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…and you know where this is going to lead. I want to read or hear something, anything, about Norman Mailer the writer.
Not Norman Mailer the celebrity. Not Norman Mailer the drunken macho blowhard. Not Norman Mailer the political “radical” with Neanderthal attitudes about women. Not Norman Mailer the antiwar activist who was quick to elevate cocktail-party disagreements into calls for fistfights. I’ve read more than enough about all those Norman Mailers.
My experiences with Mailer’s writing have been mixed to poor. I cringed at his Marilyn Monroe tribute book. Tough Guys Don’t Dance was a slop of a book that became a bigger slop of a movie.
Then there was the 1957 essay “The White Negro,” which I first read sometime in 1982 or 1983. Yes, it accurately predicted the Sixties culture wars. But it was also a piece of self-promoting nonsense. But then again, I already believed, apparently unlike Mailer, that black culture had purposes other than giving white hipsters something to copy, and that women had purposes other than facilitating male orgasms.
So: Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to recommend something Mailer wrote that justifies his hype. I’m afraid you’ll have to do it via email again; I’ve still not figured out how to turn comment threads on.
…still hasn’t flown yet, and company executives are already hinting at another round of job-blackmail demands for whatever plane will follow it.
Did Raymond Carver really write Raymond Carver’s short stories? Or should they more properly be considered editor Gordon Lish’s prose based on Carver’s storylines? Carver’s widow would like us all to see his real stuff, un-Lish-ized.
But by that time, the whole company might be sold off.
I can still remember when there were five mass-production breweries in the Northwest alone, each operated by a different company.
Fortunately, we now have a wealth of microbreweries, whose broad range of tasty product has long since rendered superfluous the likes of “Colorado Kool-Aid.”
Both Kerouac and Rand are better known today for their celebrity and their ideas than for their prose stylings.
But both authors’ rambling self-indulgences actually serve their respective egotisms.
Both liked to hype themselves as daring rebels, valiantly crusading against the stifling anti-individualism of grey-flannel-suit America.
Kerouac helped provide an ideological excuse for generations of self-centered dropouts and anarchists to proclaim themselves above the petty rules of mainstream society.
Rand helped provide an ideological excuse for generations of self-cenetered tech-geeks and neocons to proclaim themselves above the petty rules of civil society and rule of law.
But at least Kerouac’s devotees don’t go around declaring that the oil companies and the drug companies somehow don’t have enough power.
(P.S.: Digby has much more lucent thoughts than mine i/r/t Randmania.)
As I mentioned a few days back, I’m working to make my music history book Loser fully available again. This time, I’m dealing with a print-on-demand outfit whose largest standard page size is smaller than the one used for the last Loser print run.
That’s little problem for the original 1995 pages; Art Chantry had designed them for a 10-inch-tall page, rather than the 11-inch-tall size the original publisher used.
But I subsequently designed the 1999 addenda (Chantry was living out of state at the time) for a full 11-inch page. I’ve been adapting those 45 pages to the smaller dimensions without cuting anything.
Now for the big question: How much updating should I make to the 1999-edition text?
On one level, David Lynch’s brief memoir/manifesto Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity is, like most of Lynch’s body of work, bewildering.
On another level, like most of Lynch’s body of work, it makes perfect sense by its own individualistic sense of logic.
The bewildering part is when Lynch frequently segues into endorsement spots for Transcendental Meditation. He’s practiced it for almost as long as he’s practiced filmmaking, and now has his own “David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace.”
I’m sure Lynch has sincerely benefitted from his TM practice. It’s a minor shame he takes the movement’s PR lines at face value. For some reason I’d expected more healthy skepticism from him. But instead he waxes enthusiastic about the “unified field” and a thousand meditators in one town miraculously reducing the crime rate.
I’m sure Lynch’s daily meditation habit helps to ground his mind, refresh his creative juices, and enable him to withstand the massive stresses that face any Hollywood player.
I’m not convinced the TM system is, by itself, any more effective than any other meditative regime. However, any human discipline can be more effectively executed with instruction and guidance, such as that provided by the TM organization’s professional trainers.
Catching the Big Fish is beautifully designed, and beautifully written. Just as in his screenplays, which seldom let dialogue get in the way of imagery, his prose is short and sweet and directly propels the narrative line.
Lynch talks only a little about his films, explaining at one point that he doesn’t want his comments to overshadow the works themselves. (This is in a piece about why he doesn’t like DVD commentary tracks.)
When he does talk about his films, it’s in the form of little vignettes. Befitting his early training as a painter, his stories in the book are all about stringing together a succesison momentary images.
He does talk about his new digital-video feature, Inland Empire, and why he’s turned permanently to shooting on video. Previously famous for painstakingly crafting the perfect shot, now Lynch is a total convert to digital video’s flexibility, its versatility, its economy, and its capability for unlimited retakes and experimentation.
And, as you might expect, he discusses the apparent contradiction between his TM-fueled drive for “bliss” and the dark, often violent content in his works:
“There are many, many dark things flowing around in this world now, and omst films reflect the world in which we live. They’re stories. Stories are always going to have conflict. They’re going to have highs and lows, and good and bad….It’s good for the artist to understand conflict and stress. Those things can give you ideas. But I guarantee you, if you have enough stress, you won’t be able to create. And if you have enough conflict, it will just get in the way of your creativity. You can understand conflict, but you don’t have to live in it.”
And, I LOVE what Lynch says about “world peace” as something we should work for, not dismissively joke about.
On this day, which has predictably and tragically become an annual call to fear, that’s as good a message as any:
“May everyone be happy. May everyone be free of disease.May auspiciousness be seen everywhere. May suffering belong to no one. Peace.”
“May everyone be happy. May everyone be free of disease.May auspiciousness be seen everywhere. May suffering belong to no one.
Peace.”
So did that granddaddy of all most-frequently-shoplifted-by-stoners novels, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
I didn’t used to understand what all the Kerouac alterna-celebrity hype was all about. I’d read On the Road and some of his other books; but the rambling odes to young-adult wild oat sowing failed to inspire awe in me.
Sure, he’d lived an adventurous life (until he became a bloated drunken burnout). But I’ve never given a damn about a writer’s gossip life, only about his/her actual writing.
(Hence, I’m not the best person to share your worshipful odes to the lowlife legends of Kesey, Bukowski, Nin, and especially “Hunter.” Talk to me after you’ve read their works.)
Then I attended the Kerouac monologue bio-play at the old Velvet Elvis theater. Soon thereafter, I discovered Kerouac’s Playboy essay, “Origins of the Beat Generation.”
Suddenly, it all made sense.
Kerouac, I learned, was reared in Boston to Quebecois parents.
Kerouac’s beat dichotomy of hipsters vs. squares was really the great Canadian dichotomy of earthy Quebeckers vs. stuffy Ontarians!
With that revelation, I understood. Kerouac’s works were only partly romans a clef about himself and his friends. They were mostly rambling, improvised love songs to the people, places, and things he loved, to the America of hot jazz, R&B (not its teenybopper dilution as rock n’ roll), blue jeans, the long lonesome highway, drinkin’, whorin’, and all your educated-straight-white-male pleasures.
All this is a prelude to David Mills’s Guardian essay contrasting Kerouac, Wm. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg.
Mills’s premise: Like certain later cultural scenes, folks who happened to be in the same place at the same time didn’t necessarily make the same stuff.
The gay Ginsberg and the then-closeted gay Burroughs, Mills claims, had a lot more at stake in their personal revolts against Eisenhower/squaresville America.
Burroughs, the most formalistically-minded artiste of the three, was particularly able to hold his philosophical and aesthetic principles as the society around him churned.
But Mills believes Kerouac, the meat-and-potatoes straight guy who’d documented the adventures of his more overtly freaky friends, came to feel left behind, or even betrayed, as the Beat worldview was commercialized into hippie-dippie hedonism. All this led, at least indirectly, to his drink-sodden premature demise in 1969. Ginsberg and Burroughs, meanwhile, remained resolute and active into the 1990s.
As an old college radio new-waver, I heartily preferred Burroughs’s staccato rhythms and imaginative dystopian fantasies.
The latter-day Ginsberg? Those amateur performances of giddy song-poems lauding the allure of underage boys? Not my idea of significant art.
That leaves Kerouac. Many have superficially adored his works. I superficially dismissed it. I’ve since learned to appreciate it, and its evocation of a world that had already passed by the time On the Road came out.
I used to say that upscale, whitebread Seattle’s favorite “minority groups” were (1) upscale white women, (2) upscale white gays, and (3) dead black musicians.
When I said that, I’d forgotten about a fourth ethnic fave–the mythical Native American Symbol-Person.
Nearly every Seattle Caucasian loves this fantasy figure, in one pose or another.
Athletes and corporate-motivation fans love the Warrior.
Stoners and ex-stoners love the Wise Philosopher attuned with the Earth.
New Agers love the Healing Shaman.
Art collectors and interior decorators love the Anonymous Artisan. (I once met a young white sculptor who griped that no local tribe would let him buy his way into membership.)
All these groups tend to be somewhat less fond of actual, living, flesh-n’-blood indigenous men and women; particularly those who fail to live up to the symbols.
All this is a prelude to a plug for Native Seattle, a new UW Press book by UBC historian Coll Thrush.
Mary Ann Gwinn’s Seattle Times review covers Thrush’s basic plot points well. To summarize: Amerindians weren’t just icons and muses. They were real people. And they still are. And they’ve remained a vital part of the city’s life, whether whitey’s aware of this or not.
Native Seattle is an important book, despite its shortcomings. Thrush has a stilting, academic writing style; he repeats the same arguments over and over. He admits to gaps in his research, particularly in finding actual living native folk willing to talk with him. And in the introduction, he audaciously compares his own “outsider” existence as a gay man with that of the First Peoples. (In real life, there’s no comparison. Trust me on this.)
In one sense, Thrush also stereotypes the local native people, as Tragic Colonial Victims whose story requires a Brave White Liberal to tell it.
But if Thrush fails to fully grasp the human side of his tale, the research-wonk side still fascinates.
He vividly depicts the seasonal camps and full-time settlements in and near the present-day city. He’s particularly fond of discussing the topography of these places, before Seattle’s great regrades, landfills, canals, and drainage projects changed it all.
And he rightfully notes that natives didn’t just “go away,” peacably or otherwise. They were integrated (sort of) into the urban economy from the start, as mill workers, cannery workers, sailors, cooks, maids, hookers/mistresses, etc.
Even as the reservation system developed, local Amerindians continued to live and work here, full-time or seasonally, through all of Seattle’s 156-year history.
They intermarried with whites and Filipinos. They came here from outlying tribal communities. They worked for Boeing, for construction companies, and for fishing fleets.
And they’re still some of us. Not ghosts, not apparitions, but actual humans, who live and die and think and feel and love and try to muddle through somehow.
(Priscilla Presley quoted in USA Today): “Elvis means something to people because he wasn’t a contrived person, he was organic and true to himself.”
Sorry, ex-mother-in-law of Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage. You’re mistaken.
As Brit musicologists Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor write in their fascinating new book Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music, Elvis was as contrived as they come.
He carefully constructed a persona that was one part nice Mississippi mama’s boy, one part James Dean sneer, and one part R&B outlaw. And it worked. These seemingly incompatible traits melded together in the 1954-58 Elvis persona, creating a musical legend and a world icon.
The trick to the early Elvis wasn’t that he was “natural.” It was that he made his particular artificiality seem natural.
Presley’s later reinventions, as a goody-two-shoes matinee idol and as an overstated Vegas self-parody, were no more or less “real” than his first persona. And they were just as successful with audiences of the time–as they are to this day, in the form of impersonators and merch/DVD sales.
So, on the 30th-anniversary week of Presley’s passing, let’s remember the real “real” Elvis, the consummate entertainer who found a way to rock the world.
(Faking It, by the way, is a wonderful book. Its chief premise: Forget “authenticity” or “keepin’ it real.” All pop music is a contrivance, and that goes for country, folk, blues, punk, hiphop, and square dancing too. Sure, the Monkees were a manufactured image–but so was John Lee Hooker.)
Got another little essay in the Capitol Hill Times, this one about how and why apartment and condo residents could be more sociable.
Got the August Belltown Messenger out, with three long pieces by yrs. truly.
And I’ve turned in another photo-history book to Arcadia Publishing. Seattle’s Belltown will be out in November, tentatively, and it’ll be just as fabulous as Vanishing Seattle. More on this later.
These past two weeks I’ve been hard at work on the next photo-history book, Seattle’s Belltown. (If anyone has any images of the Trade Winds, the Belltown Cafe, the original Tugs, the Weathered Wall, or the original Vogue, contact me immediately!)
The vastly larger and more comprehensive second edition of my “e-book” Take Control of Digital TV is now available.
As some of you know, television as we know it ends in 2/09, when the analog broadcast transmitters shut down and everything goes digital. Before then, you’ve got a lot to learn about the new digital TV system and all the software and hardware that goes with it. I humbly believe my e’book’s the best way for you to get up to speed about HDTV, LCD, plasma, Blu-ray, HD-DVD, Apple TV, DVRs, and all the other myriad aspects of the new video universe. Get it now.
I’ll explain this further, in handy online-audio form, on the streaming Net-radio show Tech Night Owl this Thursday evening.
…the only prior time I’ve mentioned Paris Hilton. It was a brief aside, pondering whether Hilton would have grown up to be a classier person if Elizabeth Taylor had remained part of the family.
Now, it turns out, Hilton and I have read the same book! (Or at least we’ve both been seen in public with the same book.)
In a papparazi shot earlier this week, a pre-jail Hilton was photographed carrying (1) a Bible and (2) the self-help tome The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.
Tolle, 59, was born in Germany under the name Ulrich Tolle, and now lives in Vancouver. He apparently changed his first name in honor of 13th-century German mystic Johannes “Meister” Echkhart.
Tolle has written four books and released dozens of audio books and lectures, all of which are narrated in a very calming, softly accented voice. He borrows ideas from a lot of Eastern and Western sources, but his central thesis is a simple one.
Many modern humans, Tolle asserts, are crippled by their own “mental noise,” or obsessive-compulsive thoughts. Regrets about the past, worries about the future, self-condemnations about one’s physical appearance or social status–they’re all symptoms of the mental noise. The noise, in turn, is tied into the “pain body,” a mental state in which all someone can feel is pain (physical, mental, emotional), and all someone wants to do is to spread that pain to others.
Tolle’s prescription: Become aware of the true self behind the false identity of your thinking mind. Become more acutely aware of your body and of the world surrounding you. Accept the present moment. Learn to live in the stillness. Develop an awareness that goes beyond the “egoic mind.”
Some of you are already scoffing that you never perceived Paris Hilton as much of a left-brain thinker.
But a mental-noise victim doesn’t have to be a tech nerd, a video-game geek, or even a language nut such as myself.
Let’s armchair-analyze our poor little rich girl here.
If she’s like some ultra-fashion-conscious women, she’d be prone to constant fretting about every minute aspect of the way she looks.
If she’s like some professional “celebrities,” she’d be constantly calculating how best to keep her name and image in the public eye, even if it’s in the form of a self-deprecating “dumb blonde” role on a staged reality show.
And if she’s like some Hollywood types, she’d search for an apparently simple short cut to spiritual growth, preferably one that didn’t expect her to renounce her material wealth.
But Tolle’s path isn’t as easy as he initially makes it out to be. It requires one to give up things more valuable to a celebrity than money. It requires one to give up one’s ego, one’s fully-constructed but false sense of self.
It’s giving up everything that makes someone a professional “celebrity.” And if Hilton’s ready to do that, more power to her.
…”reading is going to “go completely online.” I can imagine that fate for ephemeral and time-sensitive matter, for research and reference, and for community info sharing (aka “social networking”). But more artistic, entertainment-oriented, long-form, or “experience” reading (yeah, that includes porn) may always be more popular in nonvolatile formats that don’t require separate playback hardware, i.e. books.
…the Ides-O-March this year my thanking the P-I’s Bill Virgin for a really nice Vanishing Seattle book plug in his column today. Virgin’s topic: The past and future, if there is one, of that once ubiquitous institution, the gas station.
