Critics Who Know Jack Read online

  What makes a man turn cartwheels after his arrest while protesting the capitalist establishment of the New York Stock Exchange and throw dollar bills down from the gallery to the men in suits and ties below? Could it be Abbie was thinking of the poem by W.H. Auden where, in honour of W.B. Yeats, he says:

  And when the Frenchmen are roaring like

  beasts on the floor of the Bourse . . . some one will remember this day . . .

  Revolution was not just for the hell of it as Abbie said — and yet he did make it fun. The generation he grew up in allowed for fun. Yes fun! Even in revolution! The media allowed for it. The play of visual and the lights of television screens made revolution something you could see day to day. Add to that the joy and explosive nature of the “new” rock & roll and its never-ending exploration of the subconscious coming to the surface in chrysalises of expression both musical and word-ly — and you have something to invest in as a youth movement. A great sense of space for “fun” not to be ruined by the greed of war and un-required disciplines from earlier (post WW2) times.

  Spoils? Spending a lifetime on the run for standing up to the lies of the country’s leaders is hardly a manifestation of living the spoiled life. Master of Agit-Prop and street theatre, Hoffman knew how to create a character that was both outspoken and to address the political issues of the day through a complex consideration of “sign and symbol.” He knew the semiotics of effect and the nature of the American media. Fickle for a storyline that showed the counter-culture as unruly, long-haired and “un-American.” Hoffman played off this media need brilliantly time and time again. He became the darling of the “radical chic” and in truth was offered substantial contracts to become a television icon and fashion gadfly for the commercial enterprises wanting to take full advantage of the “youth dollars” the generation was born into. His American-flag shirt was replicated again and again (similar yet more political than Peter Townshend’s of The Who, and his Union-Jack jacket). This proved Hoffman’s great sense of the theatric that the press and commercial interests were eager to pursue and cash in on.

  To be defiant was cool and hip yet underlying this “attractive” stance, Hoffman had political chops: a substantial activism based on socialist and other left-leaning ideological frameworks. The freshness or the newness of his antics was in great part the result of the time he lived and “worked” in. The explosion of media and television. The rush to culture by a high percentage of Americans both young and old. Yet with Abbie, it did not stop at symbol. Risking his life, he and many other young Americans pushed Lyndon Johnson from the White House and helped end the Vietnam War through constant exposure of the hypocrisy and aggressive actions of the State. And with Richard Nixon’s paranoid presidency, demonstrations that swayed public and world opinion contributed to exposing Nixon’s larceny-driven morality and his eventual demise.

  Hoffman committed suicide after years of being on the run. He had plastic surgery to change his well-known features and continued his activism even as a bipolar disorder consumed his once agile and clear, loving mind. Certainly if Abbie were around today he would be yelling: Steal This iPad! He made a forceful difference in American politics and culture and its says something that the country he was born in never found a way to honour his contrarianism and citizenry, as much as it seems to love its rebels and sense of integrity.

  The Artist as Homeowner, Or: Bring Me Two Capps!

  A film-maker in the neighbourhood I live in is always looking for the next good idea for an independent film and how to buy a house at the same time. His real work is doing some post-editing for bigger productions and a few hours a week in a bookstore as a clerk that allows him some part time to pursue his higher interest. His wife could have been a model but applies her congeniality to being a cultural administrator’s receptionist. Yet they struggle. Day to day they are seen morning, noon and evening consuming lattes and watching every new face that comes into the neighbourhood cafes. Their interest in meeting people has everything to do with: Who will be the next person who might be the light at the end of the tunnel? The great breakthrough person who will present an opportunity and moment that will raise their profile and light? And get them off the “poor end” of the café stools? Their eyes are on the door constantly.

  Rents are high in the neighbourhood and home ownership near impossible unless a parent or a relative with saved funds passes on. So there they wait. Though if you look around the length of the café, you will see them in double and triplicate. All resentful of each others’ position and, at the same time, encroachment on each others’ space.

  This is where their quest for culture has put them. Full of envy and connivance. Superficial and fatigued in their struggle. Embarrassed that as they age they can no longer “afford” that extra dollar to put in the local street-person’s cup. Taking the other side of the street to avoid him and cringing as he calls out: How are ya? Have a good day!

  The home they want? An old three-story Victorian with a garden and sunroof. A room for him to film edit and a room for her to practice the painting class assignments she takes at the local high school. Long wooden pine tables for guests and Christmases and Easters and a finished basement they can rent to an arts student to help pay the mortgage.

  This all steams away in them. This dream of ownership under the espresso machines of Joe, Tony and Frank, giving them the caffeine runs while their fairly insecure employment awaits them every morning.

  They are not Old Testament Job. They would rather others suffered and haven’t been near a church since last year’s Passion Procession where he had the idea to film old country folks mourning away in their past and present beliefs.

  The price of the Victorian of their dreams is no less than seven-hundred-thousand dollars. They have little saved. They’re growing older. They’re more and more grumpy as each day passes them by. They’re in that limbo between the energized skin of their youth and the doom of walkers and old folks’ homes they have not prepared for.

  What to do? The old folks are dying and haven’t saved a dime. “Two capps, Tony! Make ‘em extra strong!”

  BAD POP SONGS

  Every era has its kitsch. And every era its spectrum of popular song that ranges from the facile and trite to the higher forms of contemporary composition. And every era seems to introduce a new medium. From Victrolas to mp3s and all in between. And every song is subject to interpretation. One most noteworthy being Mack the Knife (originally Die Moritat von Mackie Messer), part of German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. Music by Kurt Weill; lyrics by Brecht himself.

  The song, written in the voice of a narrator, speaks of Macheath (Mack the Knife), all around gangster, bad guy, voyou, playboy, hustler, murderer and superiorly masterful underground liver in the shadows of 1920s and ‘30s Berlin. He represents cunning and throat-cutting. A king of the underworld and underclass. Marginal yet prince and thief, who rules by his “own sword” (slash) KNIFE. The song’s treatment was presented in the course of theatrical performance and worked as Brecht’s dark characterization of the vast underworld created by socio-economic upheaval and uncertainty. Macheath did not come from riches and, unlike Robin of Sherwood, he not only robbed from the rich but from the poor as well.

  Move forward to 1960 USA. Bobby Darin — ‘50s rock idol cum Vegas lounge-king — decides to take this intensely political song and render it with trumpets and a big band sound in an almost self-representational deprecation and laurelling, and spank it onto the American music charts. In Darin’s version the wickedness of Macheath is oiled up into a crescendo of suave pseudo-hip, Rat-packy, coolest-man-in-town, with all the babes lining up stylization. The line forms on the right, Babe, now that Mackie’s back in town sings Darin as though his metaphoric lady-killing is being awaited by every female within range of his cologne. This is not the stench and filth of early twentieth century Berlin. Nor is it a conscious reverence of a vile character by Darin. From the viewpoint of “sign and symbol,” culturally it is a v
iolation and corruption of a vastly important articulation on underclass culture that Brecht’s Marxism intended in his original penning of the lyric.

  Now the Bad Pop Song/Good Pop Song part. With formulaic interception of the song’s meaning, Darin created an arrangement that was pleasing to the American listening public. Like many other singers of his time, Darin found novelty in foreign-language songs that the American market had not been exposed to en masse. Note here in the same period Danke Schein by Wayne Newton and Elvis Presley’s version of the pastoral Neapolitan O Sole Mio transposed as It’s Now or Never. While those songs were somewhat innocent in their adaptation, the Darin version of Brecht’s Knife corrupted the meaning and intent from the original’s socialist perspective to syrup-ing in the false gods and golden fat-calves of Las Vegas.

  Darin completely guts the song’s meaning to mere shank, though Vegas itself was built by an underclass from New York and New Jersey. The underclass or underworld of Italian and Jewish American 20th century mobsterism. And in truth, Brecht was fascinated by the American Mobster and corruption by capitalist enterprise. Yet he did not celebrate it as a way to be. His play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, in which metaphoric character associations are made between Hitler’ Reich and Chicago’s 1930s gangsterism, is one of the great social condemnations of greed in modern theatre. However none of this information seems to have informed Darin. There is no satire nor irony in Darin’s adaptation. It is all joy and grease.

  As a footnote, American folk-singer Dave Van Ronk did record a version of Brecht and Weill’s song with an integrity and fear that would have made Brecht smile. In Van Ronk’s version (in English) each verse rises with the sharp edge of a blade. Van Ronk’s vocal cutting to a peak and slash and slaughter by song’s end. This version is not pop song and has no pretension to be so. For the most part being limited to the esoteric world of independent record production. Though its artistic merit sits high in the pantheon of recorded music. In turn, is Darin’s Mack the Knife a bad pop song? In its triteness and treatment of subject matter? Considering the song’s origin, it is. As an American hit of the period one thanks the god of pop music that the Beatles and Bob Dylan were more than establishing artistic stronghold on the American charts, giving us great alternatives to schmaltz and lounge-lizardry.

  BAD ESPRESSO

  In Rome, il guaglione (the young punk) behind the counter turns a line in a cappuccino preparation and lifts the deep brown espresso to the surface foam into a heart for the young Japanese traveller. He has not cashed in money from her and his eye is already on the door, setting two espresso cups out for his next customers. She sips lightly on her cappuccino, careful not to let her lips break the heart the barista has designed. She smiles and he returns it. He sets the two other espressos out for the well-suited bureaucrats who have made their early morning pilgrimage here before heading into the city’s financial district for a day’s work of accounting and paper-shuffling.

  Over the course of the next half hour seven more customers have come into the café and the young man has served each their coffee without waiting for a cue as to what they desire. But for the Japanese student, they are regulars and have not lined up behind each other or paid for their drinks before being served. This is not Starbuck’s pretending charm and pseudo-Feng Shui with its cardboard cut outs of Kenyan mountains and Colombian bean-growers with straw hats and moustaches — and its over-priced caramelized coffee beans! Its counter people and baristas rattling in the cost of your beverage and waiting for your money as they call out the drink to another worker who is busy changing the satellite radio station to annoying high-pitched boy-band music. With all of this, the espresso you order is made from a touch of a button and thin as watered maple syrup. And what seems to elude the Starbuck’s chain is the wonder of viscosity (what happens when you steam coffee and milk and water together for that delightful weighted foam or crema (the golden brown top of a properly steamed espresso).

  You ask if they can remake it and they are happy to do it again and are apologetic and it comes out much the same. This time you frown at the meagre and thin portion and go to the plastic sticks and cream counter and add extra cream to at least tolerate the bitter taste. And, of course, you add a touch of sugar, which is brown as if you are at least practicing something healthy regardless of how badly the coffee is “prepared.”

  And you have taken the time to tell them how it is done in Roman cafes and one of them says: Cool. I was there last summer with my folks but not all the time. And you ask: Doing what? And he says: I’m studying here at the College of Art and Design And you say to yourself: This is not Caravaggio making my espresso this morning. Not even Gauguin. He would probably have spit the first taste out. Yet if he had a patron he wouldn’t have been paying for it so maybe he’d just be looking forward to getting back to his studio and whipping down a hardy grappa or half litre of red. But the young Roman barista knew you were in the land of Caravaggio and even if he slips once or twice and makes an inferior brew, you at least are taken by the aura of it all and go out and sulk by a Roman ruin as opposed to resenting that you ever stopped at Starbuck’s expecting a decent and simple beginning to your morning.

  Take then your fine Roman espresso and walk along the Tiber to Trastevere in autumn and think of the Argentine steakhouse near Via Cavour that you will dine at this evening (with a full Tango ensemble) and let fade the snotty little vegan muffin shop where a cup of milk is rarely available and if asked for, a glance of damnation sits stupidly on the face of the anaemic unwashed third-generation, twenty-something counter person, back in the North country, across the Atlantic. You could be here in Rome if you just made your own stove top espresso or cappuccino at home and saved five dollars latte money every day for a year. Caravaggio awaits you!

  GREAT POP SONGS

  We all have our own personal top ten. Name yours? Here’s my list but not in order, as no order exists for them. Instead, they sit side by side in a sort of forever-ness while other songs (mostly good) satellite around this Milky Way.

  Won’t Get Fooled Again, written by Pete Townshend for The Who. To underline how great this song is, I knew a kid back in first year university that couldn’t get to sleep at night unless he had this song playing full-blast through his headphones. He aced his French and Math exams the next week as long as Roger Daltrey’s voice ran through his membrane and engaged his Circle of Willis, establishing the anatomical purpose of the blood-brain barrier.

  La Bamba, by Richie Valens. One of the first runs at what came to be known as Tex-Mex, later Conjunto and Tejeno, and years before the World Music craze of the 1990s, La Bamba was adapted by the 17-year-old Valens (Valenzuela) from a Mexican folk song into a rockabilly, Buddy Holly-like wailing rhythm, breath-taking arpeggio guitar solo and lyrics all in Spanish. The Chicano had arrived on the music scene. Giving way to even the likes of Trini Lopez who kicked major ass with his latin-infused version of the collegiate standard If I Had a Hammer. And gave future rays of light to the likes of Carlos Santana and the masterful East L.A. band Los Lobos.

  Eleanor Rigby, by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Mid-sixties pop music meets Thomas Hardy novel-like storyline and features cello and lyrics about the loneliness, tedium, boredom and death without fanfare, almost unnamed. A universe away from car-accident songs like Teen Angel and Leader of the Pack from earlier in the decade, where death was celebrated as a form of dedication and true love. That is, you pledged your eternal heart to the boy or girl who died in the car crash. I think the Everly Brothers actually did one about a plane crash.

  American Pie, by New Rochelle, New York’s Don McLean. Not since Bob Dylan’s 1965 Like A Rolling Stone had a song longer than two and a half minutes get substantial and continual airplay on U.S. radio. The last line about “The Father, Son and The Holy Ghost, they caught the last train for the coast, the day the music died . . .” rides in the imagination to this day though the song was released in 1971. The reverberation of those lines lamenting the traditi
onal values of faith and American wholesomeness have been revisited by country star Garth Brooks in an Up With People-type rendering. And by Madonna, albeit a few lines as opposed to the full nine minute version, giving McLean the biggest royalty cheque of his career.

  I Get Around, by Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys. Unlike the heady Good Vibrations that suggested Wilson was into psychedelia, this teenage surf/car tune comes out of the gates full throttle and displays brilliant harmony and joy of sun and water. Though it celebrates, in nuance, teenage male infidelity (“None of the guys go steady ‘cause it wouldn’t be right to leave your best girl home on a Saturday night”), the verve of seeking happiness makes it hard not to play the song at least twice in a row and get in your jalopy and go visit Frank and Joe Hardy (The Hardy Boys) in fictional Bayport.

  A Whiter Shade of Pale, by Keith Reid for Procol Harum (in Latin Beyond these things). In this Bach meets Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Reid got Harum onto the charts with surrealism and non-sequitur narrative. Though the song was played to death after the attempt-to-be-hip movie, The Big Chill, its lyricism sustains itself regardless of the tiring antic-driven acting of Kevin Kline and his prep-boy, man-stays-young Pat Boone-ishness. As did many of the great British bands of the time, Procol Harum distinctly drew references from literature as opposed to the world of television and other media. Though the song carries a semiotic to it, it is not a message as much as an aura of magnificence of imagination and the mind that holds the song forever high in the line-up of tunes exposed by American radio.