A day at the beach.

Unfettered by Optimism

Blast from Past

Hank Williams Sr./Machiavelli

Art and Science Must Be Stopped

Under New Governance Your Majesty

Darkness from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (Esquire, 1936).

In a previous article this writer told about his realization that what he had before him was not the dish that he had ordered for his forties. In fact — since he and the dish were one, he described himself as a cracked plate, the kind that one wonders whether it is worth preserving…

Sometimes, though, the cracked plate has to be retained in the pantry, has to be kept in service as a household necessity. It can never again be warmed on the stove nor shuffled with the other plates in the dishpan; it will not be brought out for company, but it will do to hold crackers late at night or to go into the icebox under leftovers…

“To hold crackers late at night”!!! Ha ha ha!!

So, since I could no longer fulfill the obligations that life had set for me or that I had set for myself, why not slay the empty shell who had been posturing at it for four years? I must continue to be a writer because that was my only way of life, but I would cease any attempts to be a person — to be kind, just, or generous. There were plenty of counterfeit coins around that would pass instead of these and I knew where I could get them at a nickel on the dollar. In thirty-nine years an observant eye has learned to detect where the milk is watered and the sugar is sanded, the rhinestone passed for diamond and the stucco for stone. There was to be no more giving of myself — all giving was to be outlawed henceforth under a new name, and that name was Waste…

The conjurer’s hat was empty. To draw things out of it had long been a sort of sleight of hand, and now, to change the metaphor, I was off the dispensing end of the relief roll forever.

The heady villainous feeling continued…

Let the good people function as such — let the overworked doctors die in harness, with one week’s “vacation” a year that they can devote to straightening out their family affairs, and let the underworked doctors scramble for cases at one dollar a throw; let the soldiers be killed and enter immediately into the Valhalla of their profession. That is their contract with the gods…

So what? This is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain that you are, “a constant striving” (as those people say who gain their bread by saying it). only adds to this unhappiness in the end — that end that comes to our youth and hope. My own happiness in the past often approached such an ecstasy that I could not share it even with the person dearest to me but had to walk it away in quiet streets and lanes with only fragments of it to distill into little lines in books — and I think that my happiness, or talent for self-delusion or what you will, was an exception. It was not the natural thing but the unnatural — unnatural as the Boom; and my recent experience parallels the wave of despair that swept the nation when the Boom was over.

* * * * *

And, a pithy retort via “When Novelists Sober Up” by Tom Shone

When Fitzgerald went public about his creative decline in Esquire, in a piece entitled “The Crack Up”—a prototype for all the misery memoirs we have today—Hemingway was disgusted, inviting him to cast his “balls into the sea—if you have any balls left”.

*  *  *  *  *

P.S. “When Novelists Sober Up” has a good bit about “Hemingway’s liver protrud[ing] from his belly like a long fat leech,” and John Berryman, a poet I’ve never had the pleasure of reading, making disingenuous and thus amusing attempts at rehabilitation before jumping off a Minneapolis bridge, “his body splitting like a melon upon impact with the ground.” (Points subtracted for so many shitty indie-rock bands being enamored with this).

P.P.S. More:

Only the advent of rehab, in the 1960s, interrupted this fall—enforced incarceration flattering the writer’s sense of drama, the Kafkaesque me-versus-the-system fable playing out in his head. John Berryman sat in rehab looking like a “dishevelled Moses”, his shins black and blue, his liver palpitating, reciting Japanese and Greek poets and quoting Immanuel Kant. When he found out the doctors around him were serious he buckled under, declaring himself “a new man in 50 ways!” and affecting an ostentatious “religious conversion” which he proceeded to pour into a series of poems to his Higher Power (“Under new governance your majesty”). Ten days after leaving he found he needed a quick stiff one to get the creative juices flowing again and downed a quart of whisky. “Christ,” was all he could say the next morning.

I Heart Art

From the New York Times:

In a winter coat and a hat with thick wool lining, Mr. Anderszewski walks solitarily along snow-covered train tracks at a railroad station, as we hear his reflections in a voice-over, in English.

“When I play with orchestra,” he says, “I sometimes tell myself I’ll never play a concerto again. Too many artistic compromises.”

Yet, he continues, when confronted with “the extreme loneliness of the recital, the heroism and also the cruelty involved, I sometimes think that I’ll never do recitals ever again. I’ll only make recordings.”

Then again, he says, in the recording studio, when he is free to repeat the work as often as he desires, the possibility of always doing better creates another kind of terrible pressure.

“In fact,” he concludes, “the real, the ultimate temptation would be to stop everything, lie down, listen to the beat of my heart and quietly wait for it to stop.”

More Vaise IRL

An interview with one of them “Coming Insurrection”/”Invisible Committe”/”Tarnac 9″ neo-situ dudes:

Q. How are you spending your time?

A. Very well, thank you. Chin-ups, jogging and reading.

Q. Can you recall the circumstances of your arrest for us?

A. A gang of youths, hooded and armed to the teeth, broke into our house. They threatened us, handcuffed us, and took us away, after having broken everything to pieces. They first took us into very fast cars capable of moving at more than 170 kilometers an hour on the highways. In their conversations, the name of a certain Mr Marion (former leader of the anti-terrorist police) came up often. His virile exploits amused them very much, such as the time he slapped one of his colleagues in the face, in good spirits and at a going-away party. They sequestered us for four days in one of their “people’s prisons,” where they stunned us with questions in which absurdity competed with obscenity.

…

Q. You come from a very well-to-do background, which oriented you in another direction. . .

A. “There are plebes in all classes.” (Hegel).

Q. Why Tarnac?

A. Go there, you will understand. If you don’t, no one could explain it to you, I fear.

Q. Do you define yourself as an intellectual? A philosopher?

A. Philosophy was born like chatty grief from original wisdom. Plato already heard the words of Heraclitus as if they had escaped from a bygone world. In the era of diffused intellectuality, one can’t see what “the intellectual” might make specific, unless it is the expanse of the gap that separates the faculty of thinking from the aptitude for living. Intellectual and philosopher are, in truth, sad titles. But for whom exactly is it necessary to define oneself?

: P

Fave Trax:: Plaster Hounds

Plaster Hounds

2004 Chromatics (in KRMTX phase) LP sports an impeccable cover design, drum machine/guitar/voice tones that I’m still trying to steal, and “best-drummer-in-hardcore” Max Anarchy from Get Hustle. Go!

Tristan’s Metier

Two excerpts from a Glenn O’Brien interview with Kraftwerk from 1977.

When did you start the group?

RH: We started playing together in ‘68 with different people. Then we set up our studio in 1970. So Kraftwerk was founded in 1970. We’ve played with different combinations of people, but for the last three years we’ve been playing with the two drummers we have now: Karl and Wolfgang.

Do they use regular drums at all?

RH: No, it’s all electronic. We have invented some special electronic drum system and patented them. We had regular drums with amplification and echo machines.

FLORIAN SCHNEIDER: But they were not sensitive enough. They were too loud. Too noisy.

RH: Now we can make all kinds of volume changes. And also the attitude of the player is a non-physical one. Our drummers don’t sweat. So they are like us. They are not subhumans doing the dirty work. They are like computer programmers.

* * * * *

Would you like your music to be beamed to other solar systems?

RH: Of course. So far we’ve been beaming ourselves around the world. When we wrote the song ‘Autobahn’ we were beaming ourselves into American car radios. Dreams come true.

You don’t have moral ideas. Do you have political ideas?

RH: We strongly believe in anarchy and self rule.

When did you start the group?

RH: We started playing together in ‘68 with different people. Then we set up our studio in 1970. So Kraftwerk was founded in 1970. We’ve played with different combinations of people, but for the last three years we’ve been playing with the two drummers we have now: Karl and Wolfgang.

Do they use regular drums at all?

RH: No, it’s all electronic. We have invented some special electronic drum system and patented them. We had regular drums with amplification and echo machines.

FLORIAN SCHNEIDER: But they were not sensitive enough. They were too loud. Too noisy.

RH: Now we can make all kinds of volume changes. And also the attitude of the player is a non-physical one. Our drummers don’t sweat. So they are like us. They are not subhumans doing the dirty work. They are like computer programmers.

Fried Green

Reality Fatigue

From The New Yorker (again…not cool, I realize…):

Finally, as Obama said, “there remains the question of detainees at Guantánamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people. And I have to be honest here—this is the toughest single issue that we will face.” This group, “who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted,” might be held in preventive detention, perhaps forever. It’s a sobering thought, that Obama could consider approving this kind of long-term detention, and it remains to be seen how much evidence would be required to justify such an extraordinary step and how many cases it would involve…In any case, it’s hard to imagine any President agreeing to release people who, as Obama put it, “in effect, remain at war with the United States.”

Doesn’t need to be said again, but still:

Yes, it is hard to imagine any President releasing prisoners who are at war with the United States. But why do we care about the United States if the rule of law is applied randomly or to complement political moods? What exactly is worth protecting (besides all of our stuff) in a nation with no legal or theoretical skeleton?
I’ll answer my own question: The sun rising/setting over the Grand Canyon, the towering majesty of the Redwood; Pollack’s manic manifestations of the modern human psyche, Coltrane’s quest for musical union with the Divine; the taut prose of Raymond Carver, and the excitement of televised professional football. Let’s not forget the quiet, God-like smile that curves the corners of your firstborn, wrapped in swaddling clothes as she is, cradled in warmth and light.

Queen Christina

Toto Wampage

From The New Yorker:

Cast of characters:

Margaret Mitchell, author of the thousand-page blockbuster novel “Gone With the Wind.”
David O. Selznick, the legendary, manic producer of “Gone With the Wind.”
Victor Fleming, a vigorous and resourceful man who was then directing “The Wizard of Oz” — few considered him an artist.
Sidney Howard, East Coast playwright and screenwriter.
Ben Hecht, the greatest and most cynical of Hollywood screenwriters.

The story:

When summoned by Selznick, Fleming hadn’t read Mitchell’s novel, but he took a look at the screenplay and immediately told the producer, “Your fucking script is no fucking good.”

*    *    *

Hecht agreed to work on the script as long as he didn’t have to read the book. Selznick told him the plot, but he couldn’t make any sense of it, so Selznick retrieved Howard’s version, and, as Hecht listened, Selznick and Fleming read it aloud, Selznick taking the role of Scarlett, Fleming reading Rhett.

In this manner, the three men worked eighteen or twenty hours a day, sustained by Dexedrine, peanuts, and bananas, a combination that Selznick believed would stimulate the creative process. On the fourth day, according to Hecht, a blood vessel burst in Fleming’s eye. On the fifth, Selznick, eating a banana, swooned, and had to be revived by a doctor.

What Immortal Hand or Eye?

Winter Haiku

Shiitake potstickers, sesame crusted tuna

Sweetbread sausage, squid and artichoke galette

Spanish octopus and lobster paella, suckling pig

Thank You Once Again, Harper’s

Weekly Review sent me here.

I approve of the conceptual content, but not the syntax.

Juan Maldacena at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton… showed that the physics inside a hypothetical universe with five dimensions and shaped like a Pringle is the same as the physics taking place on the four-dimensional boundary.

Beaten to the Punch

Van Dyke Parks’ Guide to Style

Look at what this man is wearing:

And, from Clang of the Yankee Reaper:

“Iron Man” (orig. by Squibby [Stanley Cummings])

Manhattan Downtown Music Scene

The members of the band Gang Gang Dance never wanted to be a band exactly, let alone a trendy band. Formed around 2000, incubated on the Lower East Side, they were opposed to the new wave of downtown rock having its New York moment at the time.

“We were really grossed out by a lot of the guys in leather jackets walking around Ludlow Street, and the aesthetic of the Strokes representing New York,” said Lizzi Bougatsos, Gang Gang Dance’s lead singer. The group — Josh Diamond, the guitarist; Brian DeGraw, the keyboardist and electronic maestro; and Tim DeWit, the original drummer — saw themselves as experimentalists, building a cult following over the years for their largely improvised shows.

Ms. Bougatsos is ready for the attention. “There’s no such thing as selling out in my mind,” she said, adding that she would love to have her music featured on a TV show soundtrack: “A Jeep commercial, a tampon commercial, anything,” she said. “We’re a band, we make music, and that’s what we want to be known for.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/arts/music/21gang.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

If not the unapologetic allegiance to capitalism, what exactly about The Strokes’ aesthetic was so gross? The leather jackets?