Southern Bookman

Memoirs of Punk Glory

I've been reading a cluster of memoirs from the 1960s-1970s on the punk/left wing/hippie era of New York City, from the lower east side over to the Village. All three I downloaded on my Nook, which seems all too easy too do, like another glass of wine when it's going down smooth. I doubt any of them will be on Rick Santorum's list, or that of any other GOP candidate for that matter, although Ron Paul might enjoy the liberatarian spirit of the times.

The first finished, Patti Smith's "Just Kids," about her love affair/friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe. As the 60s were burning out, and the '70s came like the horrible morning after, Patti came out with her "Horses," which I quite liked if I recall. The cover photo was by Mapplethorpe, which I'd forgotten, or perhaps never knew, until I read the book. Despite her wild, cutting edge personna, Smih comes across in her book as a shy, nice, small-town girl, an innocent in the big city always finding a new man to cake care of her. The first part of the book talks about her meeting Mapplethorpe and her close early relationship with him, and it begins with narrative energy from the time-honored motif of two kids from the sticks in Manhattan. Then, as they hang on and establish a daily life of trying to become artists, the book's drive dissipates, with too much mundane detail about squalid apartments, bad jobs, folks met and drinks downed. At end end, the book regains its opening power, fnishing with a poingnant account of Mapplethorpe's death.

The lastest I'm reading is James Walcott's account of the same time, wrriten from his jounalist's perspective. Walcott is a more fluid writer than Smith, better able to give dramatic force to the details and anecdotes he recalls, although he often overreaches with his verbal effects. His hip asides are amusing when on-target, but are annoying when he goes amiss. He too hits a dead zone in the middle of the book,which I hope he spins out of soon.

The most disappointing one is Ed Sanders' memoirs about the Fugs and his Peace Eye Bookstore, As with Smioth, he piles on surfeit of details that read more like a private diary without putting them in a broader context for the reader. The book is still entertaining, but too many chapters pile up with unrefined facts about places played, folks met, songs written.

Thoughts of Rothko on a Rainy Night

As I left the Theatrical Outfit's performance of "Red," in downtown Atlanta, a light rain fell. The play, full of art talk and aesthetic musings, left me in a sombre mood. The longtime Atlanta theater master Tom Key truly made himself into the haunted Rothko, showing a man covering an acute sensitivity with an art-cumedgeon persona, and young Jimi Kocina as his helper and dramatic foil was excellent. 

Once again, I decided against driving home on the interstate and took the local route from Spring to Peachtree. I always like going down Peachtree, imagining it a grand boulevard like say Park Avenue, although Peachtree, along with so much else in Atlanta, is quite mediocre. Still, artistic efforts like Tom's Theatrical Outfit in a once dying part of downtown kindle a hopes for the city, whose lustre has dimmed in recent years. 

Thoughts of Rothko and his ruminations on the truth of art/seeing/color/vision vs. commerce/popularity'vulgarity had me thinking about my own life, and others. The New York Times had run three obituaries on three great women who had lived well with full artistic accomplishment: Dorothea Tanning, Wislawa Szymborska and Camilla Williams.

Heading home, I passed the Memorial Arts Center, where once I'd seen some Rothkos at the High Museum. A few other signs of attempts at urban greatness passed by, along with a stretch of strip shopping centers and the like. They have their own truth too, though.

I pass places where I've lived segments of my life, in weekly repeated rituals: Barnes & Noble (alas, Borders gone), Peachtree Pres (where I fitfully go to the gym, and where my children played basketball and went to preschool and where Tom Key annually narrates a Christmas Eve service for kids), and the pond on Lakemoore. I also pass Christ the King, where my wife and I were married, and where I first met Tom at a Sunday morning adult education series. Years of images and memories built up.

The rain grows heavier, and already some parts of Roswell Road are flooded. Again, I'm thankful to make it home.

Ed Sanders Remembers the Fugs

I'm finding it all too easy to buy books for the Nook. The cost is less per book than in a bookstore, but clicking that little tab quickly adds up. 

My latest ebook purchase is "Fug You," the memoirs of Ed Sanders, one of America's overlooked cultural heroes. How ironic that I would follow Ed's career into the ebook era, when I first encountered his work on vinyl 33-rpm records when he was the leader of The Fugs and a solo artist who produced one of the great albums, the "Ed Sanders Truckstop." I have also read many of Sanders' books, including "Tales of Beatnik Glory," poems and "The Family," the best book written about the Charles Manson trial. Even when he was publishing iconoclastic works such as his "Fuck You, a magazine of the arts," Sanders stood outside of the bohemian counterculture.

Like another satirical genius of the '60s, Frank Zappa, Sanders has a conservative side that allows him to look critically at the excesses of the philosophies that took root in the '60s. As with Zappa, Sanders' songs take a broad aim, examining middle class conventional society as well as the hippie, left wing culture that brewed its own deadening conformity in rebelling against "the bourgeoise."

Like Sanders, Zappa first produced classics as the leader of a band. Zappa's Mothers of Invention and Sanders' Fugs produced brilliant satire that showed a firm grasp of a range of musical styles, not only in melody but with lyrics. Then both of them produced ground-breaking work as single artists. While Sanders also wrote poems and books, Zappa moved into different realms as a producer on Bizarre and Straight records, with such imporant works as a album of Lenny Bruce's Berkeley concert and Captain Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica." 

While Zappa's music grew more sophisticated and self-conscious with its models on jazz and classical music, Sanders found a similar model in country western and swing. Both found rich troves in early rock and rhythym and blues. Like all great parodies, Sanders "Truckstop" not only makes fun of country motifs, but shows great love and respect for them. As with Zappa making great rock and jazz while parodying them, Sanders makes great country and swing music.

Sanders with his blue collar characters such as "Johnny Pissoff" showed an early understanding of and sympathy for working class anger that most '60s writers lacked. Zappa understood a different class, a more suburban, California-mall-oriented group, while Sanders captured the feelings and cultural touchstones of truckers and plumbers and carpenters, haunted by Jesus, sex and booze. Sanders' humor is more free-swinging and guttural than Zappa's. The Fugs, who also included the late Tuli Kupferberg, were part of the New York village scene that also produced Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, while Zappa came from the Southern California freeway-oriented musical mix. While turning to country, Sanders and the Fugs kept the Lower East Side influence; while Zappa remained rooted in Laurel Canyon.

Sanders' self styled "investigative poetry" is too programmed and topical, but I'll always remember reading his "Poems for New Orleans," on the abuses in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. His poems put these in a more memorable and compelling form than the countless magazine articles and books about the storm's aftermath. As with all of his work, he shows a jazzy, free-form sensibility along with a deep knowledge of New Orleans' history and culture. I bought that book in Cambridge Square, then spent a nice morning in Harvard Yard reading it. Sanders' poems, like his other works, are viscerally entertaining.

The Fugs' name, like that of his new memoir, comes from the euphemism that Norman Mailer used in his celebrated first novel, "The Naked and the Dead," for the old four-letter Anglo-Saxon f-word . This nod to literary culture is another hallmark that set Sanders apart; he has a strong knowledge of American poetry and fiction, with Fugs songs making references to Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and Hilda Doolittle (HD). He references Homer and the Iliad in "Truckstop."  Unlike some anarchists and bohemian figures, he had a strong reverence for books and writing, a desire to preserve and celebrate the literary culture. That's why his book on Manson displays such deep understanding; Sanders knows and is part of the nihilistic cultural waves that produced Manson, but possesses the disgust and foreboding of a cultural conservative.

At 72, Ed Sanders continues to provoke and entertain. Reading him, I am saddened that Zappa didn't live to see the social media era. But I'm thankful to have Sanders still among us. 

American literature is blessed with writers like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth who continue producing vital work into old age. Sanders, for all of his idiosyncrasies, can stand among them.

 

A light on John Berryman's spiritual side

The Catholic intellectual journal Commonweal miraculously reappeared at the Barnes & Noble a few weeks ago, along with the Times Literary Supplement. I hadn't seen either publication on the newsstands for years, and their reappearance sparked my flickering hopes that print culture was not in rapid decline. Alas, the TLS quickly disappeared, and when I inquired, the clerk, with the gravity of an undertaker or a doctor with bad news, said "we are no longer carry it." Not enough buyers, he said. However, Commonweal remained.

The other day, I at last picked up a copy, to read an article on the new translation of the Catholic liturgy, which will be imposed upon us in November. The old English liturgy has been the once recited at Mass since the 1960s, when the Latin Mass passed away in the days of Vatican II. I'd read an article in The New York Times about the new translation, which sounded awkward, convoluted, tone deaf, unmusical, etc., if allegedly accurate.

Unforunately, I found the Commonweal piece on the new liturgy as dull and wooden as the new translation itself is supposed to be. Luckily, though, I found a moving article on John Berryman and his late "Eleven Addresses to the Lord."

The article recounted Berryman's struggles with alcoholism and despair and how a conversion experience in a a rehab center had led to the "Addresses." Tragically, the conversion didn't take, not did the alcoholism cure, and Berryman killed himself by leaping off the Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis.

Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill's piece places Berryman as one those spiritual seekers who swerve between great doubt and great faith. His "Eleven Addresses to the Lord," found in his 1970 "Love & Fame," one of the first poetry books I bought as an adult, reflect that conflict. Cahill doesn't even mention Berryman's best-known work, "The Dream Songs," with which he is saddled. It's one of the masterpieces of his generation, but its popularity has taken away attention to Berryman's other work. It's refreshing that she concentrates on his religious poetry.

Many of the poets of Berryman's generation were known for their personality extremes. While Berryman wasn't medically diagnosed as manic depressive like his sometimes admirer Robert Lowell, Berryman showed all of the erratic behavior and mood swings of his peers. 

Berryman's longing for religious grace and spiritual healing was among his most admirable features, along with his handling of the vernacular as a poet and his depth as a scholar and critic. Thanks to Cahill for examining this side of him. The piece made me wish for a "Collected Poems" of Berryman, as has been done for Lowell. Editions of "Dream Songs" abound, but I would love to have all of Berryman's work collected in one place.

 

Ken Kesey's "Magic Trip"

In one of those serendipitous discoveries, I found that Comcast's On-Demand is showing a documentary on Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' psychedelic trip across the United States in a painted bus called "Further." Although the hour was late and sleep called, I had to immediately watch "Magic Trip," the History Channel-funded film.

The film, pieced together from movies taken by Kesey and crew on the trip (the initial motive for the journey was to make a film), was exhilarating and hilarious, although the antics of the proto-hippies now seem ill-conceived, jejune and wasteful.

How wonderful and relevatory to see characters in "living color" I'd only read about previously. Kesey with his physical power and charisma, bursts from the screen. Neal Cassidy, the hero of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," also shows his legendary physical dynamism and electric non-stop raps. Although he was constantly on speed, driving through the night and talking even when no one is listening except for the microphone, Cassidy despite his love of nutty,unexpected adventures comes off as an adult, knowing how to change tires and get out of frequent scrapes with the highway patrol. Cameo appearances are made by an amusingly proper Larry McMurtry,  perplexed when his old Stanford chum Kesey and the Pranksters show up at his home in a rarified Houston neighborhood, a sadly diminished Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. A young and beardless Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead play a significant role in the film's look at the famed Kesey acid tests, the subject of a book by Tom Wolfe (not even mentioned).

The less famous members of the crew come off as silly, confused, bewildered, infantile and mentally derangedl. I felt something like pity for them, along with the sick fascination of watching impaired people acting out their delusions. One or two of them show intelligence in commenting upon the experience. Others are just children trapped in Kesey's artistic and social experiment.

Frequent LSD trips mark the cross-country journey. Kesey is an early LSD apostle, although the film shows Timothy Leary and Ram Dass shunning the group when it shows up at Kesey's LSD experimental station in New York. Kesey first took acid as part of a government-funded experiment at Stanford. The experiment is shown is excruciating detail, with Kesey recording his observations in a tape recorder, then in an interview with a nurse who may be a Nurse Ratched prototype. Kesey's psychedelic visions sound pretty much like any other acid trip, showing how mundane and unordinary the so-called "revelations" really were.

Like other "happenings" and political street theater projects of the time, the trip of Further doesn't hold up aethetically. Most of the crews' antics while on acid don't appear very imaginative and innovative. Yet, the film, with its comments from Kesey and Cassidy and its constant attempt to show the context of the times, still possesses great charm and energy. As with Andy Warhol's similar aesthetic experiments with a crew of acolytes, Kesey's experiment looks like a grand failure. At the end, he turned against the counter-culture folks who kept showing up at his Oregon farm, and the widespread use of acid, although he kept maintaining the value of its use for select visionaries such as himself.

Kesey says to an unnamed interviewer who sounds like "Fresh Air's" Terry Gross that he kept writing to the end. Yet, at least in posthumous works that have been published so far, he never reached the heights of his earlier works, the classic "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," and "Sometimes a Great Notion." Kesey wasted much creative energy in the Magic Trip. While the film is amusing, I wish we would have had instead later, artistically mature, books from Kesey.

By the way, I was glad to hear Kesey say he didn't like the movie made from "Cuckoo's Nest," although he liked the Broadway play (Kirk Douglas played Randall McMurphy.) Kesey thought the movie, starring Jack Nicholson, focused too much on the conflict between McMurphy and the Big Nurse. On reviewing the movie several years ago, I hated the misogynistic portrayal of Ratched, although Louise Fletcher won an Academy Award for her performance.

....Note: Terry Daughtery, interviewed by Southern Bookman after his fine biography on Donald Bartheleme, will have a biography out this month on "Catch 22" writer Joseph Heller. A riveting excerpt is in this month's Vanity Fair. 

Shakespeare Troupe Moving to Fort Greene

The New York Times had an interesting story Saturday morning about the Theater for a New Audience Shakespearian theater moving from Manhattan to Fort Greene in Brooklyn, where the city is funding a new $47.5 million theater for the company. The move drew criticism from black residents and artists, who say the move catering to, as the Times said, works of a "Dead White Male" playwright. Said Laurie A. Cumbo of the Musem of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, "We have a role and respnsibility to act as a community so that these institutions that we're building first and foremost benefits the people who live" here. Then we can think about the hipsters, the yuppies, the Manhattanites and that sort of thing."

I can see the need for the city to fund works of emerging black playwrights, along with works from other groups. Artistic merit, not ethnicity, should be the standard. However, while Shakespeare the man might be white and dead, his plays have remained alive for more than 400 years, and speak to all of us. The belief that Shakespeare doesn't relate to black audiences shortchanges them. The article says the Theater for a New Audience does three plays a year; surely other companies and artistic genres can use the theater some of the time. It would be a good gesture for the theater to open itself to contemporary plays, including those of black writers and performers.

The building of the theater recalled to me that Shakespeare's own company built the Globe Theater in London. What does it say about our time that in the Elizabethan era, a theatrical troupe could afford its own stage, not depending on the queen to fund it. Of course, today the theater must compete with much more entertainment offerings. The wealth of "The King's Men" can only be duplicated in mega performances on Broadway, which also continues to struggle along with symphonies, museums, publishers,etc. 

 

 

Recalling Christopher Isherwood

Watching the movie "The Single Man" with Colin Firth and Julianne Moore brought back my Christopher Isherwood phase, 25 or 30 years ago, when I read several of Isherwood's books. That was also the time of my Graham Greene phase, but that's another story.

After the movie "Caberet," I read Isherwood's "Berlin Stories," with the famous beginning "I am a camera." Then I read as much of his work as I could find, including "A Single Man." I liked his taut, old-school mandarian style, its sardonic, stylish tone unable to stop heartbreak and despair from breaking through. The interplay and conflict between the main character's high literary culture and British eduction and the glitzy, unrooted culture of Los Angeles and Hollywood charged the books with tension and foreboding.

Directed, written and produced by Tom Ford, the movie version of "A Single Man" gets closer to the heart of Isherwood's work than the overly sentimentalized "Caberet," which I still love. Colin Firth's perfomance as the grief-stricken professor George Falconer deserves the praise it received. Julianne Moore again shows herself a marvel. 

The story takes place in November 1962, in the aftermath of the Cuban missle crisis. A major theme is the pervasive fear at the time over nuclear annhiliation, with the global Cold War with the Soviet Union reaching its zenith. Despite the characters' anxiety, the movie made me longe for the era. The movie evokes the time with its well-designed, lovely products, such as the vintage Mercedes that Falconer drives. The clocks, the furrniture, the clothes all speak of a sense of aesthetics and elegance soon to be blown away.

Firth's face changes from scene to scene. His English drawl recalls Michael Caine, and his thick glasses and lovely suits made me think of George "Superman" Reeves as Clark Kent. He also reminded me of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who would be slain exactly a year after the events of the movie. Like Kennedy, Falconer represents a world of culture, learning and refinement swept away by the '60s counterculture. This new cultural energy is brilliantly shown in the outstanding scene of the sad dinner party between Falconer and Julianne Moore's lovesick Charley. The tipsy couple get together to dance, and Charley changes the record from the jazz classic "Stormy Weather" to Booker T. and the MGs' "Green Onions." They awkwardly, then increasingly abandonly, do the twist, then collapse in exhaustion to the floor. That brief sequence embodies the huge cultural and social swifts of the next few years.

The film is loaded with literary references. One striking one is that George's class is studying Aldous Huxley's "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan." Aldous Huxley, also a member of the Britisith literary expatriates in Los Angeles who would dabble with psychedelic drugs and mystical religion. That whole mileu is fascinating; acute sensibilities bred in tradition and literary culture captivated by sensuality and psychic experimentation. Also there in the L.A. scene were such worthies as Thomas Mann and the composers Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, seeking to transplant European culture to the far Pacific coast.

Isherwood's old chum W.H. Auden, who also left England for the New World before World War II, would remain in New York and cling to the old culture, finding solace in traditional Christianity. Watching "A Single Man" bids me to reread Auden's poems of the era, which evoke the same despair, the same sense of the poetic and literary mind beset by America's consumer culture, love of speed, power and new money. The two worlds could reach common ground: I first heard of Auden when I saw him on the Johnny Carson show.

 

A Bomb Worth Detonating

I recently discovered the art/literature/film/music quarterly Bomb, although it's apparently been publishing since 1981. With the vagaries of newsstand display, I just noticed the mag showing up at my neighborhood Barnes & Noble.

In contrast to literary journals, Bomb has a full magazine format, with glossy pages and a big helping of colar art and photographs. The editorial theme is "conversations between artiststs, writers, actors, directors, musicians." The magazine includes "First Proof," a literary supplement with original fiction and poems.

I picked up the spring 2010 issue, number 111, because of interviews with Sam Lipsyte and Charles Bernstein, because I'd recently read Lipsyte's bleakly funny novel "The Ask" and Bernstein's selected poems collection "All of the Whiskey in Heaven."

The Lypyte interview is conducted by the writer Christopher Sorrentino, whose works I've been wanting to read for some time. I was a fan of his father, Gilbert Sorrentino, a master of postmodern fiction. The conversation betwqeen Chris Sorrentino and Lipsyte is an interesting meditation on fiction and writing techniques.

I haven't gotten around to the Bernstein interview, but I expect it to be an in-depth discussion of postmodern poetry, especially Bernstein's Language poetry school. Bomb also has an interview with actress Patricia Clarkson, known for her work with Woody Allen. Although the introduction doesn't mention it, I also liked her work on "Six Feet Under" as the neo-hippie sister of the funeral home matriarch played by Frances Conroy.

With its focus on our most notable artists, writers, actors and directors, Bomb will be a worthy addition to my relenteless reading menu.

"Fences" A Magical Day of Theater

I was supremely lucky to acquire a ticket for the revival of August Wilson's "Fences" at the venerable Cort Theater in New York City. The classic Broadway play made me remember why I fell in love with the theater all of those years ago.

Denzel Washington and Viola Davis are superb in the starring roles, and the rest of the cast is splendid. Washington radiates power in the dynamic role of Troy Maxson, first made famous by James Earl Jones. As John Lahr said in The New Yorker, the audience at first loves him as a star, but in the end admires him as an actor. Viola Davis as the sensual, giving, heartbroken Rose gives one of the all-time great Broadway performances. Also marvelous are Stephen McKinley Henderson, Russell Hornsby, Mykelti Williamson, and Chris Chalk. The young Eden-Duncan Smith captivated my heart as the little girl Raynell.

As the performance kept delivering higher and higher levels of dramatic power, I found my admiration soaring for director Kenny Leon, one of Atlanta's artistic treasures. Leon understands the play's subtleties, and the actors are perfectly attuned. The set by Santo Loquasto was breathtaking, and Branford Marsalis' bluesy music captured the mood of the 1950s black culture in Pittsburgh.

Towering above all was August Wilson's script. Regrettably, I'd never before read or seen any of his work, although I was aware of his stature. The play, full of wonderful lines, unexpected turns, and finely modulated plot elements, was that of a master artist. I'm looking forward to immersing myself deeply in  his work.

Elif Batuman's World of Literature

I've dipped into some of this year's lauded new novels, yet find they don't engage me. I'm sure it's reader error. I have a new hot writer on the radar: Sam Lipsyte, authr of "The Ask." He's apparently the latest Gordon Lish protege and uses scatological, risque language to depict disturbing, sexually explicit scenes. Whooooo, baby, I'm starting to tingle.

Meanwhile, I'm entertained by Elif Batuman's "The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them." Batuman, who received her doctorate in comparative literature at Stanford and now teaches at "the Farm," pulls back the curtain on the world of academia. Her views of professors, scholars and graduate students swing from the richly comic to the devastatingly cruel and often sad.

Batuman gives a vivid account of how she rejected the world of "creative writing" and literary workshops to become an academic. She defends the long reviled and ridiculed practice of literary theory. While she decided against the fiction writing life, her pieces read like a strong contemporary novel, with strong passages of often absurdist dialogue that made me wonder if some of it were invented or embellished. She claims that all is real.

Here's a strong passage in which she disputes the common wisdom that "theory" ruins literature. "Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn't the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?"

Although I don't remember ever reading her in New Yorker, Batuman is the latest product of that vaunted magazine. She's also a member of the "N + 1" community, those young, or perhaps not so young now, well-read folk who've sought to keep literary culture going in the age of text messages, Twitter and the IPod. Batuman is a strong advocate for literary culture, as well as the need to uphold the teaching of literature in our curious age that swings from utilitarianism to superstition.

Another plus of the book, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in original paperback, is the bright-yellow and orange cover design by the outstanding and truly original New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast. Chast's inimitable drawings aptly illustrate the book's comic, questing spririt.

Batuman's work will also give you knowledge about those masterpieces of Russian literature you probably haven't read or haven't read in quite a while. Quite handy for dinner parties to be able to come up with some anecdotes about Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy  or Isaac Babel. Actually, I have a copy of Babel's "Red Cavalry Stories" which I was unable to finish a few years ago. Batuman inspired me to try again: one of the missions of her book is demonstrate how books can enhance life and repay constant, "posssessed" study.