of course these binaries were in continual dialectic interaction).

Trisha Brown’s Accumulation suggests how the Sixties counterculture exploded into being in the relationship of sensation to sensibility. As the dancer repeats her bodily movements, she adds new insights. She accumulates — ideas, awareness, experience, knowledge. Moving and then moving again, returning and reaching out into the dark theater, she establishes connections and then pulls them back into herself.

There were many distopian aspects to the Sixties counterculture, however the openness and discovery expressed in Accumulation presents the Sixties counterculture at its best.

Image: Trisha Brown Dance Company

Life is like a body with no bones.

- The Scene Is Now, “Two Spoonfuls”

Like a later-day Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, The Scene Is Now created music that mutated conventional rock song forms into something new.

The group x-rayed the bones of a typical rock song, then manipulated and rearranged, negated and inverted, transmogrified and reshaped the music into a fresh idiom: all herky-jerky and skeletal, jangling and jingling, howling and clattering, fumbling and fraying at the edges.

As founder Philip Dray put it in a Perfect Sound Forever interview from 2001, “The ethos of the band, such as it was, and this was true of The Scene Is Now, was to try and write and perform material that was original and that avoided certain hackneyed rock and roll ideas, both musically and lyrically.”

The results were songs that seemed to have already existed yet had never been noticed: compositions made from wind gusting, gravel kicked up, leaves falling, and garbage dumpster lids creaking in the night.

Image: Perfect Sound Forever

When limits, or choices, are displayed in the service of the possibility of meaning, in the making of art objects, we call the result beautiful. That is, we stand before a painting by Vermeer, or we read a poem by Paul Celan, or we listen to Shostakovich’s Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues for Piano, and we say this is beautiful. But what we are really announcing is our pleasure and gratitude in the fact of the choices the artist has made. We recognize something in how one stroke of the brush brushes up against another stroke of the brush; how one note moves toward and away from the next in an astounding sequence; how one word attaches itself to another and to another and to another until something that has to do with all the words separately - the history of their meanings - gathers into a nexus which allows us, which invites us, to experience something like the meaning of meaning.
- Ann Lauterbach

One of the great pleasures of the New York Review of Books is the subtle brilliance of how its editors sequence articles. It is the same pleasure that came in college from having something in one class connect to another, seemingly by serendipity.

In the 17 July 2008 issue, Stephen Greenblatt’s review of new productions of Macbeth explored the original play’s positioning between a world of magic and secularism. Soon thereafter, Claire Messud’s review of Lousie Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves used a memory of the contrast between Messud’s Catholic and Protestant sides of her family to explore a similar theme. Then, two articles later, Linda Colley’s review of J.H. Elliott’s Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 picked up the thread of contrasting Catholic and Protestant sensibilities.

Did the editors put these together knowingly or without awareness? Part of the fun is that the connections emerge without intention from the editing, so that one cannot quite be sure if he or she is being led or forging the connections independently.

It’s a small instance of intellectual life in the electric synapse between purpose and accident, a space in which wonder gets produced.

Will this mundane but delicious interplay between editor, publication, and reader remain in the digital era? Hypertext seems to replicate, even expand, the pleasurable effects of editorial sequencing.

But the editing of serendipity will only persist if cultivated and appreciated. It must be relished as a secret whispered from editors to readers across the connective and collective bandwidth.

Try as you might, you cannot fit the whole world in a box. From this failure comes the heartbreaking power of Joseph Cornell’s art.

One can only navigate the imagination in increments, miniatures, on the wreckage of coffin shards, lost at sea, a filmy soap bubble on the expanse.

Images: Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Soap Bubble Set), 1936; Joseph Cornell with his box “Garbo: The Crystal Mask,” about 1939-1940, Joseph Cornell Study Center, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

“Praise and blame are aspects of the same thing. The capacity for criticism is the capacity for enjoyment.” - Clive James, Cultural Amnesia, 117.