The way the news has gone down lately, you would think someone really cared about the morals of authors, critics and other literary personae. The latest spark to ignite a prairie fire is the conviction of Laura Albert, the nonfictional being behind JT Leroy, who is the fictional author of the fictional work Sarah. As you undoubtedly are aware, one of the fictions jumped off the title page and signed a contract with Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, President of Antidote International Films, in which she gave no hint that she was fictional.
Michiko Kakutani, the illustrious senior literary critic for The New York Times, has also made news, offering a review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows hours before the enormous marketing machine behind its release had approved its sale. (I don't usually insert NYTimes links because they force you to register, but even though the URL includes "restricted" I was able to link to this review through Google, for whom the right to link stands slightly above, life, liberty or the pursuit of copyright in the moral order.) Moreover she mentioned that she had simply wandered into a NYC bookstore and purchased a copy! She was also the subject of a critique in Slate yesterday
by Ben Yagoda (leave it to Slate to do a critic critique), who complains loudly that Kakutani either blows kisses or comes down with a blunt ax on books she reviews, not to mention indulges in even more pathetic uses of language than the two near-dead metaphors I just used. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. (Damn those clichés, they come so easily sometimes.) Recently, we had Mark Helprin whining on the Op-Ed page (May 20) that his family would not enjoy eternal profits from a perpetual copyright on his writings. Of course everyone remembers the plagiarism scandal of Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan, way back in 2006. Ms. Viswanathan asserted that her extensive copying from at least two other authors was "unconscious and unintentional", sort of like George Harrison's redo of "He's So Fine" as "My Sweet Lord". Which is a step up from the college President (don't have the notes on this one in front of me) who repeated the old platitude that he had failed to keep careful notes separating his own words from those of others. More likely his note taking was a little too careful. And the list goes on, especially if we widen the scope to ethics and fictions in general, which lets film and all its foibles sneak in. Thus ON 3/29/05 we had, for example, two headlines in the Times, "Documentary Criticized for Re-enacted Scenes" , and "Historical Epic Is Focus of Copyright Dispute" (p.E1). The former concerned the film Mighty Times: The Children's March, which won an Academy Award for Bobby Houston and Robert Hudson, and included fake-vintage footage of civil rights protests. The latter the film Kindom of Heaven, which was accused by James Reston Jr. of "stealing his research", according to the Times' Sharon Waxman, including "events, characters, scenes, descriptions and character tensions". Whoa, stealing character tensions, that's got to be up there with pocketing the Golden Triangle.
Bizarre and offbeat, you say; but it leads right back to one of the biggest recent literary disputes of them all, the claim that Dan Brown stole the "architecture" of his novel The Da Vinci Code from a nonfiction work, Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Micahel Baigent and Richard Leigh. Not a single passage was alleged to have been copied; rather, elements of the plot (maybe the "character tension"?) were allegedly conceptually lifted from one genre into another.
Dan Brown won the lawsuit filed by his accusers. Laura Albert lost hers. One thing joined the two outcomes in holy matrimony forever: the lawyers were the only real winners. Albert has been ordered to pay the plaintiff's lawyers some $350,000, while the plaintiff himself got $116,000. Nice work, guys, you earned it. Brown's lawyers were to receive their just deserts of 1.3m pounds. If I thought anyone were in doubt that the entire system of contract, copyright, patent, matrimonial, consumer and medical law (to name a few prominent areas) has as its primary purpose the enrichment of lawyers themselves, I would bring this in evidence... except that I might need a lawyer to do so. Luckily, no one in their right mind has such doubts.
But beyond the obvious cynicism of the system for redressing these alleged wrongs, there are some very funny lessons to be observed here. Consider, for example, what the world of literary morality might look like if most of these plaintiffs, or mere complainers, were right:
- It would be okay to reinvent oneself as a fictional character, but wrong to be the self that has thus been reinvented.
- It would be a sin to publish information about a book one has read if one is not supposed to have read that book according to the book's author and publisher.
- It would be necessary to pay royalties to the heirs of John Milton before reproducing much of Paradise Lost; and indeed it might be possible to sue the likes of Nikos Kazantzakis, author of The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, for stealing "architectures" or "research" or "character tensions" from Homer. (This situation should be found highly desirable in legal circles, as it would surely entail endless lawsuits to determine just who were the heirs of Homer or Milton.)
On the other hand, if some of the perpetrators here are within their rights, the world would look similarly interesting from a moral point of view:
- Who needs to write when so many millions of pages of readily available text are just sitting there waiting to be put to use? Is this not a service to the original author? For nothing provides so much publicity as a plagiarism case, and nothing helps an author's popularity so much as getting the sympathy vote after a plagiarism scandal. Why has no one appreciated the service Viswanathan did for Megan McCafferty, who I surely never heard of until her words were honored by Ms. Viswanathan?
- Why stop at faking vintage footage? Why not change the copyright date on the film to 1965? Why not get the winner of the 2007 Rev.Dr. Martin Luther King lookalike contest to put in an appearance? Why not carry subtitles: "The scene you are now seeing is really happening, or at least it was, or something similar was, or could have been anyway"? Zelig, anyone? (Excuse me, I meant Orlando.)
Well, I know what you thought: no parrot is going to self-incriminate by squawcking about plagiarism. And you are right to an extent. At least in this entry the main object of my interest is not plagiarism. Nor even lawyers. Nor copyright or patent or other illustrious institutions of intellectual private property. It is the self and its literary being.
First, Laura Albert. Apparently she is JT LeRoy, the author of Sarah. What was her offense? It was, first, believing that she was JT LeRoy. Well, she is JT LeRoy. Samuel Clemens was Mark Twain. And somebody, I hope, is H.A. Monk, the author of this blog. Now, suppose Sam had signed a contract as Mark Twain, would that be a problem? No, you say (I hope). Because he in effect owns the being that is Mark Twain, who might or might not have written books in the first person, without any difference in the situation. Ralph Lifschitz can sign a contract as Ralph Lauren, can't he? Now suppose someone comes along and wants to do a film on the Ralph Lauren story. He siticks a contract under the nose of Ralph Lifschitz, who promptly signs his name as "Ralph Lauren" ( don't know or care if he had it legally changed; maybe it's a DBA name or whatever). The cameras roll up, the street signs go up, the food cart lays out its feast of grapes, Kool-Aid and liverwurst, and finally the director says, "Okay, let's start from the top. Ralph, tell us your story. Roll it!" (Archaic pre-digital-era movie language, but whatever.) There sits Ralph. He begins: "My name is Ralph Lifschitz. At some point I started presenting myself to the public as Ralph Lauren because I wanted to be a famous fashion designer, and I didn't think anyone would take me seriously with a name like Lifschitz which suggests I'm a nice Jewish boy from the Bronx." "CUT!" End of film. The Director resigns and goes off to do a documentary about Walter Carlos...
Now what, literally, is wrong with this picture? Nothing, really. The Director got what he signed up for, the Ralph Lauren Story. It's just that that story is one or two sentences long. Not Ralph Lifschitz's problem. So why did Laura Albert get sued? And why did she lose? Mr. Levy-Hinte, you see, the upholder of Truth, Justice, and the Hollywood Way, believes he was duped by Ms. Albert. You see, what he wanted was a film about the "real" JT LeRoy. When he discovered that there was no "real" JT LeRoy, he decided that instead of doing a two-sentence film about JT LeRoy he wanted to do a metafilm about Laura Albert. But Ms. Albert did not believe that she had sold him the rights to a story about Laura Albert. You see, Laura Albert is JT LeRoy, but JT LeRoy is not Laura Albert. The relationship is not reciprocal. She had sold the rights to an Albert-as-LeRoy story, but not to an LeRoy-as-Albert story. But the former story makes for a very short film: "Hi, I'm fictional. Bye." Whereas the latter is no film at all, because Laura Albert does not want to be a movie star playing herself.
Mr. Levy-Hinte may have a sense of justice, however distorted, but he has no sense of humor. You see, Jeff does not realize that he is a fictional filmmaker, at least as auteur. Every novel has a fictional author. The fictionl author is the voice from whom the story comes. Ms. Albert gave her fictional author a name - JT LeRoy - and a history and personality. Mr. Levy-Hinte may not have given his fictional narrators a name, but in his films he surely has fictional narrators. And if he has any business sense at all, he would surely jump on the first opportunity to sell the rights to the real story of one of his fictional narrators. Easiest way to make money in the arts, I bet. It is hardly Ms. Albert's fault if JT LeRoy's story is as thin as a crepe. And it is certainly Mr. Levy-Hinte's fault if he doesn't understand what a fictional author is. In fact, that gives me an idea. Mr. Levy-Hinte, if you're reading this: there is this very interested guy named H.A. Monk; he's actually part man, part parrot, and sits on top of a lamppost in Brooklyn observing the NYC arts scene. Then he gets in front of his laptop and, as H.A. Monk, pumps out verbose and little-noticed blog posts about his observations. For a cool $2 million I believe he would be happy to squawck on camera about his life in the urban jungle. Whaddaya say?
Turning now to Ms. Kakutani. Note that parrots and cuckoos have certain things in common, so perhaps this is not an unbiased judgment. But neither are any of my other judgments, so there you go. Monks and Monks also have something in common, a fact to which I call your attention only because a fellow Bloogle Gogger who signs his posts "The Monk" (I assume if it were a female she should sign it "Monkee") has posted a note on Kakutani's review in which it is stated that Kakutani has lavishly praised every one of J.K. Rowling's Potter books, including Deathly Hallows, and therefore ought not to be taken to task by Rowling, as she was, for ruining the experience of millions of readers. Now, personally, I disagree with the logic of my cousin. Rowling's complaint was, at least on the surface, on behalf of her millions of readers, not herself. The complaint should be taken on its own merits, which Monk(2) does at another point, by pointing out that reviews in the NY Times are rarely read by children. Touché. And I suppose it could be added that any adult who does not wish to have their entire life devalued by hearing something about the book before the official release date should simply not read it. But another point should be made: in fact, Kakutani's description of the plot is so minimal that only a complete idiot would find the excitement of the book to have been undermined by the review. The evil ones have infiltrated Hogwarts, some well known Hogwarts characters die, Hermione is missing, Harry leads the resistance. No point in reading the book now, right?
But the trouble with the criticism goes way beyond that. Aside from the fact pointed out by a Times letter writer that reviewers are not (better not be) beholden to marketing machines, there is the fact that the vast majority of readers will not read the entire book on the day (night) it is released, and after that there will be hundreds of reviews that can be read prior to reading the book if one so chooses. Keep in mind that film companies regularly schedule pre-release screenings for critics and other film industry types; all the secrecy about the HP release strikes one as nothing more than hype.
Kakutani consistently demonstrates in her reviews that no book worth reading can be taken at face value. Every novel has a meaning or meanings beyond the plot, character development, etc. There must be a reason why characters behave his way or that, why they are put in his situation rather than hat one. Thus for example she draws attention to Potter's struggle against "the temptations of hubris and despair". There are many other such observations in her review, and frankly, it is this, rather than blame or praise in itself, that will make or break Rowling's recognition as a writer in the long run. I don't hear anyone complaining that Kakutani revealed the deeper meaning of Deathly Hallows before the release date, even though that is far more important than who wins or dies. From this perspective, the complaints make the critic's critics seem vapid and clueless.
That said, I think there is something about the superficial aspects of the Potter books that must be said now that the series is over. Rowling has, as Kakutani points out, a brilliant sense of mystery, enchantment, diobolical plots and the like, as well as insight into the fears and passions of adolescents, professors and goblins. These are what give the Potter world its raison d'etre and make the books consistently worth reading. But, bottom line, I'm sorry to say, she is not a particularly good writer. There is little elegance or poetry to Rowling's prose. Having deeper meanings is important, but the means of expression is too. Here it is easy to see that Rowling is no C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien, and perhaps less of a writer in the fantasy genre than even Philip Pullman. Her work has intrinsic interest in almost every other way, but the basic quality of using the English language in elegant and ingenious ways is entirely missing. In short, she has no style of any great significance. I am surprised that Kakutani, who is never one to mince words, does not recognize this. Rowling is, you might say, a great author, but not a particularly notable writer.
But I digress. On the other hand, I'm done anyway, so who cares? All I really wanted to do was call attention to a couple of the current issues in literary ethics and look a little beyond the newspaper chatter. The two cases I have looked at are interesting because there are hidden conceptual issues that underlie the arguments on either side. To what extent does an author own her "self", and how many selves can she have? What constitutes deceit, and was Mr. Levy-Hinte deceived or did he deceive himself? Does an author's right to disseminate her writings include the right to ensure that no word will be spoken about her book's content prior to the release date? Does a reviewer have higher obligations than merely annointing or disparaging a work? Currently, most of the really knotty issues in literary ethics have been , obviously or not, around technology. For example, the existence of the Internet, and even more of Google, has given the issue of plagiarism a fresh urgency. But the discussion above suggests that technology alone is not the reason why literary ethics needs much more attention than its gotten. Maybe before we can understand the technological issues we need to understand things like the self and the dynamics of interpretation as they apply to literature. Which agrees in one way with the plenitude of issues I began with: we are pretty much still at sea, and have a long way to go.
Hot on the heels of the two mouths who spewed an endless stream of dull, adolescent conversation and puerile sex humor, recently departed from WXRK, the unloved and in fact nonexistent "Jack" has hightailed it out of town, apparently back to Canada from which "he" was imported, duty-free. For those of you who are not NYC listeners (in all probability a highly favored status right now), "Jack" was the pre-recorded personality with the puerile, adolescent attitude (anyone notice a pattern here?) who would periodically interrupt WCBS's jukebox format with some snide remark, often about alleged skeptics regarding about CBS's format, and then, with equally annoying attitude, intone, "Jack-FM - playing what we want". Figure Napolean Dynamite after DJ lessons; that's about how this came across. Raise your hand if you thought it would last.
Going back a few decades, CBS-FM was once one of NYC's premier prog-pop radio stations, playing everything from the Moody Blues and Jethro Tull to Carol King and Elton John, but bringing consistent taste as well as quality to NY radio. There were more experimental formats - WXLR, if I recall, was one - but this was a station no reasonable music lover could complain about. At some point, CBS switched to an Oldies format, about which all that can be said is that "Oldies" never means a really creative sampling of older songs, but rather an attempt to mine nostalgia for well-known hits. This is necessarily an uneven format, since hits are of uneven quality. At some point around the turn of the millenium the format deteriorated further, and the selection of hits was reduced to early Motown with a few Beatles songs or other superhits thrown in. This format is what Jack replaced.
It is hardly surprising that Jack did not catch on, and in fact reduced CBS's listenership (and advertising revenue) significantly. But it is interesting to consider why. I suspect it was a nearly total disconnect between the music selection and the impersonal, mechanized, phony-DJ-with-attitude idea (which according to the Times was supposed to make someone think of an iPod Shuffle - as if that is really a rationale for a radio format). But the music selection, though far from exemplary, was much better than the parade of Motown hits, and indeed much better than the wider Oldies format of yesteryear. "Jack" actually pulled from a much wider playlist than any other oldies or classics format, and had a predilection for some groups that I feel are grossly underplayed in such formats compared to their quality, such as Steely Dan or The Fixx. "Jack" did not limit the selection to major hits, though most of the tunes were at least vaguely familiar. "He" had a disposition towards crisp, catchy tunes with hooks, but that left him very wide latitude to pick and choose. Not that there wasn't repetition; and indeed one could still detect a bit too much of "Hotel California" and the like, as if we did not hear enough of that incredibly tired stuff from the "classic rock" (or is it "Clearchannel rock"?) guys at 104.3. There was also a perhaps commercially wise but musically dubious effort to stick to early-80's disco on the weekend.
All that said, there was something extremely refreshing about the "playing what we want" idea. Playlists are exactly what is wrong with rock radio, be it contemporary pop (100.3), classic rock, country or just about any other format. Jack was a great experiment in widening the playlist so much that it almost disappeared. K-Rock, even with their all-chatter format on weekdays, actually experimented on the weekends with a very interesting contemporary mix.
That has now been quieted, along with the talking emptyheads, and the station has gone to an extremely careful and repetitious selection of new stuff that is even more conservative than their earlier hard rock format. And for CBS-FM, it is now Back to the Playlist: Oldies, slightly updated but still tired. And so ends a brief and occasionally interesting era of sort-of free form rock radio in NYC.
A few NY-area college stations still dare to spin "what they want" at certain hours; but with their limited reach, they provide few opportunities for quality or exploratory programming. WFUV, which at some point had potential as a folk/acoustic station, long ago went commercial, limiting its exposure of new artists and focusing on already successful, and largely electric, acts to the point of becoming nearly indistinguishable from various "light rock" stations. WKCR gives us mainly jazz and some bluegrass and world music. I believe the nearest experimental rock station is Seton Hall's WSOU in Orange, NJ, though I can't get reception in Brooklyn; Fairleigh Dickinson's WFDU also provides some interest at the low end of the dial if you can get it. Other than that, it is pretty much a complete Radio Wasteland.
Almost. Strangely enough, it is 104.3 at night, with it's "Out of the Box" and "Underground Garage" shows, that still holds a few cutting edge cards now, as unbearable and stultifying as its daytime format is. That is something, but it ain't enough. What we need here is three things that we're not very likely to get, at least in a 24-hour station. One is a no-holds-barred experimental rock station that will give us everything from the latest progressive rock, in its various guises (see my previous post on the Book of Knots concert), to the more worthy alt-country happenings, to various interesting indie releases. Call this one WIND. And no, I don't mean Indiana. The second is a station that mines rock history for its 10,000's of extremely high quality but vastly underplayed cuts, be it from well known bands like Pink Floyd (when was the last time you heard "Atom Heart Mother" or "Astronomy Domine" on the radio?) to barely remembered groups like Family (their album Fearless is one of my favorite pieces of vinyl), from 60's garage bands (heard Bubble Puppy's "Hot Smoke and Sassafras" recently?) to some of the ingenious but rarely played cuts from contemporary groups like the Meat Puppets, Lemonheads, or Spoon. I could spin brilliant but virtually unplayed cuts by 10CC, Nektar and The Fixx for a couple of days without repeating anything. Spread that over half a century of rock history and you've got an almost endless supply of brilliant music, none of which has been overplayed by the 104.3 DJ's. Call this station WFRE. That's free, and without the attitude, Jack.
The third is a station that actually has some deep relationship to this country's musical traditions (other than jazz, which thankfully is actually represented in a couple of reasonable formats). I mean a station for which "country" means Hank WIlliams and Merle Haggard and Buck Owens and Johnny Cash and people who are their direct musical descendants. A station for which "folk" means Woody and Huddie and Pete and Bill (Staines - too bad I have to add that, he's fully their equal), and which plays some of the hundreds of high quality CD's released every year by acoustic musicians who look to them for inspiration. And which isn't afraid to play a scratchy old Big Bill Broonzy or Blind Willie McTell recording, or one by the host of worthy blues pickers who keep the tradition alive. Call this one WACU. Acoustic in spirit at least, because electronically amplified instruments are a kind of power center whose imperialistic tendencies we must resist, even if we love it as one form of expression.
For these stations to exist, I think the only hope is for some billionaire who actually cares about American music to buy out some media monopoly and play the stuff at a loss. Because one thing is clear: be it rock, country, or blues, what sells is obviously an extremely narrow spectrum of music that is constantly hammered into the heads of radio audiences through top-20 playlists and video channels. And that is a poor comment on us and our cultural bearings. A little paternalism can be a good thing, sometimes. Just give us some decent radio stations. The attitude needed to hit the road, but not the free format.
Lately the musical Monk and his friends have been exchanging views on the meaning of "progressive rock". The importance of this sub-genre of rock is adequately demonstrated by the fact that of all the uses of "progressive", only this one gets to be called just "prog", as if the social force of the music trapped the term and held it up as a prize. And the philosophical interest it has is like a model of the problem in philosophy of art in general: everyone thinks they know how to use it, but nobody knows how to define it. Which leads to the occasional battle of words: "that's not prog!". "Yes it is!". That's not art. Yes it is. You get the picture.
One thing most people agree on is that certain groups, or should I say groups of groups, constitute the paradigm or core cases of prog. Most of these bands hail from the early 1970's, though many can trace their origins as far back as the mid-60's. One contingent consists of groups which delighted the college crowd in the 70's, like Yes, King Crimson, the Moody Blues, Jethro Tull, Genesis, Pink Floyd, ELP, Nektar, Klaatu and Gentle Giant. Then there is a frankly eclectic gang of lesser lights (including the so-called "Canterbury" groups) consisting of such names as Caravan, Hatfield and the North, Van der Graf Generator, Soft Machine, Tangerine Dream and several others known mainly to connoisseurs. And there are the contemporary "prog" (or "neo-prog") groups like Dream Theatre, Porcupine Tree, Marillion and a number of Italian groups.
Yet even this - a mere sprinkling of the names who have been mentioned by one expert source or another as prog groups - overstates the amount of agreement. For example, in The Billboard Guide to Progressive Music, Bradley Smith offers numerous other names in his "canonic" top 100 prog recordings, but does not include a single album by Gentle Giant (most prog fans would stop speaking to him), ELP (most prog fans would have him drawn and quartered) or Nektar (which personally irritates me more than the other omissions). Genesis, and another leading light of prog, Renaissance, are represented only by live albums (what was he thinking/drinking? prog is the paradigmatic studio music). And the fights go way beyond this: Is Supertramp a prog or merely a pop group? How about David Bowie? What is Led Zeppelin's relationship to prog? What about Rush (I shudder, but some people consider them an essential prog band)? How important/influential are the numerous proggish bands from Germany, Italy and other non-English-speaking countries? Is Frank Zappa a prog artist or merely a quirky composer with as many different styles as albums? Is the contmporary prog-metal scene really prog or just very technical noise? Is psychedelic rock a form of prog, or prog a form of psych, or neither? Is prog a classification of bands, albums, songs, styles, or all or none of the above? The issues go on and on. And to judge from the literature on prog, of which there is a substantial amount (of extremely uneven quality) most participants are talking right past each other. Definitions of the genre fly through the air with the greatest of ease, all subject to easy refutation by simply pointing to a generally recognized prog group that doesn't clearly meet it, or a bunch of clearly non-prog groups that do. The various talking heads (not the group, who are not prog, but someone will mention them eventually...) do not usually address one another's opinions or engage philosophically with other views, but merely offer their personal visions of the genre. (For one very sane definition and list of key recordings see this article. Full disclosure: the author of the article, Ian Alterman, is not unrelated to one of parrot's cousin's grandmother's children, and the site is operated by our frequent musical correspondent and acquaintance, Dusty Wright. Anyway I don't completely agree with the definition or album selections, but I think they capture a standard and venerable view of the nature of prog.)
Rest assured, I am not going to settle any of this here. But the context is important, for on Friday night, a parrot looking for some spontaneous solution to the what-do-I-do-tonight dilemma was faced with at least two choices for delving into the music and escaping the email debates. Ozric Tentacles, a beknighted neo-prog group that has been doing its multimedia thing for a couple of decades, was scheduled to play at the Highline Ballroom; and across town, a new group of self-consciously arty rockers who call themselves Book of Knots was on the bill at the Blender Theater at Gramercy, a venue which (as the Gramercy Theater) recently did service as the film archive of the Museum of Modern Art. Eeny meeny miney mo.... not having enough toes, Parrot called his sibling, a parakeet who has written for ProgArchives.Com, one of the main prog rock sites in cyberspace. Parakeet was familiar with one highly rated Ozric album, which he considered unimpressive; and alerted me to the fact that they are almost completely instrumental, which is not bad, but I was not in the mood for a post-Tangerine Dream experience. Besides the
buzz around Book of Knots was much more interesting: possibly a one-time-only performance by a collection of art rock types who were members of other bands, (Sleepytime Gorrila Museum, Pere Ubu, Skeleton Key, etc.) Moreover they were to be joined by various other known entities such as John Langford of The Mekons, who played an opening set, as did Carla Bozulich, who also appeared as lead vocalist in Book of Knots opening number. The group has just released its second album, Traineater, and may or may not continue as an ongoing entity, as the mood strikes them.
Now I will admit the parrot squawcked a bit when, after buying a ticket for an alleged 8:00 p.m. show, I discovered that Book of Knots was not going on until 11:00. (No warmup bands were listed in any of the announcements.) Bad as this was, what really infuriated me was the club policy of not allowing anyone to leave and come back. They give you a wristband if you want to order a drink, but they can't stamp your hand or something so you can re-enter? Obnoxious. I actually went to the ticket window and asked for my $22 back, to no avail. A chipmunk-faced young fan behind me chirped profoundly "Haven't you ever been to a rock concert before?" Hmmmm... haven't I seen Led Zeppelin four times? Haven't I played at CBGB's twice? Well, yes. Not to mention been to most of the major rock clubs in NYC several times. Mr. Monk Parrot reminded Mr. Chipmunk that he had had some 3 extra decades to collect nuts and seeds on the rock concert scene, but thanks for the input. (See, once in a while it helps to be older and wiser... like Owl, except she's not older...) But time went by rather quickly, with the warm-up sets and lots of newpapers to read. Before the Book of Knots went on I bought a can of Guinness. A sign above each of the three (3) bars at the Gramercy announces "one alcoholic drink per wristband". Does that mean one per bar? But I didn't notice anyone enforcing this by removing the wristbands after selling a drink. I can somewhat understand the sentiment, for I have seen a drunken Irishman pissing across the walls and sinks of a club bathroom like an out of control firehose (this at a Luka Bloom concert at Acme Underground, about when Chipmunk was learning to write) and have encountered a variety of unpleasantly inebriated individuals. I could maybe see a two drink limit, but one is a little ridiculous. Anyway, this can of Guinness ($7 with the tip) was completely flat, with an obviously broken carbonation device bouncing around at the bottom of the can. Parrot was not in a good mood. The place also had one 200-pound security guard to every five patrons, and closed off the entire balcony (the only available seating) for "VIP's and friends of the performers". They do have a kick-ass sound system and a pleasant lounge downstairs, which might or might not be enough to drag me back to this otherwise unfriendly venue.
Back to prog. Or are we? This is the question I was alluding to at the beginning. Here are a bunch of musicians who look and sound like artrock specialists. ProgArchives has an Artrock genre, but their top 100 albums of this genre include lots of Moody Blues, not to mention Rush, the former being as tonal and accessible as one can imagine, and the latter being merely annoying. Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's Of Natural History is listed as one of the most popular albums on ProgArchives, but not as an artrock album. Prog is quintessentially the medium which allegedly lifted rock out of its dogmatic slumbers as a a mere form of entertainment and made it a genuine art form. Perhaps there are a hundred reasons to question this narrative, but it is a typical one, and it sometimes leads to prog being simply equated with artistic rock and roll. Prog is not written for dance halls; prog does not maintain standard beats or stick to basic blues progressions; prog often introduces unusual instruments, utilizes extended compositional forms, limits the use of improvisation with through-composed pieces or else extends it way beyond the confines of blues-based guitar breaks, and extensively manipulates sounds electronically. Prog was suppose to prove that rock is a form of art not inherently less complex or creative than classical music. All of which gives it a claim to being art rock pure and simple. In addition, prog lyrics are often as indecipherable as a Wallace Stevens poem, and the visions it produces, from apparently utopian to diabolically dystopian, are at least in some sense at odds with the contemporary social status quo, giving it some connection to not only modern poetry but progressive political views.
Nevertheless, the sounds which emerged from Book of Knots could arguably be called art rock, but not prog. Why? That is what is hard to say. When I got out of the concert I eventually ended up in a subway station, where I naturally applied the headphones and turned on my CD player (yes, I am one of the last people on earth without an iPod, though my CD player does do mp3's). By coincidence, or maybe not, the disk was a live Gentle Giant album. By even better coincidence, the next song up was A Free Hand. Had I recorded part of the concert by mistake? Well, not exactly, but all the elements seemed to be there: technically complex and well-orchestrated lines that sometimes touched on atonality, noises of various sorts (electronic or otherwise), rhythms dissociated from their metrical foundation, and vocals integrated as one more instrument in the mix. The lyrics are slightly offbeat, with meanings hinted at rather than spelled out. How different was this from the concert?
Well, a little. Book of Knots utilizes prerecorded soundtracks and in general uses the spoken word to great effect; their compositions are powerful but sometimes schizophrenic, with the quiet tinkling of plucked autoharps and guitars strummed below the bridge suddenly interrupted by tritonal outbursts from the entire group. Various string instruments 
are pulled in, more for their ability to produce a Webernesque texture than for melodic or harmonic uses. There was great beauty in many of these textures, and indeed in the unpredictable but usually very convincing vocal lines of these compositions (or dare I say "songs"?). All of this seemed to go beyond what Gentle Giant was doing, but not by much. Could it be that Gentle Giant is misclassified as a prog group and really belongs to a separate genre of art rock? I don't know. If you go this route you could end up casting early Pink Floyd and late King Crimson out of prog. Or, if you take the opposite tack, you could end up baptizing Zappa as a prog icon. I think what we have here is just a choice of linguistic paths: either you build out the artrock strands of prog and draw in groups like Book of Knots, which sound nothing remotely like Yes or later Pink Floyd, and call them prog; or you cut the thread where the symphonic aspects of prog trail off into noise and punk and atonality, and the textures go from the expansive synth/mellotron sound to industrial, aleatoric and elecronic. Either will do. Definitions merely reflect existing usage, as W.V.O. Quine pointed out long ago; they do not give you any sort of new information about a term, though they can serve as norms for using it once they are offered.
A few years ago I went to a "prog" concert at the Knitting Factory. There were three bands, can't remember their names unfortunately. One of them was not so different from Book of Knots, though not nearly as good. They seemed to mix aleatoric moments with more traditional ones, not unappealing but kind of an unnatural cross between the Paul Winter Consort and Jethro Tull. Another was so loud I had to leave - basically an extremely technical guitar player, backed by a bass as I recall. Other than the possibility of ear damage and another name on the Extremely Technical Guitar Player list I got nothing out of this set, but it did remind me that a great many heavy metal bands of the Metallica sort feature very technically accomplished players who seem to think that having the faculty of taste is a defect. Book of Knots loses little in volume compared to most of these bands, but to my ears
they are actually about music and not showmanship. Between their four or five guitarists, two fiddlers, numerous vocalists and percussionists, they manage to more or less consistently keep the attention on musical form and content and on the social content of the lyrics, and hardly even present technique for its own sake. Perhaps this should be part of the definition of prog, if definitions were at all useful here. Even with the guitar pyrotechnics of a Steve Howe or the drumming of a Phil Collins of the Shulman brothers' extraordinary technical facility, prog is decidely about the music.
What I could gather from most of the lyrics suggests that Book of Knots is currently oriented toward the industrial, 
with a number of them sporting suits and hair styles that brought to mind the bourgeoisie of the 1930's. In an equally outrageous suggestion of civilization and etiquette, a program was produced for the concert, in which they indicate that their second album was intended as "a tribute to the American rust belt". It seemed oddly fitting for this collaboration of otherwise musically employed musicians that after their hour-long gig they thanked the audience, and excused themselves from doing any encores with the polite admission that "we don't know any more songs"! Not even a cover of Free Bird?
I do hope the group stays together, and does more concerts. While I did not find every moment of it pleasant, I could see this as a direction of sorts for rock that means something. I am not into noise. I do not like to attacked or annoyed, I like to be challenged. This was challenging but for the most part very enjoyable. I don't know how it translates to the recording, but I'm somewhat sorry I didn't buy a CD. From the experimental psychedelia of the 60's to My Bloody Valentine to contemporary art rock, some musicians have managed to tread a perilous course between complete alienation and pandering to popular taste. The best rock manages to push the boundaries while remaining enjoyable. Book of Knots pushes them very far but does not fall off the listening spectrum. That is an accomplishment, whether you call them prog, art, industrial, or something else.
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I think it is safe to reveal that there was another reason I chose to see Book of Knots rather than Ozric Tentacles. The reason's name is Frank, and the Frank who is the reason is (I suppose) the person who runs Frank's Pizza. A shop you can miss if you blink on a slow walk, it is located right next to the Blender (or Gramercy), at 23rd and Lexington Ave. For something like 15 years it has been recognized as the real deal when it comes to New York pizza. I've been to dozens (at least) of pizza parlors. (Ever been to a pizza parlor, Chipmunk?) I've been to Di Fara's, the best pizza this side of the local pig sty (finally shut down by the Health Department, thank god, but the pizza was in a class by itself: a gooey mix of buffalo milk mozarella and homemade tomato sauce on a thin crust). Frank's I discovered about 8 years ago. They almost never reheat a slice: the slices fly out the door faster than he can cook 'em. You don't order toppings at Frank's; you can, of course, if you want to ruin the best slice of pizza south of Central Park, but restrain yourself. Your body will survive a day without broccoli, and besides, tomato sauce is supposed to be good for your prostate - if you have a prostate, that is. The sauce is the best, with a bit of a Latin twist; the cheese fresh and generous, the crust just thick enough. Do I sound like a commercial? Okay, then here goes: Frank's is the best candidate I know for successor to (the real, original) Ray's Pizza. Grab a slice or eight and tell me you disagree.
The Times just did a piece on so-called "freegans", who furnish their apartments from sidewalk trash and dumpsters (er... like the rest of us... at least sometimes...) and eat discarded food from supermarkets (crows and vultures wouldn't object, but parrots are more picky). I was once told by people on the island of Grenada: "In America, people have more wealth, but they can still be hungry. We are poor, but never hungry. If we don't have food we go up into the hills and come back with food. You cannot do that in America." But it appears that even in the Urban Jungle it is possible. Think I'll go make myself some Dumpster Salad right now.
Whether or not that sounds appetizing, one thing New York never runs out of is free music, or music at such low cost it is free by today's inflated standards. Classical institutions complain that they cannot sell out concerts; but when even a decent 2nd balcony seat runs you $65 or so, and there is hardly a day without a free event worth attending, they have only themselves to blame. For example, in the wake of 9/11 NYC initiated a "River to River" festival, including numerous free outdoor and indoor concerts. Last year we heard Son Volt give a buttkicking performance right by the water. Parrot has still not gotten over the fact that he missed a free concert by Sonny Rollins at Damrosch Park last year, and possibly worse, one by U2 right here in Brooklyn. There is a ton of free stuff at churches, in parks and elsewhere. One of the best concerts I've ever seen was a free show by the Beach Boys in Central Park - must have been around 1976. One of the worst concerts I've ever seen was a free show by Jefferson Starship in Central Park - around the same time. Even before there were as many free concert series' as there are now, there was the Schaeffer Music Festival, where you could see Led Zeppelin (I didn't), King Crimson (I did), and many equally incredible bands for about $3 a pop.
Three bucks is what I paid last night to see Richard Thompson - it still counts as free because it was a "voluntary" contribution. Walking into the concert area Thursday evening I was immediately struck by three things, all related: a dense fog of cigarette smoke, an almost as pervasive atmosphere of beer-induced flatulence, and the largest crowd of died-in-the-wool baby boomers I've ever seen. It was a veritable sea of dressed-down late-fatherhood and former hippie-motherhood types, some toting tots, others who left their spouses home to spend quality time with their children, gently explaining to them that they probably wouldn't like this concert much anyway, it's kind of folk-rock and you're still into Aerosmith, etc.
It was like everyone there was between 35 and 55, looked it, dressed it, and damn well meant to let their vices hang out whether there happened to be second-generation types around or not. I had this feeling of being at home and being distinctly uncomfortable with that, but realizing that everyone else there probably felt the same way.
Why were the Beatle-boomers flocking to this? If you are anywhere near the age of the Blogging Parrot you were probably somewhere around a college campus when Fairport Convention was making a name for itself, holding its own against Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead and those other university icons. Indeed you were probably vaguely aware of a British Isles Folkie-Acoustic subculture that included groups like Pentangle, Fairport, Steeleye Span , Fotheringay and the Incredible String Band, and which surely influenced numerous "progressive" rock groups including Yes, Renaissance, Jethro Tull, Genesis and even Led Zeppelin. Bert Jansch, one of the Pentangle guitar wizards (the other being the great John Renbourn) was heard over the din of parrot squawcks in Brooklyn's Southpaw club last year, and played a piece that was certainly the predecessor to Jimmy Page's "Black Mountain Side". Richard Thompson was his counterpart in Fairport. He later went off as a duo with wife Linda, and Boomer knew about this phase of his career too; "Richard and Linda Thompson" probably rings a bell even for people who never heard a single song by them. Richard then continued sans Linda. Through all this you undoubtedly heard at some point about his reputation as a fine songwriter. You've heard a few of his songs now and then, but nothing since Fairport Convention ever moved you to go out and buy an album. Or you did, but you haven't listened to it in 20 years, minimum. But if you are true boomer you have probably at some point said to yourself, "I should probably check out Richard (and Linda? is he still with Linda?) Thompson before I get so old I lose my hearing." (Which should have happened at the last Mahavishnu concert you attended, but somehow it only left you with tinnitus for a week.) And all of a sudden here he is playing a free concert in Prospect Park, and you say to yourself, "I'll never forgive myself if I don't check this out". And since you hate to never forgive yourself, you check it out. That's why there seemed to be a quarter million flatulent children of the sixties, washing down their soy products with Sam Adams, at the Richard Thompson show on Thursday night.
Now to add a bit to the atmosphere, there was, shall we say, plenty of weather, almost all of it wet. It started raining as Thompson took the stage; it continued to rain; there was a cloudburst and many people fled; there were storm clouds that looked like ethereal black lions roaring down from heaven to consume a meal, periodically illuminated by red lightning. Thompson took a break, while we were drenched. It rained on and off through the whole show. And it's still two years before the 40th anniversary of Woodstock. But when all was said and done, and every metal chair had a puddle of water where a boomer butt had been, and the hill where families spread their picnic blankets was well washed of beer spills, Richard Thompson still played to a packed arena, and now it was not only appropriate but necessary to shout, dance, whoop, whistle and generally show that the world that no flash thunderstorm was going to deprive us of our Richard Thompson experience.
We were not disappointed: this was one of the best concerts I've ever seen. And among concerts that surpassed my expectations, it ranked even higher. No big surprise that Yes or Led Zep gave an incredible performance. But sometimes you go expecting nothing in particular, and leave with your jaw dropped and this feeling that you were just transported back to a time and place you thought you'd never be again, and a little guy inside you going, "That's it, I'm really going to start getting serious about playing the guitar again..." The closest comparable experience that comes to mind was - ouch, 13 years ago? - at a Woodstock 25th anniversary concert, the one right here in Brooklyn, at another longstanding free concert series near Coney Island. Arlo Guthrie, Country Joe McDonald and Melanie performed; but what blew me away was Canned Heat. Hot they were (he said in his best Yodaese), so much so that I could actually imagine this as a kind of spiritual return to Woodstock.
Thompson's show was of this order. To begin with, I can honestly say this: if you have the slightest inclination to feel that you know how to handle an electric guitar, please go see this man play and be disabused of such ideas. I think it was halfway through the show before I heard him repeat a single move. He does not so much play the strings as manipulate them. It is almost as if he discovered properties of a stratocaster that no one else is aware of, and he uses these properties to produce solos that defy all conventions except those of taste. Comparisons with Hendrix are begging to be made, but I'll stop while I still have some credibility. (Thompson did, however, place 19th on the Rolling Stone list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time. Hendrix - duh - was first. The list is a bit of a joke, but I'll skip the diatribe on some of the ridiculous rankings, see for yourself.) Suffice it to say that without ever using technique for mere heroic ends alone, he manages to be all over the fingerboard (and beyond), massaging and coaxing the strings into slithering lines that seep out like the smell of freshly brewed coffee in the morning. (Parrots don't drink coffee but they can follow a warm scent nonetheless.) I will admit that once or twice his breaks went on a bit too long for their own good. It's also possible that on replay some of the guitar work would seem more standard than I've described it. But that doesn't change the fact that in the immediacy of the live performance context what came across was an endlessly inventive instrumentalist with an original style.
I should add that while he did not do very many acoustic numbers, the one or two that he did suggested that he would be as capable of keeping his audience on the edge of their seats in an all acoustic concert as he was with the strat. His one lengthy fingerstyle attack was like a guitar-picking master class.
As for the songwriting, it did not ake long to see where he's coming from. There is an Irish lilt to almost everything, but rhythmically he does such amazing things with this underlying material that it is all but cloaked. The words kept grabbing me like the guitar work - somewhat unexpected but almost always satisfying and provocative. He played several songs from his recent album Sweet Warrior, opening with the album opener "Needle and Thread"' we also got at least "Dad's Gonna Kill Me" (some controversy about this one) and "Bad Monkey". This CD is sure to find its way to my stacks soon. SInce I don't know much of his older material by name I can't tell you how much of it he played, but with rain breaks and all he was on for almost 90 minutes.
It would be criminal not to mention one of the most brilliant things about his concert" Thompson's band. Pete Zorn sort of defines the term "multi-instrumentalist", playing not only backup but extended solos on most of his instruments. These included at least mandolin, guitar, baritone sax and a couple of other horns (alto and soprano, perhaps). In additon he contributed the high harmonies, which rang out clear and accurate in spite of his years. I believe the drummer was Earl Harvin, though if so he cut his hair. (Thompson's introduction of the band members came at the very end, and was none too clear, unfortunately.) In any case, he had enough stage presence to play the concert on his own, technique to burn, and an uncanny ability to complement Thompson's unique style. I assume the bassist was Rory McFarlane (I don't know what any of these guys look like, and the web sites have limited information); again, whoever it was, he provided more than a solid foundation, posting a clean and flowing bass line that alllowed the songs and the breaks the freedom to move around as they wished.
As if to offer a grand finale as unusual as the rest of his work, Thompson broke a string near the end of his set, and someone waltzed out in the middle of his solo with a new instrument, placed it around his neck and remove the other, as he blithely carried on hardly missing a beat. During an encore I assume it was his son who was introduced as Timmy Thompson. THe younger folkrocker accompanied Richard on guiatar and vocals.
P.S. - I hope to upload some photos shortly; meanwhile, for a gorgeous photo of the concert please see the brief review at Majikthise.
Some rude pigeon pooped on Parrot's laptop, infecting it with diseases of the most various and unpleasant sorts. Five or six anti-malware program downloads later, the Winged Blogger is back in action, though not quite out of the woods. (My taskbar and start button only work now if I run a shareware program that fixes them every time I log in.) Parrot proposes to revive several levels of Dante's inferno for the people responsible for these nuisances: Level 1 for idiots who think it is just fun to write stuff that screws up other people's systems; Level 2 for adware and spam moguls and people who help them; Level 3 for Sony and Google and other MultiInational Information Control Freaks who invade your privacy for a living... Level 7 for Microsoft, who sells you junk that is susceptible to these invasions. Okay, I squawcked my piece.
A few weeks back the culture vultures lit down in Soho and did the 90-minute gallery tour. It wasn't planned that way - the plan was to do the 3-hour Chelsea gallery tour. But you know about the best laid plans of birds and men. Parrot, who is proud to be able to boast of being an art pro (sui generis, that is - squawck!) was fairly surprised to find that there are still 90 minutes worth of galleries left in Soho, which used to be the mecca of the contemporary art world until the Dia Foundation set up shop in west Chelsea, and everyone else followed. (At least I think that's what happened, but you can probably find alternate NYC cultural histories if you look around.) But there you go, more galleries than I could squeeze into a short afternoon.
Parrot first flapped into Lumas, a recently opened purveyor of photographic color prints in "affordable" editions. I particularly dug the Julia Christes and David Burdenys, found the Stefanie Schneiders a bit too emotionally distant, and hated the laminated surfaces of most of the displayed stock. More German photographers than you can shake ein dreipod at. The staff at Lumas is quite helpful and will engage you in conversation until you almost want to buy a photograph to make them happy. At the Multiple Impressions gallery on Wooster St. we admired the work of a young artist named Jennifer Scott McLaughlin. These days, if you want to invest in art, you grab somebody as they're heading out the door of an art school, still in cap and gown, with diploma in one hand and graduate project in the other, and purchase their best work for the price of a Korean car. Then you go home and pray for the next three years that somebody important discovers them. At Franklin Bowles galleries on West Broadway we were impressed with Gottfried Salzmann's washed and overlaid urban landscapes. No newbie he, but perhaps not as well known as he might be - none of the online art info sites I know of have him listed.
We hit a few other galleries, taking in everything from some fairly dull sculpture (but was it supposed to come to a point?), a bit of tromp l'oeuil painting that seemed to move with you as you passed by, and some neato-neo-surrealist stuff of a roughly Sgt.Pepper-cover sort. If the Boids had a few bucks to throw around we'd have come home with enough to cover the limited remaining wall space in our nest. Unfortunately, we have to leave art collecting to those who can afford it, at least until another thousand or ten people start clicking on Parrot's illustrious Lamppost, and the Googs start sending me some greenbacks. Wait a minute, I am a greenback...
Anyway, having caught the art bug (yum) we decided to take a longer flight. This time the birds were drawn to a Beacon, specifically that Beacon along the Hudson River where Dia has set up shop in a big old factory. Last year we winged it to the famous sculpture garden at Storm King, where we were primarily impressed by Mark di Suvero's delicately imposing forms. We liked di Suvero's idea that these towering sheet metal abstractions could repair man's damaged relationship to the environment, and perhaps even to one another. How, exactly, remained unclear, but I think it has something to do with the the fact that we can feel their tonnage as lightly as we feel a Calder mobile, poised vulnerably in their spaces and thereby establishing an equality with our fragile forms. Read Heidegger on technology and you might get a sense of how this could serve to halt our very concept of our own civilization and its endless quest to conquer the environment. (I really didn't set out to write about the Storm King trip, but it was one of the adventures that inspired me to start this blog. Took quite a while before the plan was realized.)
More or less across the water is Beacon. We lit on the Dia in the afternoon, and were barely in the door when we were confronted with two rooms next to one another, each about the length of a city block. These spaces contained Walter De Maria's The Equal Area Series, which consists of many pairs of two silvery shapes, a circle and a square, set one after the other. In each pair, the circle and square have equal areas. But the area of each set differs from that of the previous one, in such a way (according to the artist) that in one room, the pieces counteract the narrowing effect of distance, while in the other they enhance it. (I suppose if you make the unforgivable mistake of approaching the exhibit backwards the effects are reversed.) This opening salvo heralds one of the M&M themes of Dia: Math and Materials. Obsession with mathematical relations is everywhere, like you stepped through the door of a Pythagorean oracle. One artist after another is described as being "fascinated with numbers" or something like that, and the "conceptual" in their art is partly based on the philosophical that these mathematical relationships are solid and real and permanent, for all their abstraction. Like art. Tsa. (An expression one of my acquaintances used to use, meaning roughly "over and done with!" Parrots like expressions to be short and sweet.)
The mathematical theming of Dia's "conceptual" art is often reflected in the strongly geometrical nature of the works, which is nowhere more abundant than in Sol LeWitt's wall drawings. Sometimes entitled according their mathematical concepts, these unbelievably anal works cover entire large walls with finely ruled pencil markings. Ranging from simple ideas like "Vertical lines, not straight, not touching, covering the wall evenly" to complex concepts involving midpoints and arcs and whatnot, these works often shimmer with fantasized colors as our visual mechanisms try to come to terms with the unimaginable division of white spaces. Undeniably impressive, conceptual by definition, these works for me nevertheless seem closer to what is usually labelled "outsider art" - which is for the most part art by people with various DSM III illnesses - the ones who build incredibly detailed temples out of aluminum foil or cover the sides of barns with inscriptions that only they can decipher. One can imagine LeWitt, who has recently departed this life, trying in the next one to dig a hole to China with a spoon.
In fact, Michael Heizer has supplied Dia with something of a beginning to this project, a large space composed of four large, variously shaped holes in the floor. The holes might well be the result of surrounding another of Dia's illustrious art spaces with concrete - I mean Richard Serra's towering curved walls. These rusted metallic sculptures have become something of an artworld icon. Serra is touted as "a titan of sculpture, one of the last great modernists" - by no less than NY Times art critic Michael Kimmelman (6/1/07 p.E25). Serra is all over the place these days, with a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), a large permanent installation at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain (you know, the art space designed by that other ubiquitous supporter of steel prices, Frank Gehry) and plenty of recent exhibitions at major spaces like the Gagosian Gallery. Serra's work is sometimes explained in terms of its psychological origin, e.g., that he worked in steel yards. The artist himself has pointed to his experience seeing the hull of a ship raised as the origin of his ideas. That is interesting, but of course nobody outside the Duchamp school looks at rusted ship hulls as art, so the next stop is to talk about the fact that you need to move around in Serra's works to observe them, or that it is not physically possible to take in an entire work at once. "They're too complicated; from the outside you don't know what the inside is like, and vice versa", says Kimmelman in his review, adding that really "there is no inside or outside". That's good, but the same is true of the shell of a condemned building. Which might be made into art - through murals, graffiti, photography, etc. - but I don't think anyone is inviting graffiti artists to help out Serra's iron maidens.
What the critics are getting at is that Serra's work forces observers to use their imagination - to envision the work in their "mind's eye" even though it is right there in all its massive ferrous presence (or is it ferric? neither, I think; thank god for high school chemistry). As Kimmelman again puts it: "What matters in the end are your own reactions while moving through the sculptures, at a given moment, the works being Rorschachs of indeterminate meaning" (p.E28). But in my HO, for a leading art critic to write this without blinking is pretty scary. Because this applies to not only abandoned buildings but any object under the sun. This is Duchamp (or George Dickie) aesthetics on stilts: it's art if you put it in a museum, and it says whatever you make it say, and it means what you want it to mean. Okay, thanks, Richard, Mike... Aesthetic Relativism 101 is dismissed, see you next week.
This is not some isolated issue about the value of recent works by one contemporary artist. Serra's Tilted Arc (1981) is often pointed to as a turning point in the debate over public art. His description of the work matches pretty much what we have been talking about: "The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of the sculpture result from the viewer's movement. Step by step the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes." (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/visualarts/tiltedarc_a.html) Serra's work was eventually removed and destroyed by court order. This criminal act of "justice" was clearly based on the idea that public complaints about the inconvenience of walking around Tilted Arc and other lowbrow issues carry more weight than our cultural heritage, even when ithe latter consists of several tons of steel. But the travesty of judicial idiocy and the closed minds of Federal Plaza secretaries do not settle the question: what is the value of this art? For if it indeed has no meaning of its own then I don't see why anyone should give a hoot whether it was removed or not. Somebody put it there; somebody can take it away. Why did they put it there? There had better be a reason.
This reason is not provided by the relativist idea that art is just a kind of prop that you use to "play games of make-believe", as Kendall Walton puts it. Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote a poem, "A Coney Isalnd of the Mind", which begins with a war image from Goya and then paints a picture of suburban post-War America in which he imagines the insipid images of billboards and superficial suburban bliss as a re-enactment of that suffering in a different form. A "Coney Island of the mind" is what Walton and Kimmelman seem to think art is; a Torqued Ellipse is a good place to play splatter-paint games with your imagination. But Ferlinghetti's poem suggests that Coney Island is a troubled place and the artist is not a roller coaster operator but a tightrope walker without a net: he is "constantly risking absurdity/and death/whenever he performs/above the heads/of his audience"; moreover he must do this "all without mistaking/ any thing/ for what it may not be" (#15). Roughly: art uses our illusions of who we are to reflect back to us who we really are: our sometimes ghoulish, soulless banality, our paranoia, our inhumanity.
Now my guess is this: Serra's superficial description of Tilted Arc does not reveal his true hand as an artist; that, rather, partly comes out in his response to its demise: "I don't think it is the function of art to be pleasing. Art is not democratic. It is not for the people" (same source). Certainly not from the 20th century onward. Art is not democratic, and it does not therefore suggest that whatever we think it means, then by definition, that's what it means. It is not an amusement park of the mind. It is a tightrope act, and with Tilted Arc, Serra did not so much fall as he was knocked down by the chorus of boos from people whose culture is defined by the Burger King across the street. But I don't know what poses the greater danger: these inanities from below, or the relativist interpretations from above. Serra's works are terrifying, they threaten to fall, they threaten to capture and destroy you, they separate you from your sense of direction and balance and purpose and wrap you in mystery. They are metallic forms of vertigo; they separate spaces from one another so that you cannot rejoin them with your senses, and the fact that you can do so with your imagination is small consolation for their disorienting message. They mean precisely what they are, and precisely not what you want them to mean.
But no great art is so one-dimensional as to have merely a negative meaning. In the fact that they do not fall, that they do not trap and destroy you, that they do, as Serra says, respond to changes in your viewing position, they reintroduce a kind of humanism just when it all seemed to be headed down a black spiral vortex. You can touch these works; you can smell them; you can even hear them. Consciousness is vast, strange, confusing; perception is local, tangible and more or less well-behaved. The small grain of truth in the relativist perspective is that it is up to each of us to take what opportunities we can to restore what we have lost. And what is that? Perhaps the innocence that fled as the modern era of communication, transportation, nuclear nightmare and genocide unfolded. Serra's sculptures are the aftermath of a nuclear conflagration, shards of our existence left when all is destroyed. But they are just as much the prevision of that event, allowing us to reflect on it before it happens. They are the walls that separate us but also the smooth curves that let us flow together; the shadow over us, and the noir film that still lights the theater - and which we can edit by wandering through the theater. Like Mark di Suvero, his enormous, desnse compositions can be taken to Coney Island, where they have no weight at all. They give us the present as it is, but also the future as it might be. The former we can't control; the latter is all up to us. (Anti-Relativism 201 is dismissed.)
Serra is one of the outstanding examples of the second of Dia's two themes, the aesthetic use of the sensual properties of materials. Throughout Dia we find materials speaking for themselves: piles of broken glass, enormous stones, the color variations of sheet metal and the tree ring patterns on plywood. Donald Judd is another highly influential exponent of this school, and he is represented here in part by an installation of plywood boxes. Their polished surfaces undulate with natural tree-ring patterns that seem to express some sort of pulsating energy inside. Having just bantered about Serra I'm not going to do Donald Judd right now (or maybe ever) but the two of them sort of lead the second pack: the material guys. And what does all this have to say? Think about it: you've got the math guys, and the material guys. Mathematical relations are usually thought of as being immaterial, but fixed, unchanging. Stone and wood and glass appear to be extremely hard, solid but in fact they are transitory. The fixed immaterial and the transitory material... what binds them together in Dia, the postmodern space par excellence? The fact that the artist submits, in part, to qualities that exist outside, beyond her control; and this is the window through which the observer, in all his relativistic exuberance, can enter and direct - up to a point. The observer can bind to the works through the universality or apparent permanence, but must then try to understand how the artist means to use these properties.
That is, if the "art" is really worth anything, the artist does not merely assemble and sign off. Something is being said here, otherwise it ain't art - or if you prefer, it ain't good art (and this sentence either ain't English or it ain't good English). One thing I insist on is that mere flowery descriptions of Serra and his aesthetic, or Donald Judd and his, or Gerhard Richter and his grey glass, or Robert Smithson and his, such as we find in much superficial art criticism and commentary, does not make it art/good. The works say something or they don't, and if not, goodbye. What they say doesn't have to be obvious, or discernible without the artist's input. Part of what made me appreciate the Di Suveros was a film on his work that was showing at the main building at Storm King. Di Suvero makes no pretense, as some artists do, that his work has no meaning. People have meaning; people who do art funnel their meanings through artistic expressions, and filter them through the conventions of the artworld. Never believe artists who says their work has no meaning; or rather, treat this pretense as just another part of their art.
I should not leave Dia without mentioning that there are some rooms there that do not seem especially indebted to mathematerials. Then again, paint is a material, a point that I'm sure is not lost on Donald Judd or his school. There are paintings here that appear to be solidly in the abstract tradition - a stunning space full of Agnes Martin's work, large, striped canvases of washed-out pastel colors, with names like "Love", "Happiness", "The Sea", and - most commonly - "Untitled". Sometimes life makes one want to just crawl inside one of these works and fall asleep. At the other end of the color spectrum lie the much smaller works of Blinky Palermo, whose installation consists of several canvases collectively entitled "To the People of New York City". Their iridescent reds and yellows (labelled "cadmium") bring to mind another straightedged homage to the Big CrabApple, Mondrian's "Broadway Boogie Woogie". I'm afraid I don't really see any conceptual relationship between these works and the Dia's M&M artists. Though there is plenty of bridge work: Warhol, for example, whose silkscreen method is in a way a median between the deliberate application of paint and the appropriation of existing materials; or the amazing chamber of John Chamberlain, whose metallic sculptures are largely obtained from automobile junkyards, but in some cases offer stunning bursts of color. Color here is not a property of the material - but then again, it is, insofar as the material is an already painted object. The colors appear to say: "We are not Art Museum Colors; we are not Mother Nature's Colors; we are Automobile Paint Shop colors! But we appear very natural, don't we? Are we worse just because we're different?"
Well, color is to mathematics as paint is to material. Or so it seems; but many philosophers, from John Locke on, have thought that color is merely in the mind of the beholder. That is, merely like beauty. A good, if somewhat relativistic, note on which to end this essay.
