Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Re: #19 (JonL): 

>>Perhaps zombies are fascists? 

Always tempted to draw parallels between the global fascist rumblings
in the first half of the 20th century, and the post-millennial slide
to
the right (along a well-lubricated slippery slope). However the world
feels more complex and diverse... and crowded. The shadowy cloud of
civilization's potential decline seems to have spawned a tornado or
two, but are we truly in an apocalyptic era?<<

Fascinating, prickly question, Jon. I'll be picking the cockleburrs
out of my brain for days. In _The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American
Culture on the Brink_, I lean heavily on Harold Bloom's _Omens of
Millennium_ and even more so on Hillel Schwarz's _Century's End_ to
make sense of the notion that societies are, as Baudrillard would say,
"always already" apocalyptic, meaning: people have invoked the whorls
and loops of societal turbulence as proof positive that the End of Days
is upon us since the *beginning* of time, virtually, or at least since
the beginning of recorded history. As a card-carrying
postmodernist---make that *post*-postmodernist---not to mention a
born-again atheist, I'm deeply suspicious of teleologies: historical
narratives that culminate in an End of Days, whether it's the religious
right's rapture or the Marxist world revolution of the proletariat or
even Martin Luther King's arrow of history bending toward justice.
Darwinian evolution, not to mention materialism, argue that history is
a random walk. 

That point being readily granted, I *do* think we live in times of
chaos and complexity, when society is "far from equilibrium," as
scientists who study dynamical systems like to say. Steven Pinker's
claim, in _The Better Angels of Our Nature_, that violence is on the
decline notwithstanding, most peoples' experience of the wider
world---which is to say, as a funhouse-mirror reflection in the
media---seems to be as a growingly out-of-control place. Ideological
extremism and lockstep partisanship are monkeywrenching the American
political system---an article by Ezra Klein in the March 19 _New
Yorker_ notes that ideological "rigidity has made American democracy
much more difficult to manage"; the culture wars are reaching a boiling
point, ginned up by backroom dealmakers like the Koch brothers, whose
real agenda is simply to create the most deregulated, tax-free
landscape in which to Do the Lord's Work; and Angry White Guys are
stockpiling guns and training their crosshairs on scapegoats,
post-traumatically stressed by a black man in the Oval Office, the
demographic rise of the nonwhite population, the sea change in
households where women earn more than men, and the econopocalypse.

But if you're shopping for apocalypses, the rough beast right around
the bend is Envirogeddon. Come of the middle of the 21st century,
we---at least, those of us who can't afford a climate-controlled
biosphere lush with hydroponic greenery and an artesian well guarded by
a private army---are going to be living in one of Ballard's disaster
novels. Global Weirding, as climate scientists call it, is *the*
pressing issue of the near future, and I have every confidence my
friends on the right will bury their heads in the sand, on that issue,
until the sand superheats and turns to glass. 
  

    
I suspect that the apocalyptic imagination is fed by the sooner or
later, usually later, realization of mortality: if we die as
individuals, why wouldn't we die collectively, as a species? And as
elders become germophobic, a collectively aging species is increasingly
aware of apocalyptic omens. 

If you're an evangelical Christian, climate meltdown is not a crisis
to be avoided, but part of the inevitable End of Days, therefore a
reality to embrace. 

Prophets of apocalypse famously, in cartoon culture, were lone
lunatics standing on street corners wearing white sheets and long
beards and holding signs saying "The end is near!" Now they have
churches, television programs, websites... I caught one on television
yesterday, in a relatively mainstream church broadcast following ABC's
"This Week." We will all be leaving soon on the Rapture Express. Or
will we?

Word is that, when the rapture comes, the righteous will disappear
from the earth and only the wicked and corrupt will remain. The rapture
could occur this morning, and no one would notice... perhaps a handful
of scattered "missing persons" reports...
  

    
I'm not sure why we pay so much attention to idiotic thought. Jon gets
right to the heart of what's wrong with apocalyptic thinking... in any
camp. Which brings us back to square one.

Mark, what I have really appreciated in your essays, all humor and
subcultural drive-bys aside, is the scalpel you take to areas where our
collective unconscious has wandered from clear reason and what we knew
to be true from the get go.  It's always good to have an iconoclast in
the room; especially in the daze of spin and branding.

How do you keep your edge? Who are and were your influencers? (Along
with those you've already mentioned.)

And how do you keep an editor:) You use so many adjectives and adverbs
I don't know how a decision can be made on what to cut or how to
rephrase. Great rants.
  

    

Rants that excellently slice through fog and mush indeed. Yet, I wonder 
about your appeal to any in cloud cuckoo land. Do you have readers or 
commenters or critics there?
  

    

I'm wondering what <tcn> wonders.
How do you keep your edge?  And what's your brand of coffee?

And here's a link to a PDF from Ramparts April 67 discussing
Hitler as AdMan #1:

http://www.unz.org/Pub/Ramparts-1967apr-00005a02
  

    
Submitted by Roy Christopher:

As much as I agree with your (and Tricia Rose's) assessment of the
ills of Hip-hop, I find those things to be its least interesting
aspects. Hip-hop's adaptation and appropriation of pieces of the past
is still a fertile cultural practice. Fueled now by digital tools and
distribution, Hip-hop has rounded the corner of its postmodern turn.
Moreover, the lyricism is just bananas. Allusions and signifiers fly by
at light speed, calling for an evermore refined Hip-hop literacy.

I understand the turning away, but I think the things you once found
so mind-blowing there are still there. It takes some digging, but
Hip-hop is still a hotbed of cultural epiphanies.
  

    
Re: #27 (JonL): 

>>I suspect that the apocalyptic imagination is fed by the sooner or
later, usually later, realization of mortality: if we die as
individuals, why wouldn't we die collectively, as a species?
[A]...collectively aging species is increasingly
aware of apocalyptic omens.<<

Too metaphysical for this unreconstructed materialist and recovering
Marxist. Then, too, this argument performs a dialectical move I've
always been reflexively wary of, namely, de-emphasizing social dynamics
or economic factors in favor of individual psychology or personal
morality (codeword: "responsibility"), probably because such arguments
are so congenial to the Judaeo-Christian emphasis on pilgrim's progress
over social change, and to Ayn Rand-ian free-market fundamentalism,
with its touching faith in the Level Playing Field and the Self-Made
Man and its social-Darwinian, winner-take-all contempt for society's
losers (because, here in the land of peppy can-do, everyone loves a
winner and nobody likes a loser). I realize you're the furthest thing
from either the evangelical right or the neo-liberal true believers, so
 I hope I don't sound as if I'm tarring you with either brush. I'll
grant your premise that Homo sap (as Burroughs put it) is a solipsistic
animal who refuses to be disabused of the self-serving fiction that
Man is the Measure of All Things; there's surely more than a grain of
truth in your suggestion that the lengthening shadow of mortality makes
those of us with receding hairlines see omens of endtimes everywhere. 

But at the risk of replaying my argument from an earlier post (not to
mention the thesis of _The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium_, which at the risk
of immodesty is beginning to look almost prescient!), I will say that
American society is further from equilibrium than I've ever seen it:
the middle class really has been pushed to the brink of extinction (and
you can't have a healthy democracy without a healthy middle class,
just as you can't have a dynamic mass-market economy without a mass of
consumers); income inequality really is setting in stark relief the
fundamental contradictions between democracy and capitalism, which in
its radically deregulated Reaganite mutation is gnawing away the
foundations on which our fair republic was built; Angry White Guys
who've lost their jobs and their homes, Angry White Guys clutching
their guns as the only talismans of empowerment they have left (however
hollow), Angry White Guys clinging with white-knuckled desperation to
the only explanatory myths they know---reassuring fictions about God
and country and the American Dream---yet desperate for a master
narrative that will explain why those consoling fictions are beginning
to feel so threadbare, so full of social holes that no amount of
self-delusion can patch, Angry White Guys like that really *are*
fertile soil for the toadstools of fascism.   
 
>>If you're an evangelical Christian, climate meltdown is not a crisis
to be avoided, but part of the inevitable End of Days, therefore a
reality to embrace.<< 

Right, but we should concede that progressive Christians, such as the
_Soujourners_ demographic, take the biblical notion of environmental
"stewardship" seriously. Like any zealous atheist, I thrill to YouTube
debate videos of Hitchens and Dawkins handing god-botherers their
heads, but the New Atheism's anthropological illiteracy regarding the
progressive wing of Christianity offends the subcultural scholar in me.
It's the merest ignorance. Worse yet, it colludes, however
unwittingly, with the mainstream media in its tendency to turn a blind
eye on an admittedly few few islets of green, social-justice
Christianity in order to portray Christianity in America as a
right-wing franchise. It may be an impediment to human progress,
overall, but to deny the role played by People of Faith, to use the
evangelical term of art, in bending history's arc toward justice is
willful blindness. And I say this, mind you, as a sworn foe of religion
and all its works and ways. 
 
>>Prophets of apocalypse famously, in cartoon culture, were lone
lunatics standing on street corners ...Now they have
churches, television programs, websites... <<

As it happens, millenarian fist-shakers, prophets of doom, and moral
crusaders have made shrewd use of the media since the birth of the
biblical tract, early in childhood of the nation, as I note in my _Bad
Thoughts_ essay on the hairy eyed, John-Bircher tracts of far-right
Christian pamphleteer Jack Chick. 
  

    
One issue you I both have, I realize, is our tendency to view the
world through the increasingly muddy lens of media, mass and social. I
nod agreement when you say that the American middle class is riding a
rough road to probable extinction, but I don't have a clear set of
facts to support that contention; it's conjecture based, not on my own
experience, but on the sad parade of facts marching through the various
media channels for "news" and "information." I've lost all confidence
in my own ability to interpret the cultural weather.

I have to argue with your first point in the last post, that I've made
a metaphysical argument. To me it's clear that the collective is a
collection of individuals, and common experience will tend to create
collective response. For those of us who were part of the postwar
"boomer" population surge, mortality is no longer deferred, we can't
avoid thinking about it, and this is bound to have an impact on our
collective sense of reality. Either Marx, Karl or Groucho, could
clearly see this point, so as an unspecified Marxist, I'm sure you can
agree, no?
  

    
Re: #31 (Roy Christopher): I'm enthralled. Would you be willing to
throw together an off-the-cuff Top 10 List of Highly Allusive,
Lightspeed-Signifying Hip-Hop? Because the Kristal-fetishizing,
noxiously misogynistic, playfully homophobic stuff booming out of my
car radio makes a man want to weep into his copy of Horkheimer and
Adorno's _Culture Industry_. But I'm ready to answer the altar call and
get religion, Brother Christopher; may the scales fall from my eyes!
Also, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the effects of the
copyright crackdown on the Hip-Hop-as-Postmodern-Bricolage phenomenon,
epitomized, back in the day, by Hank Shocklee's Bomb Squad and De La
Soul and, more recently, by DJ Krush and DJ Shadow. A thousand flowers
may be blooming in the cracks of consumer culture, but I can't imagine
you'd argue the aesthetic fallout of the war on copyfighters.
  

    
Re: #33 (JonL): You'll get no quarrel from me on the point that the
graying of the baby boom puts America---or, at least, the boomers who
cast a long shadow across its mass-market myths---in pensive mood,
sighing theatrically about its impending mortality and, on occasion,
inclined to confuse the baby boom's shuffle into its AARP Years with
the decline of civilization generally. 

As for reading cultural signs, specifically regarding the middle
class's move onto the endangered species list, we can agree that
there's no such thing as a monolithic mainstream anymore, and that
universal consensuses on anything are hard to come by, yet still accept
the avalanche of hard evidence showing that 30 years of Reaganomics
has carved the epitaph of the working class. The utter falsity of
trickledown, laissez-faire policies is abundantly evidenced, it seems
to me.
  

    
"The utter falsity of trickledown, laissez-faire policies is
abundantly evidenced, it seems to me."

I don't disagree. Yet they persist, and those most damaged support
them. Or perhaps they don't, it's hard to tell, the narrative is out of
joint.
  

    
At the risk of sounding rude, you sound quite silly with your circa 1992 
take on hip-hop. 

It's pretty obvious you've never actually listened to it, which is a 
dangerous position to cast stones from ("I hate that stuff that, ah, I've 
never heard more than a few fragments of!")

Check into these and get back to us or stand down on this point, sir:

'Aquemini,' by OutKast
'Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers),' by Wu-Tang Clan
'De La Soul Is Dead,' by De La Soul
'Only Built for Cuban Linx,' by Raekwon
'Raising Hell,' by Run-DMC
'Midnight Marauders,' by A Tribe Called Quest
'Paul's Boutique,' by Beastie Boys

Now here we go dropping science dropping it all over
Like bumping around the town like when you're driving a Range Rover
Expanding the horizons and expanding the parameters
Expanding the rhymes of sucker M.C. amateurs
Naugels, Isaac Newton Scientific E.Z.
Ben Franklin with the kite getting over with the key
Rock shocking the mic as many times times the times tables
Rock well to tell dispel all of the old fables
I've been dropping the new science and kicking the new knowledge
An M.C. to a degree that you can't get in college
The dregs of the earth and the eggs that I eat
I've got pegs through my hands and one through my feet
Shea Stadium the Radium E M D squared
Got kicked out of the Palladium you think that I cared
It's the sound of science


Challenge #1: 
If you've ever written anything that good, I'd like to see it. 

Challenge #2
Hip-hop is a coded art form, which you probably don't understand. I'm 
guessing you don't even understand what's going on in that verse. I would 
find it highly amusing to read your take, though.
  

    
And before you go all "I listened to The Message in 1983!" again, consider 
the folly of analyzing the state of rock music in 1981 by listening to 
Herman's Hermits. Not very helpful.
  

    
<rocket>: But what do you really think?
  

    
Heh. 

I'm sure our esteemed guest will be right back with information that
isn't 20 years old (Copyright wars? Seriously? Allow me to point you to 
Biz Markie's "All Samples Cleared" -- released on June 2, 1993.)
  

    
#28 of 32: Ted Newcomb (tcn) Mon 14 May 2012 (05:57 AM):

>>How do you keep your edge? Who are and were your influencers? (Along
with those you've already mentioned.) And how do you keep an editor:)
You use so many adjectives and adverbs, I don't know how a decision can
be made on what to cut or how to rephrase.<<

#29 of 32: . (wickett) Mon 14 May 2012 (08:53 AM)

>>I wonder 
about your appeal to any in cloud cuckoo land. Do you have readers or 
commenters or critics there?<<

#30 of 32: david gault (dgault) Mon 14 May 2012 (08:55 AM)

>>How do you keep your edge?  And what's your brand of coffee? 
And here's a link to a PDF from Ramparts April 67 discussing
Hitler as AdMan #1...<<

Thanks, all, for your lavish praise, which brings a blush to my
wizened, reptilian cheek. Thanks, too, for the RAMPARTS article;
fascinating stuff.

And the answers are:

I keep my edge by returning again and again to acidulous wits like
Gore Vidal (_United States_, his ginormous doorstopper of an essay
collection, is a must for every library), Hitchens (whose neocon
cheerleading I predictably deplore, but whose Oxfordian cut-and-thrust
is a thing of beauty, worthy of study for every aspiring stylist),
Bierce (_The Devil's Dictionary_), Burroughs (whom I read as a savage
Swiftian satirist, a mantle he himself often claimed), H.L. Mencken,
The Incomparable Oscar (Wilde, of course---a gimlet-eyed social
commentator behind his Aesthete pose), Twain (one of our most mordant
observers of the American scene), J.G. Ballard (pathologist of the
postnodern, as I call him in the book's dedication), Joan Didion, and
Luc Sante (whose blurb I am proud to say adorns the book's back over),
to name just a few of the whetstones I use in an increasingly vain
effort to keep the aging mind keen and the pen sharp enough to draw
blood. 

How do I keep an editor? I presume you mean magazine editors, as
opposed to my book editors, who are chained to their oars, poor dears? 
Regarding the tightly dovetailed nature of my writing, you're very
intuitive, because I *have* been told by editors that the joinery of my
sentences is so tight it squeaks, which makes it fiendishly difficult
to trim "widows"---hackspeak for that extra word dangling on a line of
its own, at the end of a laid-out paragraph, which art directors
usually insist must be cut. I *will* respectfully demur regarding my
allegedly reckless use of adjectives and adverbs. I *do* carry the
battle standard for a more Wildean prose style that stands foursquare
against the beige, PowerPoint prose of our age. The Gladwellian style
of our times is anathema to me; I find it colorless, and yet more
evidence of creeping corporatism. But that doesn't mean my prose wears
velvet knee-breeches and swans around with a nosegay in one pale,
long-fingered hand. (Adjective alert! And one of them a compound
modifier at that!)

How do I keep an audience?

Well, *you're* here, aren't you?

But seriously: we can't *all* be Malcolm Gladwell. What would the
overcrowded fishbowl of American Letters be without its minnows? To be
sure, I'd be delighted to seduce the million, sell more books than God,
and retire to a little Pacific atoll all my own, to shuck the clams
out of their shells and wear my trousers rolled. But not at the cost of
performing an icepick lobotomy on my thought, or sanding all the
idiosyncracies off my style. If that means I'll never play Wembley,
well, we'll always have each other, won't we? I'd rather have star
billing in an egghead's idea of CBGB's than headline an arena packed
with _Tipping Point_ fans. And I mean that from the bottom of my heart,
what there is of it.
  

    

Glad to hear you're a fan of Gore Vidal's history of the US.
I came to it only in the last 4 or 5 years, except for Burr
which I read in 92 and immediately gave to a friend who 
was inventing the myth of the independence of the internet.

We've been a global empire (here in the US) since Teddy Roosevelt's
time, by choice.  I like Vidal's telling of that story because
it lets me off the hook;  this shit didn't start with Vietnam
or the Dominican Republic, or Cuba.  Oh wait, it did start with
Cuba.  In 1898.  

  
  

    
From Roy Christopher:

A top ten... Hmmmm:

Hail Mary Mallon 'Are You Going to Eat That?' (Rhymesayers
Entertainment, 2011)
El-P 'I'll Sleep When You're Dead' (Def Jux, 2007) and 'Cancer for
Cure' (Fat Possum, 2012)
Action Bronson 'Dr. Lector' (Fine Fabric Delegates, 2011)
Tyler, The Creator 'Goblin' (XL, 2011)
Antipop Consortium 'Fluorescent Black' (Big Dada, 2009)
Aesop Rock 'None Shall Pass' (Def Jux, 2007) and 'Skelethon'
(Rhymesayers Entertainment, forthcoming [July, 2012])
Death Grips 'Exmilitary' (Third Worlds, 2011) and 'The Money Store'
(Epic, 2012)
Odd Future 'Odd Future Tape' and OFWGKTA 'Radical' (both
self-released, 2008)
New Flesh 'Understanding' (Big Dada, 2002) and 'Universally Dirty'
(Big Dada, 2006)

The futile and feudal crusade of the "copyfighters" is only forcing
the sampling artists to get more creative. No more obvious
interpolations or outright ganked grooves allowed (without hefty fees
beforehand or fines after). I'm not saying it's a good thing, but
sometimes it makes for music made with more effort.
  

    
That's a good list of recent releases, but it is hard for me to imagine our
guest coming to grips with Odd Future! He clearly has a lot of catching up 
to do before he can handle that.

(Hence my list of mostly time-tested hip-hop classics.)

I think even the most calcified mind probably can understand this one, 
though:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hzHoSpGkjM
Goodie Mob - Soul Food

Make sure you listen at least to the chorus, where some nice gospel vocals 
are waiting for you. Also fun: careful observers will spot members of 
OutKast -- that was before they blew up -- and of course this is Cee-Lo's 
old band (not that our guest knows who Cee-Lo is; that black man is 
impossibly lowbrow).

...

Just so we are all clear here, I didn't feel any need to get involved in 
this conversation at all until I saw this, in response to a very polite 
inquiry from Roy Christopher:

"But I'm ready to answer the altar call and get religion, Brother 
Christopher; may the scales fall from my eyes!"

That's amazingly condescending stuff, unless, of course, our guest is 
actually going to listen to the selections named above in response. 

I eagerly wait for that analysis, unless it's beneath a guy who writes about 
zombies in pop culture.

More broadly, anyone branding themselves as a "cultural critic with a 
fringe sensibility and strong cyberculture roots" who isn't listening 
to hip-hop at least with one ear is out of touch, by definition, and not 
to be trusted. 

Hence the challenges, which will very likely go unanswered. But if you 
style yourself a "cultural critic" ...
  

    
What's cool about living in the digital age: I just created a Spotify
Playlist with most of those albums (it's called Hip Hip Hop, if you
happen to be on Spotify). 
  

    
Via e-mail:

RE: #44: Chill, we're friends.
  

    
re: <45>  Could you give me a more exact way of accessing that
playlist on Spotify <jonl>?  I couldn't find it. 

I'd like to listen to it to be able to evaluate the issues that
<rocket> is raising.

I'm going to wait for Mark to respond before I comment. 
  

    
Admittedly culture wars can be interesting, but Roy has a good point -
we're friends here. This conversation does raise a question for Mark
as culture critic. A critic takes strong positions, but culture is
fluid, malleable, and open to interpretation. A culture critic will
inevitably be challenged. Is this a pain in the ass? Or is it
stimulating? 
  

    
<dlwilson>, this should help:

http://open.spotify.com/user/weblogsky/playlist/0TgFNSuyAAgRZYx71zpn57
  

    <scribbled by jonl Tue 15 May 12 11:48>