Summer of Our Discontent - Thomas Chatterton Williams

        

         There I was, just looking for another reason to cancel our subscription to Paramount+ (as if the cancellation of one of the conglomerate’s biggest stars & one of the longest-running, most iconic programs in the history of television in a naked concession to political pressure dovetailed w/ epic corporate greed wasn’t substantive enough) and almost daring The Daily Show to piss me off again with their holier-than-thy-neighbor rhetoric juxtaposed with wanton shameless indulgence in the lewdest, most disgraceful attempt at humor outside of the MAGA-sphere they so cleverly deride, when Jordan Klepper, that self-styled avatar for whiteness constantly name-dropping rap artists we all used to listen to as children, as if to segregate himself from the hand-picked morons he highlights at Trump rallies (not that he has to look that hard, to be sure) as diagnostic, rather than merely symptomatic, of America’s present and ongoing malady---pardon my tangent; when Mr. Klepper announced his guest, Thomas Chatterton Williams.

              Now, don’t get me wrong; the frequently insightful and intelligent guests TDS brings on is one of the primary reasons we DON’T cancel Prime Video/Paramount+; although most of the truly insightful ones are interviewed by legacy host Jon Stewart, who tends to talk over his guest, as well as the audience’s applause, but nevertheless brings a depth and breadth of political, social, historical, and just plain human understanding to the program that is far beyond the broadcasting norm, let alone whatever garbage keeps popping up on your feed…

              Mr. Williams, to my pleasant surprise (and what a breath of fresh air if a surprise should turn out to be pleasant in these days, eh?) exceeded even these distinguished experts and do-gooders with his acute, sustained, yet casually flexible insight into WTF is going on in America (and, indeed, the world) at this moment, tracing our present despair from the collapse of the Obama-era hope (which, I would argue, was not perhaps as complete and universal as he would have it; even outside the nascent reactionary movement that became ascendant and now appears perched for dominance) through the first Trump presidency, to climax in the violent orgy of performative, secular Holy War that filled the streets, and our screens, during the Pandemic, between the brutal videotaped police murder of George Floyd and the bizarre reality-TV spectacle of the first sustained assault on the Capitol since the War of 1812 (which is what our National Anthem is about, that once-loftily-inspiring hymn to liberty cacophonously butchered by the J6 Crew who, temporarily, were submitted to Law and Order for their role in the insurrection.) 

              I have forgotten all the details of the interview itself, but immediately I wanted to read the book. It’s been a while since I’ve had a good non-fiction read, in any case; and when I’m not frequenting my neighborhood dispensary, my mind craves stimulation. I had no real thought of being emotionally moved; I just wanted something to keep my interest on my days off from work, holed up in an air-conditioned room. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortuitously, the book was not out yet for a couple weeks, and did not appear to be on pre-order from my local library, or I could have requested it ahead of time; it was available to pre-order from the publisher, but I couldn’t get anyone to take the hint and get me a copy as a slightly late birthday gift, either. What the library did have available was an earlier, autobiographically framed, yet sociologically examinational work by the author, Losing My Cool. I slurped this one up like a well-mixed Arnold Palmer over the course of several hot summer days, and I’m glad I did as it gave me some profound insights, into myself, surprisingly; into epistemological phenomena I have pondered for decades; and of course, into the author himself, preparing me to some extent for the new book and the thinker from whose mind it sprang.

              And a thinker he is! I will attempt not to fawn excessively, for a variety of reasons which should be self-evident, not the least of which is that I fear I have already distracted the reader too much from the focus of this book report: but that is why I don’t call it a book review; though we are far from grammar school. I do want to say, before I move on to the work at hand, my ultimate assessment after reading the earlier publication, or rather my statement to whomever is listening, is this: Williams has arrived, a legitimate American 21^st Century philosopher.

 

Summer of Our Discontent

The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse

Thomas Chatterton Williams

 

              Summer of our Discontent is a deep dive into the shifting waters of debate in America and abroad around race, progress, morality, and competing visions of the ideal society. Inseparable from this struggle between conflicting ends, is the argument over means: the tactics of activists, politicians, journalists and intellectuals; as well as a more spiritual war (for want of better term) over the narrative that frames past and present, human agency and social culpability. Not such a long time ago, in a presidency that seems farther, farther away with each day’s news cycle, Barack Obama’s administration, whatever we make of it substantively, symbolically seemed to enshrine the enlightened consensus we used to fancy was shared among most educated, intelligent, or simply decent people: the idea, to paraphrase Dr. King, that a person’s character was of more worth than accidental or arbitrary, superficial signs of identity, be they the color of our skin, the gender we were born with, or even, in that halcyon era, sexuality, which had only just recently gained a slight majority slant towards tolerance (and yet was immediately seized upon as a marker of enlightened versus reactionary attitudes, to demonize Americans not on board with the values currently trending, as well as foreign nations with whom we had a bone to pick---this last detail to be revisited briefly later in relation to Russia.) Less than a decade after the first Black First Family left the White House, this liberal-centrist orthodoxy has seemingly been replaced by two irreconcilable yet almost symmetrically mirrored dogmas of value-signaling, blame casting, performative shaming, cancellation, and a growing tolerance for not just character assassination but actual cold-blooded murder, kidnapping, and wanton destruction, coupled with a reflexive, martyr-like denunciation in-no-uncertain-terms of even the most dubious perceived slight, when it comes from the ‘other side’, all of Biblical proportions. This is less like the Civil War and more like the Thirty Years’ War which decimated Central Europe over theological dispute in the name of the Gospel of Love!

 

              The central theme of the book revolves around the erosion of intelligent discourse directed at the pursuit of “a more perfect union” which has engaged liberal pols, pundits and thinkers throughout the post-War era, and indeed has always been at the heart of our American form of the liberalism which has gained currency since at least the Enlightenment. This is, granted, only one mental construct of progress, which has faced intense scrutiny and critique all along, from convincing arguments on the left and the right, as well as more nuanced and lofty analysis by Nietzsche and other heterodox philosophers as well as powerfully moving religious leaders of all stripes and sects. Were Williams’ views to approach anything like mainstream acceptance, they would be well-deserving of similar qualifications and counter-argument. What saddens, angers, and frightens me, threatening to lull back into complacent despair those of us who still stubbornly insist on thinking in this fraught arena of outrage and conviction (as Nietzsche also wrote, “Convictions are greater enemies of truth than lies”) and what again touches on the core argument of the book, is not that nobody will agree with the author (dig Henry Louis Gates’ cheekily couched praise on the back cover) but that few will be very likely to read the book, at all the pessimist in me worries, let alone cover-to-cover, footnote-to-YouTube-link; and fewer still will understand or even engage in the meticulous exposition, let alone grapple with the dire consequences of not taking these questions seriously; indeed, at a time when we are being encouraged to take everything personally, how can anyone afford the intellectual luxury to take anything seriously anymore?

              And yet, this is far from an impersonal work, for the writer nor, at least, this reader. How many indignant, well-intentioned young soldiers in the alt-Left social justice thought-bubble have experienced firsthand excessive police brutality inflicted on their flesh and blood kin in what should be the privacy of their own home, in a bald act of almost objectively-defined racial violence? And how many of the frustrated, alienated and left-behind voices of young men who have been seduced by pseudo-conservative ideology have actually come to terms with and reaped the rewards of this once-and-still (and, optimistically, still to be) Great America that emblazons their baseball caps, replacing the team spirit and rivalry of Red Sox and Yankees fans with a fictitious tribalism that makes a savage mockery of the now quaint-seeming notion of “no Red States or Blues States”?  Thomas Chatterton Williams has experienced firsthand both of these Americas, and likely others besides. Growing up as a modestly privileged white boy myself, I have no firsthand experience of many of the harsh challenges that Williams faced growing up; nor have I achieved any of the academic and career growth of which the author is duly proud, having worked to support my children in menial retail and grocery work since becoming a young father after goofing around as so many of us do when young and not impressed upon as to the inherent value of American meritocracy, scions of white hippies who could afford to indulge in a youthful cultural diversion from the rat race due to the confluence of post-War prosperity and white privilege, while Williams ultimately came to see his own black community as caught up in their own juvenile culture but without the luxury of pursuing it and still leading a comfortable life, as white millennials have finally had to come to terms with, to a lesser extent, since the Recession.

              Nevertheless, in Williams’ story I can’t help but see myself, and perhaps this is the crucial thing that, to me, informs him with true experience; that, while living in two worlds, he does not fully belong to either, not conforming to the cultural prejudice of his peers after Losing His Cool nor being fully welcomed by the (still almost exclusively white) gatekeepers of the intellectual zeitgeist as a black intellectual who draws from his life experience and perspective but does not fall into the neat category of the burn-the-house-down angry Black deconstructionist telling the aforementioned disaffected white liberals how to redirect their rage against the very system that has propped them up for generations and for just a moment in time really did seem ready willing and able to lift us all. How many of these white young (and sometimes not-so-young, the same generation of spoiled LBJ-haters that clearly have no wish to grow up intellectually) liberals with their vicarious outrage at newly-magnified, though in reality diminishing, injustice actually live in public housing with poor Black and immigrant families, as I do, or work alongside them for low-paying wages? Victimization is just as much a form of dehumanization as bigotry; more perniciously, while being downpressed can lead to a struggle to better oneself and one’s community, being made the token martyr for some privileged white academic’s pet project of catharsis degrades both the brown individual and the Black community; but why not fancy that was really the whole point all along? Since I’m clearly upset and venting these last two paragraphs, losing my own cool as it were, in the common sense of the phrase, and veering from what I meant to be a concise intellectual examination, why don’t I just get paranoid to boot and say that “They” want us weak, disunited, and confused, at odds with each other, scapegoating our neighbors, fighting our brothers and sisters in a disturbing, dystopian civil war. Whoever “they” are…oligarchs, technocrats, the crooked politicians and the corrupt media that props them up with one hand, ready to tear them down with the other, whatever it takes to get ratings or mollify whoever just bought out their parent company or approved the merger that made it happen? Sure; I always bought into a lot of these same identity politics of despair myself, long before it was so fashionable; I just prided myself that I married these outrageous assumptions to a more-than-healthy skepticism and never actually became moved to reject society in toto. In fact, looking back, it was Obama who directly called on me, not in the early era of Hope but during a State of the Union speech during his second term, which all those same early enthusiasts probably didn’t bother watching, to abandon cynicism, that it would get us, as a people, as a nation, nowhere. I tried to become more objective, to regain my cool in this context, to try to achieve a broader understanding of American politics (inspired by my wife’s college studies, pursued intermittently but successfully while raising three children under trying circumstances) and our history, and to convey some of that to our growing children as well, particularly during the precious time after my wife got her degree and stopped working full-time in order to be at the bus-stop, cook meals and read to them.

              But then when Donald Trump ran for president in 2016 everything seemed to change, almost like a climatological phenomenon. I remember as if it were yesterday how it hard it was to attempt to remain levelheaded and neutral during those days when the air seemed electrified with human anger and Puritanical judgement from all sides meeting in an explosive and unexpected, in not by any means unpredictable thunderclap on Election Day. We were accused of both-siderism or worse; misunderstood and practically disowned by friends and family, and fed algorithms that either forced us off of social media altogether or simply motivated our loved ones to “block” us, a cozy little new feature leaving us none the wiser and them all the more ignorant for insulating their bubble further and pretending other points of view did not exist. The funny thing is, I’ve always been to the radical lunatic left of most of these liberal lemmings that happen to be my social milieu, and yet all of a sudden the only people who were still my friends on Facebook were more conservative: not because they mistook my intellectual curiosity for MAGA enthusiasm (because, obviously, how could a rational person conflate such mutually exclusive positions?) but because they actually did love their country and care about their family and neighbors and wish for more discourse rather than value-shaming; because they were complex, normal people, maybe a little older and having lived through many changes themselves; maybe Williams and I are too young to remember all the seismic shifts and witch-hunts that predated this moment. I don’t really know. Read the book. Make your own conclusions. Talk to your friends and family and neighbors once again. I’ve got to hurry up and rush this onto my blog before my son steals the laptop, as I’ve been meaning to write this concluding paragraph for several days now. There is so much more I could say, if I haven’t said too much already. All I know for sure is this:

              That summer, too, was just another thing for the man who has turned out well to digest---

               

High School Daze - Resume of a Writer, pt. 2

    Procrastination is a skillset I acquired early. I realize now that I may never get around to writing that book...

    but then just the other day I was thumbing through one of the several books of Jim Morrison's poetry & writings on my disheveled bookshelf and saw this quote once again:

          "I always wanted to write, but I always figured it'd be no good unless somehow the hand just took the pen and started moving without me really having anything to do with it. Like automatic writing. But it just never happened."

    Y'know, Jimbo was a huge influence on my development as a writer; and a reader, and a thinker, back in highschool. Before I had ever gotten high myself, I was "stoned immaculate" immediately upon hearing The Doors' primal shamanic jazz metal. The band's influences 'opened the doors' to me musically to begin to appreciate jazz, blues, flamenco, Bertoldt Brecht, bossa nova --- and towards prog rock and psychedelic (all still before I had smoked a joint.)

    Morrison, on the other hand, got me into poets and writers like Rimbaud, William Blake, Jack Kerouac and Friedrich Nietzsche. Jim's favorite book, 'The Birth of Tragedy' soon became mine, and laid the foundations for my theological project, God is a Mushroom! in the duality of Apollo & Dionysus --- as well as inspiring the Bacchic satyr revelry celebrated on my beer blog, The Discriminating Wino.

    Kerouac inspired me to write the tale of my life, as it was happening, which filled many notebooks and has gone through several versions --- not drafts but actually total rewrites of events burned into my mind, of those High School Daze --- but who'd wanna read a story about some high school kid in 2000 taking a bunch of acid and watching George W. steal the election, then getting kicked out of school for writing Lewis Carroll poems from Looking-Glass House in graffiti on the stall doors of the boys' room, and sitting at home stoned for three months watching Joe Rogan duct-tape the world back together on NewsRadio reruns and laughing so hard I was still heaving uncontrollably, breathless when the show came back from commercial break, from something funny the late, great Phil Hartman said...and Man, speaking of writers that show had the best!

    Then, in a paradise stumbled upon one day when I took enough medicine to stop a cough for two weeks I discovered R. Gordon Wasson's Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. This has inspired over two decades of my own research and speculation, culminating thus far in God is a Mushroom!

    Willaim Blake's poetry, especially the Songs of Innocence, informed the simple English pastoral cadence that permeates much of my own poetry; particularly in the collection All Seasons.

watch me reading Blake

    Rimbaud's influence was different --- though no less decisive. Aside from being one of the most masterful artists of his craft, Rimbaud left us his life and his madness as a measure for any future poetic genius of total decadence, along with the phrase, "A systematic derangement of the senses in order to achieve the unknown."

Achieved... 

Resume of a Writer Part One: Introductions are a Bitch

Resume of a Writer pt. 1 Introductions are a Bitch

    

Well now! one of the many reasons I keep putting off writing this damned article, or whatever we want to call it, is access to a computer: sharing this laptop with my wife, working from home, and two teenagers still doing their work for high school, even though they have their own Chromebooks provided by the school, with all their academic work over the years on Google documents why are we just now worrying about some tech company having access to all our personal data? Oh, I see, Google was politically correct at the time, so no one wondered at giant computer banks decoding the processes by which human learning itself takes place...as I give them another two cents on this blog, same folks at Google, and go tell the current owner of The App Formerly Known As Twitter, or TAFKAT (but I forget these days you have to explain to young folks that partying like it's 1999 meant partying as if it were the end of the world, some distant and impossible-to-reach asymptote of a future, not a quaint pastoral age of well-fed burghers without even text messaging or trigger words) all my personal and political sensitivities...but I'm rambling now, intoxicated with the rare chance to caress these tiny little square keys; gettin' em' clackin' really turns me on in the morning. 

    So, though, does a cup o' Joe. N' I haven't had any since Wednesday morning.

    Ash Wednesday. 

   I've never been a good Catholic (in fact I was brought up to worship the Devil) but lately I've been trying, despite Nietzsche's advice, and so I'm giving up meat and alcohol (Fritz would approve of that) but also trying not to drink so much coffee and cream, and as luck would have it we ran out and I was too stoned to remember to pick up some more at the grocery store yesterday...which brings me to the third cause of chronic procrastination...

    Well now! it's Friday and I'm gonna go smoke another bowl outside, if the wind doesn't take it all. I can hear it howling out there...I'll be back in a minute to explain what all the above confusion is intended to signify, and see if we can get you a MPH on those wind gusts (courtesy of our friends at Google)

    Sorry, introductions are always hardest...I get way too excited, then try to say everything all at once, and get ahead of myself, or behind, or sometimes turned around. One thing I've learned after all these years is that Two wrongs don't make a right: but Three lefts do. Chew on that for a while. So anyway I opened the laptop this morning, finally having the energy somehow without caffeine to start churning out this gibberish you kids read on the internet these days (but at least you're reading and not just watching YouTube videos) and my son's essay was open, and I realize I have nothing to worry about because we already taught our kids to be such great writers, and they really impress me sometimes...on the other hand, a teenaged boy's ability to disregard all logic and commonsense and deliberately flout the psychic conventions of modern speech can be cause for concern...I was so much more impractical myself, though, and look where I am now: still breaking my back at a grocery store at the age of 40 and giving away my words for free, because I have no agent, no publisher, no reading public, no fan club or even sympathetic bunch of cheerleaders recruited from friends and family because I'm a grumpy old Steppenwolf who would never suffer to ask a favor unless it was for his wife and kids. And so I commence this piece of language to communicate my desire for the post of Chief Bard or Poet Laureate or, gulp, I suppose Official Rhymer of the Tyrant? Pretty, pretty please? Introducing the Resume of a Writer. I'm gonna have some tea now, while I get my thoughts together; and perhaps smoke some more weed. Oh, yeah: The winds were 24 miles per hour, bearing down on us from across the Great Lakes to the northeast. 

    

    My back hurts and I want to call out from work today. Of course sitting here typing isn't doing my back any favors either, and my wife'll commandeer the laptop in another 45 minutes anyway---oh look, a wind advisory just popped up on the bottom of the computer. It's a thirty minute walk to work and the winds get even crazier when you cross the train tracks---I've lost at least one good umbrella there on a rainy day. I need to start looking for another job---but every time I mean to get started, I lean on the same tired excuse: someone else is using the computer and I need to update my resume. I got to thinking if I ever did get some time to work on that resume, to look for some other shitty retail job or at best another clerk position with the City, I might as well take the time to write down the Resume of a Writer...oof, when you say it like that it sounds more like an epitaph. 

    

    Especially since, now that I successfully called out from work, I am officially calling out from writing today as well. You suckers have a nice weekend.

Resume of a Writer pt 2: High School Daze

John Harvard's Ghost

 first wrote this piece about a month ago

        Harvard Square is dead.

    I know; it's always been shitty, these score of years I've known her--it's always been shitty,  & great at the same time. But lately, even before COVID they've been taking away everything great to make room for the mediocre--and still leave the shitty. But now, in whatever wave of the pandemic you'd call this, it's a ghost town. Not that nobody's around--the students are back in class, the hobos and addicts as numerous as the geese by the river (and leaving as much feces in their wake.) But there isn't any place to go.

    Today I have the day off from work, but the exterminator is coming to fumigate our apartment; so with the kids at school, my wife working, and the cat visiting my mom, I thought I would spend the late morning/early afternoon enjoying Harvard Square in some way like I once did, from high school daze of stoned summers till the Vitamin Shoppe finally closed in 2014, after I'd been working there for seven years.

    After stopping at the library to pick up some books and finish writing the second chapter of a novella I've been working on, I was hoping to go to the Harvard Art Museums to see some Edward Hopper, who just the other day became my favorite artist. I remember them opening at 10:30 before the pandemic, and had been told a week or two ago by some security guards outside on a cigarette break that the museum would be re-opening that Saturday. But when I climbed the stairs to the front entrance, a sign informed me that reservations were needed to enter.

    So I went straight through Harvard Yard where vain co-eds sit on the long staircase hoping someone will look up their skirts, learning less than a highschool drop-out drinking on the sidewalk with winos. My first stop was Citizens Bank, to get some quarters for laundry (we'll have to wash the sheets again I pulled before the pest guy came to spray the bedbugs) and a little cash to hit a pub, hopefully; but the teller wouldn't even process my transaction personally but directed me to the ATM and traded me two rolls of quarters for a $20 after I withdrew. Well! You can forget about me looking for the customer satisfaction survey in my inbox this time (as every time)!

    Now at least with some money in my pocket I thought I'd treat myself to a CD at Newbury Comics, but the 2nd floor of the Garage is closed until further (if any) notice. Leaving by the back door I came upon where John Harvard's used to be, gone a while now but supposedly replaced by some new brewery/bar, but it seems to be closed. Getting desperately thirsty, and feeling justified as it was already 11 AM, I thought to try Charlie's Kitchen next but it was dark and closed, with no sign to indicate their operating hours or whether they'd closed due to pandemic or just gone out of business altogether. The Xfinity contractor clipping cables on the side of the building tried but wasn't very helpful.

                    "Oh, yeah they're open.

                        For sure. I think

                        maybe at 12. But

                        they're definitely open --

                            should be, anyway."

    Then I went to sit by the river and read poetry and start writing this articles in my spiral-bound notebook, now almost used up. That's one thing they can't change. They'll never stop the river flowing, the ever-winding Quinobequin; or as the White Man calls it, the Charles.

    Eureka! I thought, Shay's will be open. Yes, good old Shay's -- now, the only problem is, should I have a pint of Guinness or a glass of Malbec? But when I get there, it's dark, the door's locked, and no sign or hours posted. Rats! Despairing of ever getting drunk before noon, I stopped into Pinocchio's for two slices of Sicilian pizza with veggies. My only successful experience so far. Inside the pizzeria I recognise a middle-aged woman I remember from back in the day, when she was selling flowers on the sidewalk, part of the street community. I eat outside on LGBTQ rainbow wooden Adirondack chairs in front of the Lutheran Church and throw the plate away in a trash bin in somebody's driveway, passing by a man I know to be the boyfriend of the woman in Pinocchio's, though I've never spoken to either of them. A truck stops on JFK Street, burly men unload kegs -- of course! Tasty Burger serves beer. But I walk in only to learn the bar doesn't open until 5.

    I'm done now, say Hi to Jean riding by on his bicycle as I make my way out of the square, heading towards Porter (where, as it happens, all the bars are closed as well; so I settle for a pint-size can of hard kombucha which I sip walking around the block, admiring the garden of some highschool friends' parents') past lovers lying on the Common breathing in cuttings from the mounted lawnmower.

    I guess this all has little to do with John Harvard. But then neither do the University, or yonder olde pissed-on statue. 

Top Ten Most Overrated Albums

Number of the Beast

I’ve always loved Iron Maiden. Many have called them overrated, then as now. Certainly they got a little carried away with ego and image; they are the sole inspiration for parody in Spinal Tap.

            Whether this album best represents all of those things that were overblown about them, I don’t know. Certainly it’s a great album, one of their best. I just think that people focus on it too much. What’s disappointing is, it’s the first Maiden album that does not have an instrumental; and the first without Paul Di’Anno. Now, Bruce is a great singer but as he was still under previous contractual obligation he couldn’t even contribute his amazing songwriting abilities to the meager extent that Steve Harris would later permit. Also, as Nico has not yet joined on drums I must say, the chemistry between Bruce and

Clive Burr is less than stellar—‘Run to the Hills’ is the exception that proves the rule; overall that bouncy tom-tom sound worked much better with Paul’s sharp, angsty vocals, whereas the lineup that coalesced for Piece of Mind was their most sophisticated, and probably the most talented metal band of all time.

            The title track is worn-out; aforementioned ‘Run to the Hills’ is always fun to sing along to with friends, ‘Hallowed be Thy Name’ is of course their greatest song ever and ‘Total Eclipse’, co-written by Di’Anno is probably Maiden’s all-time heaviest song.

Some Girls

Some Girls has been quoted as being the last truly great Rolling Stones album—well, not quoted; but people have said that.

            And I get what they mean: it is the end of an era, the Stones finally letting youth and their earlier stardom go. The thing is, though, it just isn’t true. Tattoo You and Steel Wheels are far better albums—more mature, more heavy, more masculine—more consistent: there are really only a couple good tracks on Some Girls.

            Keith’s ‘Before They Make Me Run’ is the absolute highlight. ‘Shattered’ is cool. ‘Beast of Burden’, alright. But ‘Miss You’ is played out; I had a Puerto Rican coworker who found the breakdown rap mildly offensive and irritating—as far as disco they do a better job on ‘Emotional Rescue’, thanks of course to Bill Wyman.

            The title track is not just sexist and racist—it’s boring. And is it ‘Just My Imagination’ or is Mick getting too old to seem cute doing his little English covers of Motown songs?

Appetite for Destruction

OK, it’s probably one of the greatest rock debuts of all time. ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ and ‘Paradise City’, all great songs, still play on the radio daily. I’m just tired of hearing people talk about, “It’s their greatest album”! Use Your Illusion, anybody? If you wanna admit that the only thing that makes it “better” is the fact that Steven Adler’s on the drums, fine! at least you’re being honest; and maybe you’re right... but if it’s because your measly brain can only handle songs about sex and drugs and not contemplate war, social dislocation, megalomania, love and other more philosophical considerations just go back to your AC/DC!

The Doors

This, too is one of rock’s timeless debuts. ‘Light My Fire’ and ‘Whiskey Bar’ are staples of classic rock radio. ‘The End’ is iconic through its use in Apocalypse Now and as the inspiration for epic rock from ‘Dream On’ to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Above all this record captures the time (’67) place (Los Angeles) and feeling (duh!) better than any other.

            The problem is that by holding it up critics have asserted the band’s subsequent efforts fall short—and this is untrue. From the spaced-out perfection of Strange Days and the prog-rock experiments in the studio that led to the commercially successful Waiting for the Sun, to the brilliant orchestration and proto-hip-hop of Soft Parade and all-on rock of Morrison Hotel and L.A. Woman, not to mention the excellent live shows turned out on the occasions Jim wasn’t too messed up to perform, the Doors never looked back.

Kind of Blue

Kind of Blue truly is a great album. Perhaps the greatest. Still; it represents a certain whitening and stagnation of jazz taste, even if made by a predominantly black and forward-thinking ensemble. Miles himself hated being pigeonholed by this release, even as it helped him to reach a wider audience, whom he exploited to finance his expensive tastes.

            John Coltrane is neither at his worst nor his best. There are definitely Miles records where Trane’s solos are simply embarrassing. But here, he is the least remarkable of the group.

            Bill Evans, despite adding so much to the texture and atmosphere of the record (his intro to ‘All Blues’ is a highlight) is shown up by Wynton Kelly, who only plays on one track, the bluesy ‘Freddie Freeloader’. And the closer, ‘Flamenco Sketches’, which is given two takes on modern Cd releases, is boring, and disappointing next to the full realization of the incomparably superior record, Sketches of Spain.

            This album helped to kick off the modal jazz craze, but for all that, despite its authentic jazz elements, where are the drum, the bass solos?

Exile on Main Street

Yes, another Stones album on the list…maybe I’m trying to say something? What if we listed the most overrated bands?

            Anyhow, Exile is a sprawling mess. And why do we romanticize the fact some rich English chaps don’t wanna pay their taxes? There are two good songs on this heroin-soaked-cotton-ball of an album: ‘Tumbling Dice’ and ‘Happy’

pretty much everything by Bach

other than the Organ Works

Why are classical listeners so obsessed with Bach? As if he were the apotheosis of Baroque, rather than its contrapuntal decadence?

            The answer, I think, lies in the eugenic, anti-Catholic bias of Anglo-Teutonic protestant tastemakers in the English-speaking world. The Italians, even the least of them, were vastly superior to this uptight Lutheran, and the early Baroque far more pure than the late. At the same time I’d rather hear J.S.’s son C.P.E. Bach most days than his father.

            To be fair, there are a few choral masterpieces and, again, the organ works are divine, incomparable and in a class of their own, though I’d throw in Wagner’s arrangement of the Wedding March from Lohengrin.

The Ring Cycle

Speaking of Wagner, he only followed through in finishing this quartet of nonsense at the unremitting prodding of his benefactor, mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. Wagner at one point wanted to produce the piece annually at no charge for the benefit of the common man, socialist that he was, in a wooden theatre constructed specially for the occasion and burned to the ground after the third night. Rather, at his wife’s insistence and, ultimately, direction, he got Bayreuth with high ticket prices exclusive for the well-t-do whom Wagner despised.

            Siegfried has its moments; the rest of it is boring. The overture to Das Fliegende Holländer has all that is great about The Ring, condensed into actual music.

            Lohengrin is divine. Tristan und Isolde heavenly as well.

            No doubt The Ring has helped to inspire more cultural works in the last century than any other musical composition, from Tolkien to Star Wars. Nonetheless; it is far from Herr Kapellmeister’s finest.

Led Zeppelin IV

or ‘Zoso’

I take it back, then—the Stones are not the most overrated band. This scrawny, effeminate shrieker and the drunken buffoon of a drummer who only knows one beat utterly ruin the ingenious creations of the studio musicians: bassist/keyboardist/mandolin master and junkie/sex-pervert guitar player; except perhaps on ‘The Battle of Evermore’, the only good track on this absolutely (and literally) God-forsaken album.

The horrible, overrated ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is probably only so popular because Bonham doesn’t play for most of the song—and yet, paradoxically, the song only gets good at the end, when the drums come in.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

The rest of this list is meaningless. Great music enjoyed by sensible individuals.

Here we have something of another order altogether. How the greatest rock band, under the obvious and indiscreet influence of the most wonderful drug churned out this garbage is beyond me.

There are precisely 1.5 good songs on this record: the incomparable harmonic joy of ‘Lovely Rita’ and Lennon’s part of ‘A Day in the Life’.

            

Hitchin' by Alex Silberman

         Hitchin’ might be the best non-scholarly work to come out of Cambridge since the so-called ‘New England Summer’ literary revival of the late 19^th century. I, myself had always wanted to be a modern-day Kerouac — but Alex Silberman beat me to it (the fact that he actually went out “on the road” helped).

         I bought my copy in cash after drinks with the author at the Field, outside of Central Square.

         ‘That an $1.50 buys ya a cup a coffee.’

         It doesn’t hurt that I know a few of the characters in the book—and his depictions are spot-on. But really, Hitchin’ says something very deep, about life, about America—about youth, and its afterlife; how youth lives on in adulthood.

         As Alex hitchhikes across the country west he meets an assortment of weird and wild characters (perhaps none more so than himself) and like a Rorschach you can see what you want in it; to me some themes that pop up are the dichotomy between family (biological or otherwise) and loneliness. Despite the dire straits some are in or habits and lifestyles these are Sly Stone’s “Everyday People” who stop to pick up our author and detail their relationship problems, addictions, dreams, beliefs and wisdom. Silberman quotes a few aphorisms, or “advice” told him by a guy named Brandon, which could probably be stretched into a whole chapter, or maybe a book in its own right.

         Our protagonist lives among, and yet apart from all these people, maintaining individual self-consciousness while partaking in the flux of action and conversation. As Nietzsche writes in The Birth of Tragedy, ‘every artist is an “imitator,” that is to say, either an Apollonian artist in dreams, or a Dionysian artist in ecstasies, or finally…at once artist in both dreams and ecstasies; so we may perhaps picture him sinking down in his Dionysian intoxication and mystical self-abnegation, alone and apart from the singing revelers, and we may imagine how, through Apollonian dream-inspiration, his own state, i.e., his oneness with the inmost ground of the world, is revealed to him in a symbolical dream image.’* 

        

         As we meet ‘the young the old and what have you with other displaced characters’ and more through ‘different worlds not colored in such Nuevo modernist, veiled progressive, technocratic finery’ we see another side of the American Dream. If Silberman cannot change the world he seeks to live outside of it, and yet right in the heart of it at the same time. Still, without the corporations he reviles who would manufacture the cars that give him a lift, who would ship the cardboard boxes from which he makes his signs, and who would operate the fast-food joints he stops in to use the bathroom?

         Alex inhabits a world (call it Cambridge, call it the second decade of the 21^st century) where people are defined by, and hung up on, their sexuality—therefore, as many do I think, he accepts gays and transsexuals unquestioningly but is adamant in his own heterosexuality, defining himself in the process but it is palpable his lonely lust on the road as he heads west throughout the first part of the book, ‘Momentum from point A to point P, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.’

         In many ways though, he is just a normal guy—the first half of Hitchin’ is really the story of the people he meets on the way; very strange characters at times caught up in all sorts of situations. He judges the system, not individuals—he leaves that to the reader. Still there is often enough the sense of a struggle in these lives between sin and redemption. They change their lives, overcome addiction, deal with infidelity, return to or run from children, spouses, obligations and home:

         and it’s to home, ultimately, that Alex must return. The Pacific Ocean is his destination, his goal—once he reaches it he seems devoid of purpose, flitting about impulsively looking for connection, settling for shallow sex. It is at this point in the book that we confront Silberman himself, without the phantoms of all these other lives whose stories seem transiently fascinating. And here, the writing itself takes a different turn. Silberman’s narrative is defined by naiveté side-by-side deep wisdom; his prose at times simple and matter-of-fact, bordering on social-media-English, yet achieves true brilliance in unique phrasing and often enough is profound in its very simplicity.

         Hitchin’ does not answer the question, “What’s out there?” so much as it raises new questions about what’s inside and between us, how we define ourselves and relate to each other in this modern world where connection is a click away and yet the people we live with may be farther from us than the other side of the country.  

Purchase Hitchin' through Amazon

-G.T. Evans

*trans. Walter Kaufman

Aside from the Nietzsche all quotes are taken from Hitchin’