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#388 – Smells Like Mid-Life Crisis

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

it’s like rain on your wedding day: a.o. scott on the ironies (are they ironies?) of the gen x man’s mid-life crisis.

A.O. Scott has a typically intriguing and well-written essay of cultural criticism in which he detects a crisis of the Gen X male’s mid-life crisis. Scott knits together, in a threadbare grunge-flannel tapestry, recent films such as Greenberg and Hot Tub Time Machine and Sam Lipsyte’s novel The Ask to argue that the meta-crisis for Gen X men now arriving in middle age is that they never grew up in the first place.

I think Scott has it backward. The real crisis of Gen X men is not that they can’t grow up in order to have a mid-life crisis, but rather that they were never young in the first place. That is to say, they were never young by the criteria of the baby-boomer definitions of youth (“hope I die before I get old” and all that). These constructions of youth and adolescence—forged in the 1960s and 70s—dominated American middle-class culture in the 1980s and 90s. But they were also imploding as baby boomers clung to youth into their middle years and redefined, along with corporate marketers happy to help them, what young meant.

The need to establish youth as generational difference remained an imperative for Gen X, but it no longer functioned well to establish difference. This was the experience of “vintage postmodernism” that Scott describes in the essay. (As a side note, “vintage postmodernism” a fabulously strange phrase, as if to suggest that now we live in a post-postmodern moment—and perhaps we do; and perhaps therein lies a way out.)

What happened in the 1980s and 90s was that the temporal organization of life stages exploded across biological ages, thus making it both necessary and impossible for Gen Xers to validate their experiences of youth on baby boomer terms. I think this might well apply for women as for men of this generation.

Gen X was itself a manufactured label born of the 60s impulse to define generational cohorts. This group came of age with the need to talk about their generation, but they themselves had to manufacture both the talk and the generation out of categories that no longer caused a big sensation. And they’ve been uncomfortably numb ever since.

Posted in Advertising Culture, Consumer Culture, Critical Culture, Culture Rover, Popular Culture, Seventies Culture, Sixties Culture | 1 Comment »

#385 – The Sick-sties

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

the lingering haze of a decade’s long time passing.

Another Speaker, Tip O’Neill once said: ‘All politics is local.’ And I say to you tonight that when it comes to health care for all Americans, ‘All politics is personal.’ - Nancy Pelosi, Closing Statement for House of Representatives Health Care Reform Bill, 21 March 2010

One of the most surprising aspects of the Barack Obama era thus far has been the strangely mutating specter of the 1960s. The hoopla during Obama’s campaign framed him as a post-60s figure: this was a man who was not formed, stained, distorted, trapped, or motivated by the scars of 1960s political or cultural struggle. Neither non-inhaling Bill Clinton, nor Vietnam-vetted John McCain was he (nor Vietnam-evading George W. Bush either, for that matter).

But then, during the campaign, Bill Ayers the unrepentant ghost kept creeping out on to the scene as Obama’s main man. Rather incongruously, not to mention unconvincingly, but there he was nonetheless. Suddenly, at least as far as right-wingers were concerned, you did need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

But it was not until the health care reform debate that the 1960s—or more importantly the fuzzy public memory of it, which folds together everything from the civil rights movement to women’s and gay liberation to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society government programs to the anti-Vietnam War struggle to the counterculture into one big (medical) marijuana cigarette—really roared back into public consciousness. And when it did, the 60s returned in odd, new ways.

That bobo in paradise (or at least at the New York Times) David Brooks, as always keen to pin the downfall of modern America on the 60s, wrote a bizarre column in March that located the roots of the Tea Party movement in the New Left. Brooks’s argument contained a seed of truth—as Rebecca Klatch’s marvelous scholarship has shown, the libertarian left and right overlapped in the 1960s counterculture. It is true, after all, that the Tea Party decided to hold a self-proclaimed conservative Woodstock in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s hometown. Significantly, though, the libertarian right clashed with the conservative right in the late 60s.

One thing that Brooks ignored in his column was the history of the libertarian right in the 1960s. Brooks, who believes conservatives should be understood exclusively as Burkean believers in human fallibility and the resulting need for tradition, structure, and restraint (except, for some reason, when it comes to the “free” market economy), did not mention the other historical side of the modern right: the Birchian right wing of firearms, dog-eat-dog liberty, and a nasty, brutish, and short paranoid style. No believers in Reinhold Niebuhr they. This omission occurred precisely because Brooks seeks to distance modern conservativism from its own checkered past.

Enter 1960s mass-mediator Todd Gitlin. Though only some of the world was probably watching in this case, Gitlin wrote an eloquent riposte to Brooks. The former SDSer, who disapproves of Bill Ayers as much as David Brooks, urged us to distinguish among the many confusing and contradictory elements within the New Left alone (not to mention the counterculture and myriad other progressive movements of the 60s). For Gitlin, Brooks’s argument is not only “glib,” but historically inaccurate. What is this dude smoking? That’s what Gitlin essentially asks without putting it that bluntly.

What not even Gitlin mentioned was a crucial difference between the New Left and the Tea Party movements. The New Left was never well funded, even as it grew into a mass movement before being derailed and dismantled by the likes of Bill Ayers and the Weathermen in 1969. But the Tea Party, if Michael Tomasky is to be believed, is no grassroots movement. It is, as they say online, astroturf all the way. Behind the supposed “people” assembling at town halls and rallies lurk corporate giants.

The only relevance of the 60s here is that one of those corporate giants behind the front groups of right-wing “populism” (if we can call it that) is Koch Industries, whose founder Fred Koch helped to create the John Birch Society way back when in the late 1950s (recall Bob Dylan’s early song, oh ye 60s nostalgists, “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues”).

What was perhaps more fascinating was that another, more unexpected 1960s ghost swirled forth on the froth of the health care reform battle. This ghost arrived in Nancy Pelosi’s sly reference to the old slogan from the women’s liberation movement: “the personal is political.”

Notice, though, how Pelosi flipped it: this was not the casting of light (light show?) on the previously off-limits terrain of the private sphere, where all sorts of injustices and inequalities were shielded from public view, but instead a strange new kind of privatization of public issues.

Pelosi unintentionally bespoke the loss of that intermediate ground—the local—in the contemporary struggle between behemoths (most especially corporations) and individuals. This evacuation of the local was present in the health care debate throughout 2009 and 2010, in mock town halls that were mediated imitations of the real thing and in the spectacle of public space as symbolic ground rather than actual terrain. Democracy may be in the streets now, but only when the streets are re-represented on the screens of television or computers.

As Gitlin himself has shown us, the 1960s was the moment when the local began to vanish both upward and downward, to the mass systems of corporate capitalism and the isolated individuals increasingly unmoored from traditional communities. Or if it was not when this transformation began, it was certainly when it accelerated rapidly.

Health care bespeaks this strange new situation, for it’s an area of life and death (but not death panels) in which we struggle to take care of our bodies amid the magnetic resonance imaging radiation waves of a massive technological system. We look for our bodies, our selves in those MRI images and all that they represent: certainly we seek to discover the well-being of our individual bodies, but perhaps we also hope to glimpse the essence of the collective social body through what those enormous scanners reveal.

This puzzle of self and system in a world where the stabilities of the local are disappearing, both into our very molecules and into the machine, both into our cells and into our cell phones, is perhaps why the memory of the 60s still lingers, free-form dancing through the purple haze, tripping forward on the networked web of the present.

In this respect, Brooks is partially right even when he is so wrong. Whether we tilt rightward or leftward now, Americans are perhaps still searching—both politically and culturally—for that moment when the self burst forth, paradoxically, from community and yet found community still around, phantom-like, glimmering simultaneously on the scrim of the self and the screen of the mediated world.

Medicated or not, we wait to see if this new community floats, and whether we are on a good trip or a bad one.

Posted in Culture Rover, Media Culture, Political Culture, Sixties Culture | No Comments »

#378 – Pynchonesque Potboiler

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

sleuthing the cig-sties.

What we lost when we lost the addled Sixties, this novel is saying to us, is the illumination that may strike the truly confused….

-Michael Wood, “What Happened at Gordita Beach?,” New York Review of Books, 24 September 2009

Inherent Vice might be thought of as Thomas Pynchon’s sequel to The Crying of Lot 49 and (especially) Vineland, two of his shorter, more disciplined novels. In fact, references to characters and details from both turn up—clue-like—in Inherent Vice.

The more focused form does not mean that the book is not wonderfully sprawling and epic as we follow in the gumshoes (or as one character jokes, the “gum-sandals”) of a hippie private investigator named Doc Sportello and embark on a noirish detective caper. We find ourselves in a remake of The Maltese Falcon, but this time the bird is on acid, and the tale is set in a cloud of reefer smog hanging over the beach communities of the Los Angeles metropole, circa 1970.

Much as the book is, on the surface, a spoof of the lowbrow (but often in fact high art) detective story, Michael Wood makes the intriguing argument that Inherent Vice might be better understood as a historical novel. For Wood, the book is really more about the Sixties than it is about Pynchon’s literary appropriation of noir.

But they why does Pynchon use the noir form to explore the burnt-out scene of late-sixties L.A.? We might say that Pynchon’s novel uses the psychological intensity and paranoid lostness of noir (as well as its oddly self-aware, low-budget, and formulaic mannerisms) to uncover new meanings (and profoundly Flitcraftian meaninglessnesses) in the Sixties counterculture.

If Wood’s interpretation is correct, then the countercultural Sixties can better be grasped not as a superficial program or a coherent ideology, but instead as a kind of faux-detective story in which the most profound illuminations emerged for those who were most bewildered by the bewildering world of a bewildering decade. Sam Spade, it turns out, wasn’t the forerunner of Dirty Harry, but of dirty hippies.

In the Sixties of Inherent Vice, there was much more glaring, stark black-and-white within the psychedelic light show than we now think. Many more shadows lurked in the tie-dye swirls of the past than popular memory permits.

Posted in Culture Rover, Literary Culture, Sixties Culture | 1 Comment »

#358 – Hope I Get Old Before I Die

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

from mockumentary to best rockumentary ever: young@heart.

For the comic perspective, which sees us all as ineluctably enmeshed in history, ultimately subsumes the revolutionary utopian perspective simply by locating it in the ebb and flow of history’s tides. After all, tomorrow never knows. …It remembers. – Nick Bromell

The documentary Young@Heart seems to be about old age, but as the film unfolds, it turns out that it is really about rock ‘n’ roll.

At first, you think the film is a gag. Is it mocking these retirees who dare to sing rock songs and other pop hits? It sure seems like it when director Walker George intersperses silly MTV-style videos of the chorus members in between his cinéma vérité.

But slowly, you start to realize that a deeper, more substantive comedy is at work in this film as it moves between the brink of death and the absurdity of life.

The film begins to display precisely the comedic perspective that Nick Bromell argues rock music acquired in the 1950s and 60s. Bromell contends that rock became the crucial cultural medium in which baby boomers developed a particular structure of feeling: an adolescent “double consciousness” that drew upon African-American expressive traditions to transform alienation into a deeper understanding of history and struggle. Rock, for Bromell, was not only about the tragically-messianic utopianism of 60s anti-authoritarianism, but also about a more profound “comic vision of reconciliation.”

Recovering his memories of coming of age to the sounds of Elvis, the Beatles, Dylan, and the whole rock tradition, Bromell writes about how the music awakened a consciousness of time, mortality, fluidity, and (with a nod to William James) all the implications of lifting the veil on the radically destabilizing pluralism of human experience.

From a later moment in the life cycle, trying to remember the 60s and why they were important in ways that are so easy to forget, Bromell writes that, “It is as if these songs’ own consciousness of the brevity of their vision and the futility of adolescence created a genie who could fly forward through time and greet me when I arrived here.” The music in Young@Heart shows how the awareness of “brevity” and “futility” that rock revealed to Bromell can even reappear later in life than middle age. In this case, it reappears for retirees who are older than the baby boomers themselves.

Reinvigorating what Lawrence Grossberg has called the rock formation when they sing everything from the Rolling Stones to James Brown to the Ramones to Cold Play to Sonic Youth, the members of this retiree chorus reverse the famous dictum from the Who: to rock is to in fact hoping to get old before you die. But you can only do this by embracing an adolescent defiance that, as Bromell contends, is busy being born precisely from the realization that it will fade, like the last notes of a song, into the flow of history itself.

Posted in Culture Rover, Film Culture, Musical Culture, Sixties Culture | 4 Comments »

#356 – Forever Young

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

a gun that shoots & a tree with roots: dylan vs. young in old age.

The concert film Neil Young: Heart of Gold reminded me of the differences between Bob Dylan and Neil Young. While Dylan has responded to old age by becoming a ghost, a spook, a wraith, a shadowy riverboat gambler, a will-o’-the-wisp, melting into some murky myth and vanishing into history, Young has managed to grow evermore solid and present.

Dylan rolls with no direction home, but Young has been able to rock his way to something more stable. In the concert film, a quiet, regal affair filmed in 2005 by Jonathan Demme at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, home of the Grand Old Opry, the rocker leans over the stage like a tree, hulking and gnarled, spreading his limbs, timeworn and sturdy, in it for the long run.

Neil Young in Heart of Gold.

While Dylan’s recent songs are evasive, referential, lost in the shards of an old-timey blues past, Young’s songs in Heart of Gold, mostly drawn from the album Prairie Wind, are simple and direct, reduced to their grainy essences by Young’s confrontation with a brain aneurysm that year.

It’s as if Dylan, facing old age and mortality, wants to explore absence—how far one might disappear into the light itself, saturated by a history beyond history, time out of mind. Young, by contrast, has embraced presence, trying to tell it like it is from his own little corner of the redwood forest, where the 1960s dream is still alive, cobbled together out of creaky bones, grandkids, and a faded glory.

The songs from Prairie Wind use every trick in the Neil Young songwriting book: perfectly-placed major-seven chords, little passing notes in the open guitar chords, a bit of steel-guitar crying out, a harmonica note bending, a delayed backbeat on the drums, haunting backup vocals from the usual crew (Emmylou Harris, Peggy Young, etc.), Young’s strained-yet-celestial-yet-strained falsetto, and lots of lyrics about dreams, love, loss, appreciation, memory, and hope. You’d think this would get old, but somehow it doesn’t. Instead, Young finds a way to get old.

The music—and Demme’s classy camera work in Heart of Gold really brings this out—discovers grace, sadness, elegance, truth, weariness, and renewed energy where one would think there could only be cringes and cliches. It reminds me of a brief exchange between Young and a fan at the start of the live album Year of the Horse, which went something like this. Fan: “It all sounds the same.” Young: “It’s all one song.”

What makes the film so moving is precisely that you think you’re headed toward the familiar, and indeed you find yourself in the familiar, only to find yourself crying and moved at how new it all feels. One little cracked vocal note electro-shocks nostalgia into catharsis (Young singing the word “heart” in his parental message to his daughter headed off to adulthood in the song “Here For You,” for instance).

You can see the differences between Dylan and Young in the films that each artist made during the 2000s. Dylan’s Masked and Anonymous, as the title suggests, is elusive, fragmentary, slippery, at the edge of coherence: things don’t quite add up; you’d piece together a story only to see it crumble in the earthquake rumble of an electric-guitar chord on “Cold Irons Bound.” We’re somewhere between the Civil War and a nightmarish noir murder mystery from the 1940s. We’ve left the building and entered some other realm of surreal myth.

By contrast, Young’s Greendale was homemade, in place, rickety, and splintered: a little allegorical tale about hippies in their golden years, an alternative history of America channeled through one town’s struggles. It was amateurish, like a summer-camp drama. But as only Neil Young can do, it linked the close-by to something transcendent: the film’s songs connected its zany crew of locals to bigger stories; a spotlight shined on life outside the limelight.

Bringing the grounded into the electronosphere of mass culture is Young’s special skill. He plugs in, but never gets lost. His roots spread as the wind shivers his timbers. Searching, he lifts us up his trunk to glimpse that elusive place where we all might gather on the hillside, somewhere between Hollywood and Redwood.

Posted in Culture Rover, Film Culture, Musical Culture, Sixties Culture | 1 Comment »

#336 – And Now For Something Completely Different

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

michael palin stresses comedy’s changing role.

A lot of contemporary comedy seems self-conscious. It’s almost documentary, like ‘The Office.’ That’s a very funny show, but you’re looking at the human condition under stress. The Pythons made the human condition seem like fun.

- Michael Palin, quoted in “On Comedy’s Flying Trapeze,” by Charles McGrath, New York Times

One can surely find exceptions, but Palin’s comments seem spot on. Comedy was about breaking free ecstatically in the 60s and 70s, whereas contemporary comedy has oddly become the opposite. On “The Office,” “The Daily Show,” and, in deeply ironic mode, “The Colbert Report,” among other programs, comedy has become a call for restraint and common sense.

This isn’t a bad thing. It just is. And it is still funny. But it also has a larger significance.

In the 1960s, laughter marked what John Cleese called, in the New York Times article, “screams of liberation” against the limitations of society. But in a contemporary public culture that sometimes feels as if it has no more limits, less and less structure, and fewer boundaries of civility or standards of decency, comedy is no longer the clarion call for freedom. Goofy satire worthy of Aristophanes no longer does the trick.

In the 60s, the goal was to show that the emperor had no clothes. In the 2000s, when the clothes off various emperors were finally torn off, what we then saw were obscene and indecent abuses of power. And in the last year’s health care debates, we learned that efforts to engage in civic dialogue only resulted in screams of a different sort — not cries of liberation but coordinated efforts at distortion and obstruction.

Comedy becomes a barometer for this situation, but this barometer is a strange one, for it can make the weather as well as measure it. What role comedy will play beyond the Bush years of undisclosed locations, bungled wars, inept governance, and economic meltdown and subterfuge remains to be seen. But it’s not liberation we need anymore. We need something completely different.

So maybe it is good that contemporary comedy seems almost moral, with fish slapping replaced by ironic modes of fingerwagging. The “screams of liberation” have become dire sighs of exasperation. And once those sighs are exhaled at “the human condition under stress,” perhaps we will be able to breathe again with a bit more ease.

Posted in Civic Culture, Comedy Culture, Culture Rover, Public Culture, Sixties Culture, Television Culture | 3 Comments »

#332 – Port-o-San: Three Minutes of Shit & Sanitation

Friday, August 28th, 2009

the thirty-ninth anniversary of a film within a film.

Are ya doin’ a movie?

Yeah.

About this?

Yeah.

What’s it going to be called?

Port-o-San.

Oh, far out.

- Stoned hippie to film crew, outside portable toilets, in Woodstock: Three Days of Peace & Music

The 1960s dictum “be in your own movie” (from Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters) was indicative of the influence of mass-mediated representations over actual experience in the 1960s. Media mattered, even though the counterculture of popular memory emphasized direct experience over the virtual thing. The problem (or was it the possibility?) that many in fact ascertained at the time was that mass-mediated representation and actual experience — getting deep in the machine and back to the woods — were merging and melding in all sorts of new ways. Hence the love affair with Marshall McLuhan.

This brings us to the most important scene of that most important film, Woodstock: Three Days of Peace & Music. Despite the recent mud avalanche of nostalgia for the fortieth anniversary of the weekend of concerts, the film had far more influence after its release in 1970 than the actual festival in August of 1969.

The key scene comes toward the end of the film. It unlocks the whole movie — and the festival it memorialized. It shifts the focus of Woodstock from romantic innocence to topics far more vexing, difficult…and sour-smelling.

We are fast approaching festival’s end, with Jimi Hendrix soon to appear, famously playing a searing version of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” We have just watched Sly and the Family Stone and Janis Joplin perform prime time on Saturday night, and the Hog Farm has made “breakfast in bed for 400,000″ (as Hugh Romney, a.k.a. Wavy Gravy, put it from the stage before a mock-military-esque roll call played on trumpet). The film cuts to a truck that reads “portable chemical toilets.” Ladies and gentlemen, the Port-o-San scene.

PortosanWoodstock

The most important performer at Woodstock: Port-o-San Man.

It looks like we are about to witness the anti-Woodstock. Everything the counterculture sought to alter, all the artificial, plastic, disposable, deodorized, and disinfected faux-civilization that Woodstock’s mud, oatmeal, woods, and naked bodies in the lake sought to abandon for nature and the natural, it all seems to be encapsulated here.

And yet the scene that follows, titled “Port-o-San” on the DVD of Woodstock, is more haunting, more complicated, more evocative, than any famous musical performance in the film.

The camera pans from the truck to a middle-aged man dressed in a janitorial uniform. He is portly and balding but very friendly and jovial — this despite his job, which is cleaning portable toilets. “Man in here,” he says as he knocks on the toilet doors, then smiles. When he reaches the last one, it’s open and he discovers a cane. “Some poor fellow come looking for his cane,” the Port-o-San cleaner remarks.

It’s an odd moment: what is a cane, that quintessential symbol of old people, doing in this ur-film about youth? And how did it wind up in the portable toilet? Is the cane a kind of allegorical symbol of the older people who the hippies don’t want to become, trapped in their Port-o-Sans, avoiding nature and the real, only experiencing a deodorized box of plastic that barely covers up a world of shit below? Or is the cane a symbol of what is to come: the fall from grace after the bliss of innocent youth?

Maybe the cane is all of those things, which is why the scene is so important. The symbolism only grows as this movie-within-the-movie unfolds onscreen. The cleaning man sucks the shit out of the Port-a-San toilet with a giant hose. He dumps enormous amounts of disinfectant and deodorant within it to make it “a little more pleasanter when you use it.” He reloads the toilet paper, which is locked in its receptacle.

You can read the scene in multiple ways. It could be a critique of an American society that has sought to cover up with deodorant all that Woodstock refused to avoid, that must lock the toilet paper in a little box to keep it from getting stolen while Woodstock has made everything free.

Or, as I prefer to read the scene now, forty years later, it is the Woodstock festival itself getting sucked up into that sanitation tube. For, Woodstock was shit, and anyone who pretended otherwise was full of shit. But that didn’t mean that it wasn’t important. The place was a disaster; though, like many disasters, it contained infinite small deeds of kindness and care. “There’s always a little bit of heaven in a disaster area,” Wavy Gravy remarks in his breakfast speech.

But just after he says this, Wavy Gravy also conveys a kind of sense of the hopelessness lurking beneath the joy. Woodstock is not to be a revolutionary transformation, much as it might feel like that amid disaster. He requests that “you people who still believe, you know, that capitalism isn’t that weird” to buy a few hamburgers from a man whose stand burned down overnight. The point, buried in Wavy Gravy’s playful tone and tooth-gap grin, is that the larger mainstream system of capitalism may seem bizarre in a disaster area, but it it is far from disappearing as a system. Woodstock the film, bringing in millions of dollars, would soon prove this to be undeniably true. But for Wavy Gravy, the point is to help out the guy who has lost his business. The small gesture of connection and support, regardless of the larger system, is, for Wavy Gravy, the crucial political act.

There’s a tragic consciousness at work here, buried in the utopian fervor. This is the case even in (or maybe especially in) a man such as Wavy Gravy, who would go on to start a clown camp. And the tragic quality continues in the Port-o-San scene. This is the part of Woodstock that so often gets lost in remembrances and anti-nostalgic complaints alike.

Placed as it is toward the end of the Woodstock film, the mood of allegory weighs heavily in the Port-o-San scene. Into the cleaning man’s hose goes not only the shit from a toilet at Woodstock, but maybe also the compost of the counterculture’s entire utopian dream of revolution or evolution to a new world beyond the difficulties of the current one. Woodstuck’s muck and mire was proof that another world might be possible, but that it wasn’t going to happen by the end of the 1960s. Humankind was not actually going to get any more humane. Woodstock‘s participants couldn’t escape the larger system that easily. The Woodstock dream, too, would get sucked up into the tube.

But the Port-o-San scene itself also suggests that those utopian dreams still lurk, nutrients accreting in the sewage pipes of society. They leak out occasionally, though no one has ever figured out how to capture the energies buried in their rich sod of desire and fantasy.

The tragic tone of Woodstock that so many miss appears again in the final sequence of the film, as we view the festival site from a departing helicopter, viewing fields strewn with garbage, glimpsing a giant peace sign made out of the mess. The Port-o-San scene sets up this post-apocalyptic, ambiguous ending.

“My son’s here,” the Port-o-san man says to the camera crew at Woodstock, “and I got one over in Vietnam too.” Here we get to a startling aspect of Woodstock. The festival site strangely, bizarrely, links the muddied home front of the counterculture to the big muddy of Vietnam. The festival captured in the film became an odd film-strip negative of the war: choppers buzz overhead, but bring rock musicians instead of marines, thousands wander a wasteland, looking blasted and dazed, there’s a strange collision of advanced technology and mud, we see lots of destruction and shit and no one quite knowing what to do with it all, but among the chaos, there’s are moments of love. Of course, Woodstock was not a war zone, but it took place in the long shadow (both mediated and direct) of Vietnam.

In his simple, un-hippie-ish way, the Port-o-San cleaner offers a very decent response to the madness. There might be a little bit of heaven in a disaster area, as Wavy Gravy waxed ecstatically, but the toilets make clear that there’s a whole lot more hell. So, caught in the middle of it, the cleaning man admits that he can’t keep up with the crowds who need to use the facilities. All he can do is do his best to “make it a little more pleasanter.” He’s glad to help the kids, and his tone of voice suggests he loves both his sons unconditionally, the one at Woodstock and the one in Vietnam. His demeanor is less starry-eyed than Wavy Gravy, but, watching forty years later, it’s also more dignified. That a man makes cleaning up shit seem dignified is no small feat.

As the tired debates about the 1960s once again get trotted out this year (the only essays now more stale than the nostalgic odes to Woodstock are the anti-nostalgic screeds), the Port-o-San scene suggests we revisit Woodstock and Woodstock in a new way: not as a tale about escapism (to nature) but about engagement (with human society), not as a story about screaming guitars and rock stars, but as a tale about quiet men and women who did small deeds of charity among what felt like the lost cause of American life.

This wasn’t escapism. Port-o-San is the story buried within Woodstock the film, and Woodstock the memory. It’s a story of trying to cope — truly cope, even in failure — with the infrastructural and intersocial dilemmas of the complex, modern world. It’s the story of being overwhelmed by tragedy but still trying to make the world “a little more pleasanter.”

The telltale sign comes at the end of the Port-o-San scene. Emerging from a stall, a stoned hippie makes clear that Woodstock is not going to be an escape to the garden. We’re not going back to nature. The dream has got to happen within civilization, not outside it. And, for him, that’s fine. When asked how his visit to the facilities was, the anonymous hippie shrugs, tokes his pipe, and sums up where we’ll have to start: “Beats the woods,” he says, and strolls off into the morass.

Posted in Culture Rover, Musical Culture, Sixties Culture, War Culture | 3 Comments »

#328 – Happy Anniversary!

Friday, August 14th, 2009

mr. fish reflects on the 60s.

FISH_Woodstock_40yrs-500

Image: Mr. Fish

Posted in Culture Rover, Political Culture, Sixties Culture, War Culture | No Comments »

#317 – My Baby Don’t Care

Monday, June 8th, 2009

when “i don’t care” is caring deeply: tom stoppard’s rock ‘n’ roll & the sixties.

If the genre of rock ‘n’ roll proposed that pop music could be theater, then Tom Stoppard’s play Rock ‘n’ Roll proposes that theater could be rock ‘n’ roll. At least in Charles Newell’s staging at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago this was the case. Featuring rows of stacked amplifier speakers and stage spotlights behind all the scenes, whether they took place in Cambridge, England cottage gardens or Communist-era Czech flats, the set hinted at how rock music suffused the most informal spaces of everyday life with an energy of the theatrical.

As the play conveyed quite well, rock circulated a pulsating dreamworld light that was at once semi-secretive, a glow concealed in the grooves of LPs and hidden within inner sleeves of record covers, and roaringly present, exploding the listener into an alternative universe of drama, comedy, and catharsis. Not unlike its precise opposite — state surveillance — rock was both always there, lurking in the shadows, and front and center, mesmerizing the citizenry.

stoppardrocknroll

Rock ‘n’ Roll, by Tom Stoppard.

“I don’t care,” is the final line of the play. It is spoken by the middle-aged English daughter of a Cambridge Marxist philosopher to her father’s ex-student, a Czech lover of Western rock who stumbles into becoming an anti-Communist dissident. She declares “I don’t care” after she runs off with the student decades after they first met in the months after the 1968 Prague Spring. By play’s end, it’s 1990, the year after the fall of communism, and she says the line moments before she and her new lover witness the Rolling Stones performing in Prague.

In the immediate context of the scene, the line teeters between an admission of failure and a shout of astounding victory.

Most directly, “I don’t care” is about the daughter finally forgiving herself for her own sense of a wasted youth.

But it also sounds like Stoppard himself finally giving up on the conventional Marxist politics that guided key characters in the play, such as the daughter’s father, a stalwart Stalinist and CP member. At the same time, “I don’t care,” also sounds like a suspicion that, even when rock music kept the spirit of dissidence alive in the Eastern Bloc, the Rolling Stones’ performance feels surprisingly like a shallow victory over communism. Thrilling, yes, but anything more than that? Knowing that the fall of communism only presented the new, and deeply troubling, problems of global capitalism in Eastern Europe, we’re not sure.

As the play ends, the spotlights turn up and glare into the audience’s eyes. We’re blinded for a moment. We care deeply, and in a blast of bass, guitar, and drums, are swept up, carefree.

But there’s more.

“I don’t care.” This line is spoken, I think, in the spirit of the Plastic People of the Universe, the Czech rock band who haunt the play along with the ex-Pink Floyd singer and Cambridge, England, recluse Syd Barrett. Like so many counterculturalists, the Plastics just wanted to be free. They sought self-expression and group experimentation and a space for art-making. The Plastics merely wanted to play their music and thought of themselves as apolitical. They “didn’t care.” Yet they became dissidents, co-conspirators with Vaclav Havel, and a cause célèbre in the West, simply for not caring.

Not caring, when you get to thinking about it, actually turns out to be a complex idea. Stating that “I don’t care” is, oddly, a declaration of caring. In negating concern, it winds up communicating concern. Intentionally foregoing control, the speaker of this declaration asserts a strange kind of autonomy. Far from apathy, “I don’t care” comes across in Stoppard’s play as a carefully-wrought carefreeness rather than carelessness. The choice not to choose is to care enough not to care.

Okay, so it all starts to make sense, perhaps, the more stoned one gets. Fine, so be it. That does not make it any less intriguing as a speech act or the staking out of a position. To not care is to ask whether any of one’s past was worth it at all. To throw in the towel. To cease to matter. And yet, to not care is also the encapsulation of what Stoppard notices as the strange politics of the sixties counterculture: the refusal of “I don’t care” is what, in fancier language, the historian Julie Stephens has called, an “anti-disciplinary protest.”

“I don’t care” becomes a kind of paradoxical statement close to the heart of the sensibility that guided the sixties counterculture. If not exactly political, then the declaration “I don’t care” was certainly public.

It was, after all, a declaration of independence — one with all the dangers of living in, and living out, the paradox of caring not to care.

Addendum: “Can theatre and rock music ever mix?”

Image: Goodman Theatre

Posted in Aural Culture, Culture Rover, Marxist Culture, Musical Culture, Political Culture, Popular Culture, Public Culture, Sixties Culture, Theater Culture | No Comments »

#308 – Opposites Attract

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

mark greif considers the congruences of the velvet underground & the grateful dead.

Both bands originally imagined themselves as the ‘Warlocks’ essentially because each had a vision of enchantment, underlaid with darkness. – Mark Greif, “The Right Kind of Pain”

Mark Greif throws out a number of provocative ideas in his review of The Velvet Underground by Mark Witts. Most strikingly, he fruitfully compares the Velvet Underground to the Grateful Dead in order to think through the stale (but not entirely unaccurate) binary of California hippie rock and New York City proto-punk.

…When you look at the state of both bands at their contemporaneous founding moments in 1965-66, you find that the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead started out, in an odd way, as basically the same band. In fact, both bands started with the same name in 1965: the Warlocks. And both were quickly taken up by other cultural movements and artists from other genres to furnish ‘house bands’ for collective projects.

…The most striking fact is that, like the Grateful Dead, the Velvet Underground started out as a platform for extremely long, wandering, repetitive, live improvisations, appropriate to multimedia events.

…The logical consequence is that the Velvet Underground were not necessarily anti-psychedelic as such (though that was what they said), but instead insisted on a different, less sunny affect-world than was associated with West Coast psychedelia: ‘We thought that the solution lay in providing hard drugs for everyone,’ Cale told Witts in a BBC interview, but ‘there is already a very strong psychedelic element in sustained sound, which is what we had . . . so we thought that putting viola [drones] behind guitars and echo was one way of creating this enormous space . . . which was itself a psychedelic experience.’

This would be the meaning of the odd simultaneity of approach between the Velvets and the Dead when they started out: 1966 was a moment in the history of popular music when the phenomenology of popular song was changing, partly under outside ‘art-cultural’ influences (the Merry Pranksters, Warhol’s Factory), and partly, one presumes, because of increases in amplification, the widespread ‘electrification’ of folk music (Dylan, Reed’s hero, went electric in 1965), and evidence from Liverpool to Los Angeles of a wish to record or augment the effects of drugs vocally and musically (the Beatles, the Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, the Doors etc).

Once he explores the striking similarities, Greif moves to the important differences:

While both groups initially aimed to hypnotize with their music, lyrically they were worlds apart. Lyrics are fate in pop. Bands become committed in funny ways to the lyrical content and thematics of their work, perhaps through the loop of the expectations of their audiences, perhaps because they’re singing them every night themselves. Grateful Dead lyrics, from the beginning, however carelessly put together, were about roads and rivers. They drew from blues and bluegrass a promise of continual rambling – with the occasional respite of dew-bejewelled meadows, barefoot dancing, and rolling in the rushes down by the riverside. It’s no accident that their first single was ‘The Golden Road’, that their signature song (apart from the tripped-out ‘Dark Star’) was ‘Truckin”, and that the band matured, from 1970 onwards, by turning the endless-trip LSD premise into an endless-travelling touring premise, summed up in the ultimate Dead-lyric cliché: ‘What a long, strange trip it’s been.’ Velvet Underground lyrics, by contrast, are about not going outdoors, and the wish for pleasurable self-destruction (‘I thank God that I’m good as dead’). …The Dead were fated by their lyrics to travel, which they did, creating a unique phenomenon of mass social affiliation across thirty years of steady touring (with just a one-year hiatus in 1975), and playing, much of the time, to an even mix of loving aficionados and grotesque burn-outs. …The Velvet Underground were fated by their lyrics never to attain a live audience, but to be passed on, from hand to hand, on record.

What gets interesting is that after focusing on the lyrics as the crucial difference between the Velvets and the Dead, Greif moves back from the lyrics to the music.

He puts forth a theory of music succeeding through “congruence.” It’s an odd word to use when listening to the Velvet Underground, since one thinks more often of their intense sonic dissonance. But by congruence, Greif means that the lyrics and the sound of the Velvets compliment each other to produce a powerful emotional experience: that of the “closet drama” of vicarious transgression in which listeners, who came to the band as a secret “passed on, from hand to hand, on record,” could experience danger, rebellion, and abjectness at a distance.

In fact, for Greif, the lyrics in fact feed back into the sound. He argues that the semi-incoherent, naughty lyrics of the infamous Velvet Underground classic “Sister Ray” are in fact a kind of nonsensical signage pointing the listener toward the screeching, grinding sounds, rather than vice-versa. Lyrics are background; sound becomes front and center.

velvet-underground dead

Sitting on the same sixties stoop? Velvet Underground and Grateful Dead.

By returning back to the sound as the key component, Greif somewhat undermines his Velvets-Dead comparison. Wait, wasn’t it the sound they had in common, but the lyrics that distinguished the two groups from each other?

Yet, crucially, with a small adjustment to Greif’s theory of congruence, his comparison can be understood as quite convincing.

Perhaps it is not through harmony of lyric and sound, but rather through a broader patten of incongruence — through playing with the possibilies of incongruence as aesthetic experience — that these bands both converged and diverged. Across the continent from each other, they grappled with the same new possibilities of electronic amplification, collective social experimentation, and the strange Warlockian alchemy of avant-gardism and mass culture. Through their shared (though difference) tendencies toward inconsistencies, contradictions, and disorienting fragments incompletely brought together, both bands constructed parallel audiences, superficial kinds of communities in which individuals could experience surprisingly powerful awakenings and discoveries of self and group.

Incongruity marked both bands. Darkness always haunted the supposedly happy hippie world of the Dead, beginning with the addictions of their central figure, Jerry Garcia; and there was often a kind of heartfelt secret handshake among Velvet listeners that provided a humanistic bond among the fantasies of bondage.

Thinking of both groups as caught up in and playing with impossible contradictions, incomplete puzzles, and odd tensions allows us to see the deeper commonalities between tie-dyed hippies and safety-pinned punks while also keeping in mind the important stylistic and social differences.

Posted in Culture Rover, Musical Culture, Sixties Culture | 1 Comment »

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