I’ve touted, on a few occasions over the years, Da Capo’s “Best Music Writing” series, the quality of which has always been, in the very least, reliable (some years editions are more excellent than other years editions, no doubt due to what has turned the crank of each respective guest editor). As you may or may not have heard, the series is now going indie — meaning that, going forward, “the series will be independently published and have a new editorial structure that will better serve the music writing community and create a more dynamic, wide-reaching book for music writing fans.” Of course, putting out books costs money, and to that end, series editor Daphne Carr has started a fundraiser to keep the series going. For me, it’s a series that, good as it has been, could still be better, so I hope they garner enough to keep things going. One very promising addition already is an online ballot, which is sure to increase the scope of the venture, if not the quality.
Not on anyone’s payroll for this, I swear, but if you care at all about this stuff you should consider making some kind of contribution. Depending on how much you contribute you’ll be rewarded for your efforts — with a copy of the book, a tote bag, a t-shirt, a date with the world’s sexiest rock critic, etc. (Not me, I’m taken.)
Something I’ve said more than once over the years is that the three biggest influences on me among writers are Pauline Kael, Bill James, and Greil Marcus. I consider myself lucky to have had some contact with two of them. I interviewed Marcus back when I first started writing, and he later contributed a few comments to my old fanzine; the past couple of years I’ve submitted the occasional question to the “Hey Bill” section of James’s website, and he’s responded to most of them. Something I often regret, though, is that I never sent any of my writing to Pauline Kael. I’ve primarily written about music the past 25 years, but I wish I’d sent her a piece I wrote about the best uses of pop music in Scorsese’s films—an idea that I bet has been done to death now, but which I think was fairly novel when I wrote it up for Scott’s Popped website in the late ‘90s—or a couple of pieces I did for Cinemascope around the same time, which would have been a couple of years before Kael’s death. I have no idea whether I would have had any success in getting anything to her, whether she would have liked any of it if I had, or even whether she would have bothered reading it in the first place. I’m guessing she was bombarded with stuff on a constant basis and from all directions—from the now infamous Wes Anderson solicitation to see Rushmore, to fan letters and invitations and everything in between.
Letter from Kael arrives in the mail: “Thank you for the Scorsese article, Phil. I don’t know what you’ve got here, young man…”
Wasn’t meant to be. Some consolation arrived this past year by way of A Life in the Dark, Brian Kellow’s biography of Pauline Kael. If you check in regularly with rockcritics.com, you’ll know that Scott recently posted a number of links to reviews of Kellow’s book (sometimes reviewed in tandem with The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, the third career overview of Kael’s reviews). I’m tempted to say that it’s amazing the amount of interest—often rawly contentious—that Kellow’s book has generated, but I suspect that anyone who has ever strongly felt the pull of Kael’s writing would not be surprised. People have been arguing about Kael since the mid-‘60s; the arguments didn’t stop with her retirement in 1991, and they didn’t stop with her death in 2001. There are a couple of ILX threads devoted to Kael where I’ve been posting the last couple of years, and while (to the best of my knowledge) no one on there ever personally knew Kael, some of the back and forth can get very barbed on occasion. That’s Kael. That readers can still feel so strongly about her in 2011—and I can’t think of another writer I’ve ever argued about so much; a couple of music writers are close—is, to me, the truest barometer you’ll find of just how strong that pull was. (Or, if you aren’t a fan, of how strong your aversion is. Kael’s detractors have always been fierce. But as I say in the accompanying interview, “the circle of people I travel in”—Jesus, where do I come up with this stuff?—is almost exclusively made up of fans.)
Between the message board, Kellow’s book, reviews of the book, and James Wolcott’s Lucking Out (in which Kael figures prominently) on top of all that, I’m a little Kaeled out at the moment, but before I hand it over to Brian, let me say that I think A Life in the Dark is excellent. Its portrayal of Kael did not in any way conflict with my sense of her as a reader (I feel like I have to stress that; some reviews written by friends of Kael’s—some, not by any means all—disagree), and my recognition of her influence on me has deepened. A lot of Kael’s own words make their way into A Life in the Dark via review excerpts, and I liked that: as I wrote on the message board, these excerpts—and the almost month-by-month timeline of the films that caught Kael’s attention—construct a parallel story, the story of American film from the late ‘60s through to the late ‘80s (but American films in the ‘70s especially, which has always been my own frame of reference), that is inseparable from Kael’s. Does Kellow always agree with Kael’s verdict on specific films? No—he’ll sometimes say so. Did I? No. Do I always agree with Kellow’s occasional disagreements with Kael? No. Does any of that detract from the book for me? No. The main thing was that it always felt like I was reading someone who’d been as permanently shaped by the likes of Reeling and Deeper Into Movies as I’ve been, ever since first discovering Kael at some point near the end of high school. There’s an oft-quoted line of Kael’s (a friend has it on the masthead of his blog) from her introduction to For Keeps, one of those earlier career overviews: “I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.” True—I wouldn’t try to argue that Kael’s body of work did not leave behind a complete world. But I’m still very glad that A Life in the Dark exists.
“One of the most powerful truths to be gleaned from examining Pauline’s life is that it was, throughout its span, a triumph of instinct over an astonishing intellect. Her highly emotional responses to art were what enabled her to make so indelible a mark as a critic. On the surface, it might seem that any critic does the same thing, but it’s doubtful that any critic ever had so little barrier between herself and her subject. She connected with film the way a great actor is supposed to connect with his text, and she took her readers to places they never could have imagined a mere movie review could transport them.”
Lost my way with this site again recently, for a whole host of reasons, but activity will pick up somewhat in 2012. There are two, possibly three, imminent podcast interviews in the works, and hopefully a few others as the year progresses. Beyond that, it’s hard to say. I’m having the same internal arguments I had the previous two Januarys regarding the viability of continuing to spend money (not much, granted) on this domain — at some point the plug will be pulled, it’s inevitable, the question is whether it happens in 2012, 2014, 2112 (a.k.a. “the Geddy Lee option”), or whenever.
I’m open to ideas, contributions (intellectual contributions, I mean), suggestions, criticisms, witticisms, etc. This site has always been boring when it’s been only about me, so — what say you?
“I’m really impressed with Jennifer Szalai’s review of a collection of Dwight Macdonald’s criticism, in the December 12 issue of The Nation, the paper version of which I still subscribe to. It’s a good discussion about Macdonald himself, and his concepts of ‘Midcult’ and ‘Masscult,’ but Szalai’s comments about the current state of criticism are even better for our purposes. She’s talking about literary criticism, of course, but a lot of what she says applies to rock criticism & its fade too. I’d been thinking all along that ‘we’ were being hollowed out by the general economic decline, and that’s exactly what Szalai says here, especially in the two paragraphs I’ve excerpted below:
If one were to point out that the wider authority of literary criticism is barely discernible today, one could hardly be accused of courting a controversy or kicking up a fuss. There certainly is a coterie of Americans for whom literature and its criticism is a matter of urgency or livelihood or both, but the notion of the literary critic as a cultural gatekeeper, whose judgments shape tastes and move units, sounds either fanciful or anachronistic, depending on whether you believe that such a creature ever really existed. Our culture is now so big and so varied, the population so diverse and so fragmented, that the very idea of anything or anyone having “wider authority” sounds silly, if not absurd.
The critical landscape has since been denuded of a whole class of reviewers — the professional critics for those many newspapers and magazines that have cut down their books pages or else eliminated them. Optimists have pointed to the proliferation of online reviews as an indication that criticism is flourishing, but the payment for most reviewing these days is meager to nil. When writing a review becomes a diversion instead of a vocation, or else an arena for book authors to horse-trade and log-roll—the literary world’s penurious equivalent of the financial world’s “revolving door” — then reviewing will list toward clubbiness, bitterness or mushy praise. There are clearly some brilliant exceptions, and even a few determined critics who make a living from reviewing; but like the society of which it is one minuscule part, criticism has largely become a winner-take-all profession. Those who wonder what happened to criticism should wonder what happened to the economics of it.
Enjoyed William Weir’s perspective on There’s a Riot Goin’ On (in Slate), specifically in regards to how critical the employment of (newly emerging) automated rhythm tracks were to that album’s overall aesthetic.
Groundbreaking though it was, the drum machine’s emergence in the early 1970s didn’t make a lot of waves — largely because listeners didn’t know what they were hearing. To modern ears, these early machines sound crude; it’s hard to believe anyone could mistake them with flesh-and-blood drumming. But as JJ Cale told Mojo magazine: “The deal is, in those days people didn’t know about it, so they didn’t realize what it was.”
Why is every thing ultimately at its most interesting before it becomes a “thing”? (cf. McLuhan’s idea of “effects preceding causes.”)
Rev. Keith A. Gordon in Blurt Online:
“Eddy’s critical flights of fancy notwithstanding, he’s a solid writer of no little wit and humor, and if we readers (such as yours truly) can agree to disagree on some of the dreck that he immortalizes in Rock And Roll Always Forgets, we can all find middle ground. As music critics go, Chuck Eddy has always been a bit of a provocateur, and his tendency to risk ridicule with absurdist or unpopular critical stances is what has always made him an engaging and intelligent writer.”
Dulani Wallace interviews Kevin Avery at the Vinyl District: “He would only really enjoy writing about things that meant something to him personally, so there are few clues about his own life in many of his pieces. So that became the idea—the first half of the book is the biography, the second half of the book is Paul’s writing. It’s kind of like Paul telling his own story.”
Review atThe Stash Dauber: “Part of why I find Nelson’s story so disturbingly resonant, I have to admit, is that I see something of myself in him (although he accomplished significantly more and operated on a more highly exalted plain than your humble chronicler o’ events), and something of my father (who spent the last 30 years of his life working on an academic paper that was never completed, let alone published). “
Kevin Avery at Strand Bookstore (via Pulp Serenade: Avery, joined by Dave Marsh, hosts an in-store at The Strand in New York — with photos)
Review by A.G. in The Economist: “Every page is a party. Open to any chapter and the capitalised names pop out (Pauline Kael! Robert Christgau! Patti Smith!). Mr Wolcott arrived in New York in 1972 — “just as everything was going to hell” — to work at the Village Voice on the recommendation of Norman Mailer (he had written an article about Mailer for his college newspaper). It was then a city of ‘crappy expectations that didn’t require a trust fund or a six-figure income for the privilege of watching everything fall apart before your eyes.’”
Brendan Bernhard, East Village: “If Mr. Wolcott traces the rise and fall of CBGB with the sure hand of a master, he is less convincing when analyzing the intellectual status of his own generation of downtown critics. Willis, Goldstein, and Christgau had ‘the brains, the ambition, the range and grasp to inherit the big desks in the editorial offices and give culture its marching orders,’ but they never did. Well, thank God they didn’t is one’s first reaction, and the second (having read these people) is, ‘Really?’”
Michaelangelo Matos in the A.V. Club: “He describes the (Voice) office’s many characters with a warm eye (‘Nat Hentoff… always enjoyed having a First Amendment case to warm his hands over’), but when Kael sweeps him under her wing, the book hits its most romantic pitch. (That, and when he discovers ballet late in the decade.)”
“James Wolcott, wise dildo” in the Daily Caller: “This is someone with talent and imagination to burn; sometimes it seems like Wolcott swallowed a Power Verbs book. After experiencing the charge of his prose, it’s almost impossible to go back to the gray stylings of lesser men — the weak Hunter Thompson imitation of Matt Taibbi, the hack righteousness of E.J. Dionne, the convoluted banshee wails of Andrew Sullivan.” (Heh, politicize much, Daily Caller dude?)
Choire Sicha sizes the book up at BookForum: “The most interesting subject here is not so much nostalgia — which Wolcott wisely disavows — or the ’70s as a ‘thing,’ but rather the raw human-on-human quality of the day’s critical discourse (as more highfalutin types would later brand it): literary stabbings, accidental slaggings-off, and lingering meannesses as practiced in the small town that is New York. Vain little red-butted monkeys, most of them overzealous typers, but also thinking people: people with an audience and people of an audience.” (“People”? What’s that?)
Staying Alive: With A New Memoir On The Shelf, James Wolcott Discusses The Writing Life (New York Observer): “You have to remember that you always write for readers… Most people, their idea of a reader is not even a person, it’s like their expectation of what this piece will do for them… You have to realize that if you don’t make something clear, if you don’t make something interesting, they will abandon it in the second paragraph.”
Phillip Lopate reviews the bio in Film Comment: “Anyone who has hung around film critic circles will know that narrowing human thinness and provincialism that can set in when there is no other focus but movie talk.”
Nick Pinkerton pans the book at Sundance Now blog: “I doubt I would’ve read Kellow’s Kael bio were it not for the fact that I was paid to do so…”
Interview with Kellow by Glenn Kenny at Some Came Running: “Her nephew, Bret Wallach, told me that when he was participating in campus demonstrations at Berkeley, she was very much against it. He was stunned because he had always thought of her, I guess, as rebellious Aunt Pauline, constantly giving the finger to the establishment. But she was not in favor of anything that was going to lead you to a point of alienation or isolation. She wanted to be in it. In the vortex, at the vortex.”
Jill Krementz covers a celebration of Pauline Kael (Krementz photographed Kael often during the seventies, and many of her photos are featured in Kellow’s book.)
Bronx Banter interview with Sanford Schwartz, editor of The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael: “Kael made reading movie reviews a more intimate and personal experience than it had ever been before. Little criticism of any kind conveyed a comparable sense of there being such a powerful, funny, opinionated, scarily shrewd, and common sensical voice there, talking to you. You wanted to know what she thought about everything. You don’t feel this with most journalists, whether they are reviewing an art of doing a political column.” (Link also includes a number of PK quotes from various interviews and some cool scans.)
Reflections on Pauline Kael, by Steve Vineberg (Critics at Large): “Kellow’s misreading gets in the way when he tries to psychoanalyze Kael through her reviews — a temptation that probably no biographer of a writer could resist, but perhaps particularly misguided in this case, since Kael was so nakedly autobiographical in her writing. (It’s unlikely that anyone who confesses that she saw Vittorio De Sica’s devastating Shoeshine after a terrible, unresolvable quarrel with her boyfriend needs to have her judgments examined for hidden motives.)”
Eddy’s work is compiled in Rock and Roll Always Forgets: A Quarter Century of Music Criticism, a career overview whose very title is contrarian: The writer’s got a problem with the premise of Bob Seger’s hit song “Rock and Roll Never Forgets.” He offers evidence with the lost artists, one-hit wonders, egocentric blowhards and various inspired eccentrics that he’s championed since writing early-1980s pieces on a budding genre called “rhymed funk,” soon dubbed rap music.
Wolcott was fortunate to be at The Voice when Robert Christgau was busy creating the best pop music section in the country. We hear about Christgau’s sonic-boom breakup with Ellen Willis and his penchant for conducting some editing sessions at home, in his underwear.
