Should Museums Show Their Johnsons? (Part 1)

 

God, I haven't had that much fun creating a title in a long time! I guess the opportunity was arranged by the Fates and Muses in some occult ritual. 

Cries had just gone up regarding the planned placement of Seward Johnson's monumental sculpture of a slightly exposed Marilyn Monroe near the entrance to the Palm Springs Art Museum, when a group of anonymous scholars threw into question the naming of museum institutes and university buildings after Philip Johnson, the modernist architect and one-time American fascist. These days, it seems that having a Johnson is not always an asset.

Let's do Seward first. His 2011 Forever Marilyn depicts the movie star in a famous shot from The Seven-Year Itch, where a gust of wind from a subway tunnel blows her dress up above her knees as she tries to press it back down.

"Forever Marilyn, by Seward Johnson" (Photo: Christopher Lance)

 

No less an authority than the Palm Springs Art Museum's Director, Louis Grachos, as well as three former directors and other Palm Springs cultural luminaries, have spoken out against moving the statue there. Here's a quote from Grachos: “When you exit the museum, you are going to see the exposed backside of a 26-foot-tall Marilyn Monroe, including her underwear,” he explained by phone this week. “That’s not the message we want to give to our community.”

"Exposed backside?" Listen, um, Louis, and your predecessors, with your undoubtedly shining credentials as artworld  judges of taste and propriety, I have one piece of advice for you: Don't go to Florence!

Michelangelo's David at the Academia Gallery in Florence

 (Photo: Anton Alterman)

I mean, seriously - from directly below the statue you can look up at Marilyn Monroe's underwear... So what the hell is in your museum, Mr. Director, if you are so horrified by the thought of the Marilyn's underwear outside the museum? Just still lifes and Abstract Expressionist canvases? Or are you saying it's okay to show depictions of privies within your hallowed halls, but outside you'd better be more cautious? (Actually, don't go to Florence, but do go to the Vatican - where a guard stands outside the Sistine Chapel checking that there are no bare shoulders or knees about to enter, while a priest inside warns over a PA that "this is a house of god". But I digress.)

Let's keep in mind that Johnson's Marilyn has been around the block and behind the bushes once or twice. Forever Marilyn has resided in a public plaza in Chicago, at Grounds for Sculpture, Johnson's public sculpture park, in New Jersey, and in Downtown Palm Springs. This has not, to my knowledge, resulted in the deterioration of the moral fabric of society. (Okay, that fabric has deteriorated - but that has more to do with a certain New York demagogue than a New Jersey sculptor.) The brouhaha is all about moving Marilyn from Downtown to a spot near the art museum's entrance. I guess the culture czars of Palm Springs were too busy to raise the cry of poisoning the public mind when the statue was downtown, so they made it a NIMBY issue. Terribly responsible of you folks.

What, then, is the right "message" to send to the Palm Springs community? How about: "We will do absolutely nothing to offend your presumed 19th century sexual morality. Indeed, we are not so much an art museum as a repository of artifacts pre-approved by a committee of West Coast evangelicals, the Pope and the local Republican establishment..." 

Wait! What? This is actually a liberal southern California city, one with the highest concentration of LGBTQ households in the country, who just elected an openly bisexual woman as mayor, and where a Republican is lucky to get forty percent of the vote in a local or national election. What is this community doing imposing such anachronistic Victorian prudishness on their art institutions?

According to the directors and their cohorts, the objections are not due to phony religious scruples about sexuality. Rather, putting the statue at the museum "elevates an approach to women that is inappropriate in 2020, introducing a blatantly sexist statue in front of our most significant cultural institution." They refer to it as "a 26-foot statement about women and sexual appeal". Johnson's monumental "war memorial" statue of a sailor kissing a woman at the end of WW II has similarly been criticized for its upskirt view and the woman's submissive pose. (He called it "Unconditional Surrender", obviously relishing the double entendre.)

But women have been depicted in sexually suggestive and submissive poses since, oh, Botticelli's Venus? To say nothing of the frankly pornographic works of Picasso and others. Or Lautrec's prostitutes. Today, though, we know better than to show a woman's undies. Today we know that when men depict women's bodies they are being used as sex objects. In fact, why focus on secondary works like Forever Marilyn - what about The Seven Year Itch itself? Not to mention other Marilyn Monroe films, and of course, her Playboy spread. She didn't actually agree to be in Playboy, but she agreed to pose nude for photographer Tom Kelley, who sold the pictures to Hugh Hefner; apparently, she didn't mind the attention it got her. So, is the idea that the best way to honor her is never to show the films and photographs in which she is, clearly, depicted as an icon of beauty and sexual attraction - a role she conspired in over the course of a roughly 15-year career? Or am I missing some hidden logic? 

Sorry, I don't see any more sexual objectification in this derivative work than in numerous cinematic and photographic images that Marilyn participated in hundreds of times. But perhaps the narrative is supposed to be something like, "Marilyn was forced to let the male-dominated studio system make a sex object out of her in order to have an acting career, but we need not endorse that grim reality." (I believe something like this was argued by Gloria Steinem in a book on Marilyn.) 

There have been plenty of cases where women were taken advantage of in film and other visual arts, and I have no doubt that in order to break into the field Marilyn had her "MeToo" moments. But a blanket label of "blatantly sexist" for representations of her as a sex symbol is blatantly false. She was actually a trend-setter in taking control of her career; she formed her own production company, carefully managed her image, and forced the world to take her seriously as an actress after having edged into cinema in "dumb blonde" roles. I regret if it doesn't fit the pretentious piety of the #MeToo era to point out that some women want to be admired specifically for their beauty, glamor and desirability, but, whatever her other troubles (they were many) Marilyn was apparently very comfortable with expressing her sexuality in a variety of ways. There's absolutely no reason to think she would have been disturbed by Stewart Johnson's sculpture.

It seems that even art directors toss around casual judgments about sexuality without so much as a thought about the broader implications of what they are saying. To give the slightest credit to their offhand comments about sexual morality would be to write off a vast segment of the plastic arts, film, theater, vocal music in various genres, ballet and perhaps much else, past, present and future, as an affront to decency and something from which to protect the impressionable minds of society at large. It is frankly quite disturbing to see people who ought to be upholding principles of liberty, progress, openness and artistic freedom buying directly into a moral agenda that could equally come from the playbook of the religious right. 

But this, sad to say, has been my experience of the left in general, going back many decades, and the more so the more left they are. The unfortunate truth is that there is a thin line between the fulminations of the Moral Majority or the Catholic Church about the sanctity of family, with its narrowly defined limits on what constitutes legitimate sexual expression, and feminist scruples about sexuality and sexual oppression. The latter run side by side with reactionary efforts to suppress female self-expression when it happens to take sexually liberated forms that they do not understand as empowerment. 

Left and right, using superficially different vocabularies, attempt to suppress explicit sexual expression that doesn't fit their political narrative. But before modern feminism and gay liberation and the coming out of transgender people, what happened was the sexual revolution of the sixties, and you cannot go backwards to undo that without taking a lot else with you. We need to sharply distinguish between the critique of moral transgressions like rape, domestic abuse and the sort of serial predatory behavior that #MeToo targets (when it is on target, which it often isn't) and the celebration of sexuality as a game, a skill, an art form and or just a facet of human nature. Otherwise the public conversation is like a coin with the same face on both sides. Attacking a work of art with feminist rhetoric about "sexual objectification" adopts a different language to achieve the same ends as conservative monitors of aesthetic propriety

Let Marilyn's butt wave free. Maybe her message is just what Seward Johnson's was: if you don't like it you can kiss my ass.

Before I leave this part of the Johnson disputes, it seems worth adding that the Palm Springs art directors, before they got into their feminist rant, were complaining about the fact that the statue would obscure the art museum itself. Though it seems like a problem easily solved by judicious consideration of its exact location, I bow out of that conversation. It certainly was possible to debate that point without bringing in spurious social critiques.

But more interestingly, they did not even address other more serious issues of aesthetics and morality in their statement, to wit:

1. The statue, like many of Johnson's other works, was copied from a shot in Billy Wilder's film, and Johnson might be accused of plagiarism, as he was with Unconditional Surrender (apparently based on a famous photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt, V-J Day in Times Square). I'm not endorsing this view, for there is a robust tradition of secondary uses of images from previous artworks, and Johnson's sculptures surely add an aesthetic dimension that is not there in the original. But this is a more serious discussion, and one suspects that the relevant authorities had no taste for intellectual challenges, preferring to haul out some trendy epithets about sexism that need not be backed up with real logic in the current climate.

2. This and other Johnson works have also been described more than once as kitsch, not real art. His manufacturing process, employing CAD (computer-aided design) software to create works from existing images, has also put his originality in question. I have been to Grounds for Sculpture, where many of Johnson's works reside, among hundreds of works by other sculptors whose content ranges from contemporary abstractions to, let's say playful humor and fantasy.

Seward Johnson, "Dejeuner Déjà Vu" (Photo: Anton Alterman)

 

I've been to enough sculpture gardens to say that the range felt liberating. There is nothing wrong with modernist mountainsides like Storm King or rolling estates like the one at the Nassau County Museum of Art. But a visit to Grounds For Sculpture can relieve you of the tendency to stomp your foot and insist that "this public sculpture stuff is Very Serious Business!" And whether it is or not, I see Johnson's work being in the tradition of Warhol and the artists who used popular culture as a jumping-off point. He had an eye for the iconic, and if his work is kitsch or lacks originality then so does that of a hell of a lot of pop artists who stand in modern art museums all over the world.

3. There is also a more legitimate reason to at least consider the charge of sexism, though against Wilder, not Johnson. I recall that it was reported not very long ago that Marilyn, though she had agreed to the famous shot in which a gust of wind blows her dress up from below, was not expecting the strong blast that not only blew it above her knees but made it impossible to push the dress back down, exposing her for several seconds on the movie set in public.There was some suggestion that this was all intentional and that she was not very pleased about it. (I am not going to hold up this post trying to find the reference, but I believe it was in the NY Times; I'll keep looking.) Even if true, Johnson would not have known this when he created the statue. But one might argue that it rubs the wrong way to have an embarrassing moment so monumentally immortalized. The problem is, it is already immortalized in the film and a thousand reproductions of the clip. Making a sculpture of it does not necessarily endorse the original motivation, and if someone finds the statue disturbing, all the better. Andy Warhol did silk screens of an electric chair and other unsettling images. This is your culture, make of it what you will.

4. Finally, in this era when support for the arts by morally bankrupt corporate executives, and in particular by those involved with predatory pharmaceutical companies, has become an issue, it might have been interesting to raise the question of the extent to which Johnson's monumental sculptures owe their existence to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, spoils of a drug company that has been involved in plenty of ethical controversies. Seward Johnson was the grandson of Robert Wood Johnson, the company founder, one of whose sons (Seward's uncle) ran the company, and fired him from a job there at the age of 32. Seward became CEO of The Atlantic Foundation, a non-profit established by his father. Though he was not a direct heir of the Johnson & Johnson fortune (he even had to wage a legal fight for a small portion of his father's estate) it seems likely that his studio, artworks and sculpture park were at least indirectly subsidized by money from the pharmaceutical company. It has been an ethically rocky road for Johnson & Johnson, perhaps tainting Seward's work like a bottle of Tylenol or talcum powder. I say "perhaps", since I remain a bit skeptical of this charge too, given Seward's minimal connection with the company himself. But someone might develop such case, and it might even have more sticking power than the sexism label for Forever Marilyn.

So the putative art experts with their feminist consciences decided to shoot from the hip about the exposure of the metallic undergarments of a woman who is known the world over as a symbol of beauty and sexuality, because it was an easy potshot to take, while other objections would actually require an argument. Unfortunately, the whole thing is a sad reminder of another recent public art debacle by the liberal West Coast intelligentsia - the decision by the San Francisco Board of Education to paint over, then (after an outcry) to cover up instead, Victor Arnautoff's historic WPA murals in George Washington High School, out of fear that they may be exposing minority high school students to uncomfortable realities of U.S. history. (Read what the Parrot had to say about this one here.) Maybe California should just remove all its public artworks, close its art institutions, and take a breather.They have Disneyland and the Hearst Mansion, anyway; do they really need all these sculptures and murals too?

I think I have discovered something about myself. When forced to choose between freedom of artistic expression in just about any form, and political correctness in at least some forms, I stand with the artists, ready to endure the slings and arrows of self-righteous activists for the long-term good of our cultural heritage. But (there's always a "but"), there are limits. Peppering the landscape with works by admirers of Adolph Hitler is one of them. I'll talk about that in the next post.

Closer to Home? 50 Years Later, It Seems Prophetic

Happy June 15, everyone! Yes, even before this Friday (Juneteenth) we have an anniversary to celebrate!

As everybody knows,1970 was the year that rock and roll died. It was the year in which, as I vividly recall, I read a music review in one of the underground New York newspapers (maybe The East Village Other) referring to the "Grand Funk and James Gang garbage" that had begun depreciating the airwaves. I knew who Grand Funk were. I had never heard the James Gang, and in the half century since I don't think I have ever listened to an entire album by them.

The year the Beatles broke up. The year Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix died. Or, how's this for contrasting "egad!" occasions: the year Black Sabbath releases their first album, and The Partrdige Family have a #1 hit with "I Think I Love You". There were always artists who you thought must have had to bribe DJ's to play their records - you turned out to be right, in some cases - but suddenly you had this influx of soon-to-be superstars whose records you could turn up as loud as you wanted and still not feel like they should be in your rock collection: The Carpenters. James Taylor. The first U.S. release by a sort of piano-bar type guy named Elton John. In general, everything was too loud, or not loud enough, and nothing was just right.

Or so it seemed. What a difference a day makes, or at least a half-century.
 
In June 1970 my junior year of high school drew to a close. The civil rights movement, feminism, gay liberation and especially protests against the war in Vietnam had gripped the consciousness of people my age. Revolution was in the air; there were so many self-styled Marxist groups around that you could take any combination of "revolutionary", "worker", "socialist", "league", "world" and "party" and there'd be a group for that. The Strawberry Statement became a film, and so did Joe - the one, an exaltation of student rebellion, the other an outlet for reactionary anger at everything associated with the Hippie movement of the 60's. Nixon, the redbaiting politician from California, was busy invading Cambodia, with the support of his notorious National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, who would later win a Nobel Peace Prize for the humiliating peace treaty he was forced to sign after the death of about a million Vietnamese and 50,000 Americans.

March 6, 1970: The Weathermen explosion, as self-styled revolutionaries accidentally blow up a Greenwich Village townhouse. 3 unlucky members die, the others are arrested.

April 13, 1970: The Apollo 13 explosion, a near-disaster. 3 lucky astronauts survive.

May 4 1970: National Guardsmen open fire on a student protest at Kent State, killing four. The day goes down in infamy. A few days later, hard hat construction workers attack student protesters on Wall Street. (When I marched about a week after that they merely threw rivets at us from the upper girders of construction site.)

May 15 1970: After some rowdy behavior on the campus of mostly black Jackson State College in Jackson, FL, police officers pump 460 bullets over 30 seconds into a dormitory filled with unarmed black students, killing 2 and injuring 11. The news is quickly forgotten.

May 25, 2020: The entire world watches a video of the brutal police murder of George Floyd, the streets of major cities erupt in protest for weeks, and some long-overdue changes may finally take place. It only took another 50 years, and hundreds if not thousands more black lives being exterminated by the "justice" system, for anything at all to change.)

The country was in the grip of a major recession for most of 1970. The average rate of inflation was 5.7%, the highest since 1951. (It would be more than double that 10 years later.) The unemployment rate was over 6%; the economy grew by .2 percent. The U.S. position as postwar economic leader of the "free world" was eroding rapidly.

Look for things to love about 1970 and you come up pretty empty-handed. But I have one. And it is calculated to make every rock critic in America hold their forehead with two hands as if they just woke up with a major hangover. If I could only get every... any?... rock critic in America to read this.

So, yes, this was the year that everything went to shit in music; it wasn't just Grand Funk and the James Gang; we were suddenly inundated with noise bands who sounded like they had possibly heard Little Richard once and figured if they could just learn to play three chords and a couple of simple blues riffs they could be rock and roll stars. And they were right. Sabbath, Spooky Tooth, Slade, Wishbone Ash, REO Speedwagon, Alice Cooper, Deep Purple, Mountain, Savoy Brown, Iron Butterfly - you keep going if you want. It all sucked. True, some of those bands managed to come up with a song or two that was not completely worthless; one or two even managed an album that I would not melt down for the value of the vinyl. I can think of only one - Aerosmith - that managed to turn my head around and make me a fan. But all this dreck - pre-metal or degraded rock&roll or whatever you want to call it - we knew it was garbage and rock music was more or less over. We knew that because we knew Hendrix and Cream and Led Zeppelin and we didn't think these guys got it about how to play hard rock.

The end of the decade more or less confirmed that we were right; for in place of the sorry list above, you could now make a new one: Journey, Foreigner, Styx, Kansas, Rush, Toto, Boston, Kiss, Steve Miller, and a lot more bands I have never had any use for. Inbetween came another sorry lot - Montrose, Van Halen, Foghat, Slade and those endlessly productive one-hit wonders, Golden Earring, who had actually been around forever until they got on anyone's radar. To say nothing of peripheral progressive rock acts like Starcastle and Uriah Heep. Once again, here and there a song or two managed to climb up from the mire and prove that there was life beneath the surface. Provoked by one of my brothers, I was recently forced to acknowledge "Separate Ways" as a so-called "guilty pleasure". There may be more than that buried in these bands' combined output, but having just taken a refresher course in the Grand Funk discography, I am not inclined to do a listening project to see what I missed. I know that the 70's start out bad, and get worse.

And yet... the thought that this assessment might be a little too harsh pushes its way into my consciousness, due to the all but criminal intervention of a friend way back when, at a time when teenage angst was as ripe as a week-old banana and even the distant chimes of romance were about as sweet. I put up valiant resistance, to the music at least. She was a big Grand Funk fan, had all of their albums - three or four, at that point. I would show up at her house, where, if I recall, a sister or brother and mother and maybe a few pets would be wandering about, but we had something remotely resembling privacy in her room - at least if the music were loud enough that no one could hear us. And Grand Funk was loud, nobody would deny them that. She played their first album a few times; I hated it and told her so. "What about 'Heartbreaker'?" Although the single only charted in Canada, it somehow struck GF fans as a hit. I found it no less annoying than the rest of the disk. Besides, by the time our story takes place, there had already been a song called "Heartbreaker" - actually more like a few dozen, but the one I had in mind was not only a great song but had one of the greatest guitar solos ever recorded. I was a huge Zep fan from almost the day their first album came out, and this was a lot of nonsense by comparison.

She played their second album and thought I had to like that. It had already gone Gold by that time, for reasons that people of discerning taste are still trying to figure out. I thought it sucked. She probably would have thrown me out, had it not been for their third album.

By way of hindsight, let me just add that today I find their early albums less offensive in certain ways than I did then. Though neither of them will ever have much of a place in my heart, or ears, I no longer hear them as collections of incompetent, not to say cynical, junk. In fact, while you can point to places here and there where Farner's guitar solos seem to just die, or never get started, and Brewer's drumming is not always convincing (and usually of little creative interest), there are plenty of other places that demonstrate a fair amount of competence. Farner's lyrics are usually pretty forgettable, but the songwriting, especially from "Heartbreaker" to the end of On Time, has some sparks of creativity. Toss them in with all the hard rock bands that were crawling out of the woodwork at the time and they sound like more of the same. But give a good listen and you can see that while he's no Eric Clapton, Farner was already a bit better than quite a few rock guitarists at that time, and he was willing to take a few chances, while Brewer - again, no Ginger Baker he, but the extended solo he manages on T.N.U.C. is not compatible with complaints about the band's competence. Brilliant, no, but more than competent.

June 15, 1970: Capitol Records releases Grand Funk Railroad's Closer to Home. It was the album that made them a household name. The latter may not be something to celebrate, but the album surely is.

There used to be this industry thing about third albums; something like, "Either this one hits or we're going to stop wasting our money promoting you." I don't know if anyone told that to Mark Farner, the songwriting, singing and guitar-playing engine of Grand Funk Railroad. At the time of which I'm writing, the single "I'm Your Captain" had already made the rounds, and I could not deny it was a good song, maybe a great song. It was not the kind of song that made you think, "Oh shit, the 60's are really over now;" it was, on the contrary, the kind that made you feel like there might be hope. So, even though it was delayed gratification, being the last cut on the 2nd side, I listened a little more attentively to the whole album. And it grew on me, and grew, and... well, finally, I bought the album. Many years later, I bought the remastered CD. I downloaded it and put it on my CD Walkman, on my mp3 player, on my smartphone. If I could only bring 10 albums it would probably go with me to a deserted island. What the funk happened to me?

First thing - it is one of those relatively rare albums - I know you have some - on which I can honestly say I look forward to every track. Second, unlike their first two albums, it has a clean, professional sound, though not as clean as it would become on E Pluribus Funk. Third, the songwriting is top notch - and for the most part not in the least addressed to Top 40 radio, as nearly every song is more than four minutes long. "Sin's a Good Man's Brother" is built around a riff that's up there in the "Day Tripper" class. "Aimless Lady" is just incredibly well constructed, a great melody (not always Mark Farner's forte, to say the least), with a terrific bass line from Mel Schacher and an irresistable beat. In contrast to "Heartbreaker" and some other early tracks, the 2-part harmonies are not perfunctory but really put some bite into the chorus. It's a kind of vocal sound that practically identifies GFR, and when they work they work - e.g.. on the chorus of "I Don't Have to Sing the Blues", which opens the album's second side, or on a song like "Black Licorice" from We're an American Band (albeit in the latter case behind lyrics that just about hit rock bottom, and in both cases are borderline offensive). "Nothing Is the Same" is another great composition. Starting with another very nice guitar intro, it becomes a fine rocker that sort of boils over as the song goes into double-time towards the end. The two cuts that stand out least, "Get it Together" and "Hooked on Love", are blue-eyed soul efforts (which I suppose a lot of Farner's songs could be called), and since I will unabashedly say that some of my favorite soul is of the blue-eyed kind (The Righteous Brothers used to be regulars on my turntable) I happen to like them. And "Mean Mistreater", a title familiar from more than one old blues song, is enough all by itself to paralyze me with nostalgia for days gone by, a ballad of uncanny power in its simplicity. A by no means minor virtue of the album is some note-perfect solo work by Farner, pretty much throughout the first side.

Songs about sailors, or with sailing metaphors, were not exactly uncommon in rock at that time. The years 1966-72 featured Billboard top 10 hits like "Yellow Submarine", "Sloop John B.", "Come on Down to My Boat Baby" and "Brandy", not to mention hosts of others that didn't chart much but burned into our skulls nonetheless, like "Wooden Ships". In 1970 Blues Image contributed their still familiar hit "Ride, Captain, Ride". So "I'm Your Captain" had plenty of thematic company, and its strong acoustic component was right on target in a year when James Taylor was a big star and even Led Zeppelin released an album full of acoustic and folk-derived tracks. On the other end of the musical spectrum, producer Terry Knight somehow managed to hire musicians from the Cleveland Symphony, one of the world's leading orchestras, to record the instrumental overlays at the end. Not that the parts are so difficult they demand top flight professionals, but the silky string sound is what you would expect from that ensemble. (I doubt that George Szell was conducting - though if he was, that might help explain why he kicked the bucket a month later.) The harmonies are great throughout, and in particular they give the bridge ("Am I in my cabin dreaming/Or are you really scheming/To take my ship away from me") the kind of depth needed to keep things moving forward as the D chord changes to minor and the song suddenly assumes a new level of harmonic complexity. But ultimately, it's the success of the simple, repeated chant "I'm getting closer to my home" that makes you keep listening and want to raise your voice and chime in. Add to all that some of Mel Schacher's most interesting bass guitar work. (On the album as a whole Schacher's work has a good parallel: John Paul Jones' work on Zep II, which still seems like the best thing he ever did.) All of that behind an unusually fine set of lyrics from Farner.

At the time, a version of the song cut down for Top 40 play made it to #22. Now, I'm no big fan of the listener-polled "Top 1043 Classic Rock Songs" released every year by Q104.3 in New York City (there's another early post in this blog on that topic). But apparently, in 2015 "I'm Your Captain" ranked #9. Those rankings are heavily affected by the station's rotation in any particular year; the 2019 poll had it at #52. Whatever - for a song that didn't even make the Top 20 playlist when it was released, it has had remarkable staying power.

And here's another thing to make you scratch your head: it is usually interpreted as having something to do with misgivings about the Vietnam War. Farner has never confirmed this, and I personally don't find it compelling. But it does have an odd thematic similarity to Amazing Grace, the song by and about a slave ship captain who felt "mighty sick", turned around and brought his enslaved cargo back home.

"I'm getting closer to my home...": is it Farner's "Amazing Grace", or the anthem for a national quarantine? If it seems prophetic, with its mood of impending doom and its exaltation of the virtues of being home, that is just one more thing that adds to the mystique of Closer to Home. There is a long list of groups with one great album, writers with one great book, and filmmakers with one great movie. Put this on the list: Closer to Home is one of the greatest albums ever made, no matter what you think of Grand Funk Railroad, Mark Farner or 70's rock.

Anniversaries are a good opportunity to re-evaluate things, and in that spirit I have taken it upon myself to listen once again to some of GFR's albums, which I had once dismissed as rubbish. I am not about to become a Grand Funk fan, other than Closer to Home. But I am willing to say that my degree of antipathy towards their other albums has somewhat diminished. The first two still don't impress me, though the first, On Time, seems a bit more creative, and the second ("Red Album") just a bit more polished, than I used to think. Survival doesn't do much for me, quite a letdown after Closer to Home. But E Pluribis Funk suggests that after finally getting their act together on Closer to Home, and then losing it again on Survival, they at last found their groove. It's not going to any deserted islands with me, but it is a respectable, possibly even good, album. The band and the sound are both extremely tight, and Farner's guitar work, which was already excellent on Closer to Home, has become first rate - or maybe second rate, since he is no Clapton or Page, or Hendrix for that matter. But whatever the merits of the view that GFR emerged from the streets of Flint as a trio of hacks, it is completely untenable by the time E Pluribus Funk comes out. Phoenix, their next album, is, like most of their albums, a land of peaks and valleys, the latter being the points at which you are pretty sure you were right about them the first time, and the former constantly challenging that with more creative songwriting and flashes of instrumental inspiration. We're an American Band is similarly tight and instrumentally excellent, though I don't like the material as much as on the previous two albums.

That, to me, is all the important albums they made, and it turns out that out of the six there is at least one outstanding gem, one pretty decent hard rocker, and one that might get a "not bad" in a generous moment. Now, think of another band that tends to get a bit more respect, alleged cowbells and all. I refer, of course, to Blue Oyster Cult. Their first album was pure genius, start to finish; their next best, Agents of Fortune, a respectable effort, with of course one of the greatest singles of all time; and their only other collection even worth talking about, Fire of Unknown Origin, might get a "not bad" in a generous moment. The rest is pretty much on a par with the worst of Grand Funk, if not a drop below. The difference comes down to maybe two BOC hits that are a bit over GFR's level (the other, of course, being "Burnin For You"). Mountain gets way more respect than Grand Funk, for reasons that are obscure to me, as they do not even have one album as good as Closer to Home. (Not to mention it was really "Mississippi Queen" that had the cowbell!)

Sadly enough, Mark Farner, the creative force behind GFR, the man who sang, on Closer to Home, "I don't care who you are, I love the human race", is now a raving rightwing lunatic, given to conspiracy theories and other nonsense of a sort currently enjoying a pulpit on Pennsylvania Avenue; he has been quite explicit about their anti-Semitic content, which even the Trumpet of the White House has not enunciated publicly. In 1972 he wrote "I Just Got to Know", which asks if you're ready "to stand up and fight for your rights" and "tired of the war and all that shit". The album also contained a rather dubious appeal in the name of Jesus to stop overpopulation "so you won't have to die". What's more, "The world is full of pollution/and Jesus is the solution". Okay, if that's your bag... but where was this heading? Farner's 1976 song "Don't Let 'Em Take Your Gun" (from their god-awful Zappa-produced Good Singin', Good Playin') has become an anthem for "Second Amendment people", while 1983's What's Funk? features an ignorant anti-communist rant against the revolution in tiny El Salvador, as if a victory of the downtrodden peasantry there would have been an existential threat to Farner's freedom in the U.S. (Recall how the revolution in Nicaragua toppled democracy in America...)There is so little to love about his politics that it is hard to believe he was once a hippie and a liberal. "Talk about a revolution/It seems to be the only solution", he sang on Closer to Home's opening cut, "Sin's a Good Man's Brother", at a time when the "revolution" was supposed to be about peace and love and and legalized pot and an end to war and rigid conservative values. He wrote environmentalist songs before that was a thing, peace-love-and-brotherhood songs, and anti-war songs. It's hard to understand how that guy became the person he is today.

As a Jew living amidst growing anti-Semitism I am not about to forgive Farner for promoting hatred and religious fanaticism. On the other hand, as a human being I cannot fail to admire his devotion to a son who tragically became quadriplegic after some ordinary teenage antics, and died a couple of years ago at 29 after a 10-year battle for survival. I wish I could put the two men together, as I wish I could put the genius of Closer to Home together with GFR's more prosaic efforts. The difference between a good human being and a cynical jerk can go act by act, and that between a great band and a mediocre one can go album by album.

I have discussed at some length in a previous post the unforgiving assessment of Grand Funk Railroad by my lifelong friend (and professional rock critic, which I can hardly claim to be) Ira Robbins, so I won't repeat myself here. The main reason to mention it again is that you can now read it on the magnificently updated Trouser Press web site, which has its own rewards if you like to read about rock; and that, if you appreciate the great writing in that piece, you can now partake of more of it in Ira's second novel, Marc Bolan Killed in Crash. (I already plugged his first one in that 7-year-old post I just referred to!) That should get you in the mood for a golden anniversary trip through 70's rock if anything will. In any case, GFR will never be a favorite of critics, and though I can't quite find my way to the Voldemort view that Ira takes of them, there are some good reasons for this.

But what I now want to go into is another aspect of their legacy that picks up again where I began, with the demise of worthwhile rock and roll in 1970. The year that rock music got sucked down a sinkhole, never to quite make it back, as we all know.

Well, here's an album playlist in which you might find a redeeming song or two:

Bridge Over Troubled Water, Moondance, Sweet Baby James, Ladies of the Canyon, Deja Vu, Elton John, McCartney, Let it Be, Workingman's Dead, BS&T 3, Time and a Word, Cosmo's Factory, John Barleycorn Must Die, A Question of Balance, Stage Fright, After the Gold Rush, Abraxas, Jesus Christ Superstar, Zep III, Tumbleweed Connection, American Beauty, The Man Who Sold the World, Layla, Naturally, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Tea for the Tillerman, Christmas and the Beads of Sweat, All Things Must Pass, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band.

I don't care how old you are, if you don't know and love most of those 26 albums you are not a person I can go out for beers with. Well... okay, maybe that's a bit hasty, but it would be more fun if you did! They all came out in 1970. I could try to boil it down some more, but already, most of those are arguably the best, or one of the best, efforts the respective artists ever produced. Maybe not Zep III; maybe not Let It Be, though in its stripped down version (Let It Be... Naked) it is up there, for me. Maybe The Man Who Sold the World is not Ziggy or Hunky Dory. Maybe...

Let me put it this way instead: in 1970, The Band, Blood Sweat and Tears, ELP, Eric Clapton (with Derek and the Dominoes), CCR, CSNY, the Grateful Dead, George Harrison, Elton John, The Moody Blues, Van Morrison, Cat Stevens, Santana, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, Three Dog Night, Traffic and Neil Young each released what is either their best or one of their two best albums. The only reason Joni Mitchell and Yes are not on that list is that they each made too many albums of surpassing brilliance to choose one or two. All four of the Beatles released their first solo albums, and all four convincingly demonstrated that their solo careers were going to live up to our expectations. The Dead and Elton John each released two great albums in the same year. What a terrible year for music.

Lauro Nyro's Christmas and the Beads of Sweat, even if not her best, was part of a trio of albums that opened a door through which Elton John, Joni Mitchell and a long list of later artists, including Kate Bush and Tori Amos, were happy to walk. (You can argue that Stevie Wonder deserves some credit there, but Nyro brought in a quality of freedom from pop limitations that I think anticipate his 1973 Innervisions and later work.)  Melanie's Leftover Wine and Candles in the Wind and The Carpenters' Close to You came out too - you can mutter "But that's not rock!" all you want, they won a lot of fans.

Still, I may have undersold 1970, in some ways. Perhaps you are a Ten Years After fan, you're going to add Cricklewood Green, I guess. If you are a prog rock fan you can point to early albums by about a dozen important prog bands, from Hawkwind and Van der Graaf Generator to Jethro Tull, Genesis and Gentle Giant. There is some classic underground stuff like Soft Machine's Third, if 2, Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother, a couple of Zappa albums, a Beefheart album, and, if you wish, Bitches Brew.

I have not mentioned 2 albums each by Dylan, King Crimson, The Doors, Badfinger and T Rex, and albums by the Beatles, Beach Boys, Todd Rundgren, Pretty Things and Poco, among many other noteworthy efforts, because they might not be those artists' best recordings. I ditched all live albums and posthumous releases (Cream, Hendrix, Stones, even The Who's Live at Leeds) and lots of other stuff. Chicago, marred by a few too many instrumental breaks of questionable merit, still had "25 or 6 to 4" and some other great songs. Jethro Tull's Benefit came out, and The Guess Who released by American Woman and Share the Land.

I have plenty of personal favorites that year, though they might not be yours: One Day at a Time, my favorite Joan Baez album, for example. Also three albums that Wikipedia seems not to know the exact release date for, all of which I think I still have: the eponymous Seatrain (with "13 Questions") and Sugarloaf (you do remember "Green-Eyed Lady", right?) and The Jaggerz' We Went to Different Schools Together (you should recall "The Rapper" too).

Beyond that, just a buttload of interesting stuff, take your pick: Argent, The Strawbs, Spirit, Faces, Canned Heat, Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, Fairport Convention, Mott the Hoople, Blue Cheer, Shocking Blue... It seems that while we were pining away for sixties music, musicians were busy re-inventing it, in spite of the James Gang crowd. It wasn't all them and Sabbath and Savoy Brown at all. Maybe there was a bit more in the "Hmmm, that's interesting" category than the "OMG what a brilliant album" category. Maybe Jefferson Starship's Blows Against the Empire, another 1970 release, does not match up with the best Jefferson Airplaine albums. There was a lot of searching for direction, some underwhelming experimentation, but overall, a lot of life.

It turns out we had our heads up our asses, so we could only see the shit that was coming out, while the next era in rock was unfolding. It was driven in large part by folk music, in part by technology, as new synthesizers, keyboards, mixing and amplification equipment were rolled out, and to some extent by a turn toward classical music, at least in the prog rock contingent. Still to come, amidst all the dreck, were The Yes Album, Fragile and Close to the Edge, Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, Aqualung, Madman Across the Water and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Joni Mitchell's other jazz-inflected middle period albums, nearly the entire, brilliant output of Steely Dan, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and some great work by the later Genesis, the best Moody Blues albums, and terrific work by some of my personal favorites - Nektar and 10cc, for instance. A certain guy named Bruce was about to spring from the Jersey Shore, initially to be dismissed by serious music fans as a Dylan wannabe; so, we had been wrong before. Across the ocean was a guy who didn't just make great music, he sort of re-ordered our thinking of what popular music was, again and again; I refer of course to David Bowie. And though a regrettable schism opened up between rock and R&B, and between white and black artists - another charge frequently heard in reference to the 70's - albums like Marvin Gaye's What's Going On?, Isaac Hayes' Shaft soundtrack,  and work by Sly Stone and others still broke through the artificial barriers.

Take it all together, and it was one of the greatest decades for music. The year 1975 alone had a slew of incredible albums - if I'm still blogging then, tune in for my next golden anniversary post.

And, finally, as if this is not enough fun already, there's this 1970 timeline story from Wikipedia:

"Grace Slick is invited to a tea party at the White House by Tricia Nixon, daughter of U.S. President Richard Nixon. Slick arrives at the party with Abbie Hoffman, who is on trial for conspiring to riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The pair planned to spike Nixon's tea cup with a heavy dose of LSD. Slick is recognized (although Hoffman is not) and told to leave because she is on the FBI list."

Now, look, Ivanka, you can do better than Tricia Nixon, can't you? So who can you get to help with that? I'm voting for Courtney Love, but you can use your imagination - Carrie Brownstein's an option, maybe even Lady Gaga? I do admit that there's a slight problem with this plan: if your Dad got dosed and lost his grip on reality, who would ever know the difference?

Oh, how far we've come since Richard Nixon! Maybe we'll get some great music this decade.

(Note: Originally posted at 9:00 a.m., and substantially updated at 4:25 p.m.)

Joker: Is the Joke on Us?

The bird population may be severely diminished, but there is hope: a Parrot has been spotted outside the box office of a famous Brooklyn cinema. What this means for biodiversity I'm not sure, but it at least means a new view from the Lamppost.

What is Todd Phillips up to, anyway, in this latest epistle from the Batcave? I sat through about two thirds of the film thinking it was a genuine art house piece which was going to take me somewhere new. I ended up feeling like I had been treated to a remake of The Dark Knight, with references to the urban decay of the 1970's and a Fellini-esque ending thrown in to top off a really unworkable stew of moral, political and psychological themes.

The problem with this film is that it starts out by providing motivations for Arthur Fleck's anger that suggest a serious psychodrama, but the plan is realized amidst a confusing muck of thematic impulses that never really get sorted out. First we get the idea that Arthur is a just a bit off, then almost immediately we find that he has a medical condition that causes him to laugh inappropriately - presumably Pseudobulbar affect, or PBA, though the film never puts a name on it. This condition can have a range of emotional effects, but Phillips never makes it clear whether Arthur's bizarre behavior all stems from this or whether he is also subject to schizophrenia or some other condition. For example, he is also strongly delusional, but that is not obviously related to PBA. We learn that he is on medication, but we are never sure what the medication is for, since he seems to have more than one mental disorder. At some point he apparently loses access to his medication, but yet another loose knot is what direct effect this has on his later actions or mental condition, if any.

Into this already complex picture Phillips adds a history of severe child abuse. That makes probably three different psychological motivations for the murderous spree that ensues. Hey, let's also make him an orphan with a deranged adoptive mother who he still lives with - why stint on emotional issues? The method here seems to be to pile it on rather than carefully work out any single theme.

Well, we are not done. Arthur is also placed in New York City at its nadir, the street violence, racial animosity, riots, graffiti, declining social services and infrastructure decay of the 1970's. (In a piece of ahistoric but playful nonsense, the film opens with Arthur dressed in his clown suit, holding a sign advertising the closing of "Kenny's Music" - presumably a dual reference to Manny's Music on 48th Street and Kenny's Castaways, which closed in 2009 and 2012 respectively - but hey, we get the idea.) The urban decay forms a backdrop of general hostility, insensitivity and paranoia that stokes the flames of Arthur's already inflamed psychosis.

Believe it or not, Phillips is still not quite finished motivating Fleck's violence. Arthur is also trying to hold down a job as a clown, where labor issues and a co-worker who is a bit of a lummox add to his worries. Yes, he is going down, down, down...

But he's not quite at the bottom yet. You see, amidst all his tsuris, Arthur still wants to make something of himself. Although the film makes clear (sometimes in surprising ways) that Arthur is delusional, it is not clear that he is incapable of surmounting this to the point of being able to do standup. He even wants to appear as a guest on a t.v. talk show with host Murray Franklin, who seems to be modeled on Merv Griffin, the iconic talk show host of the 70's. And in a plot twist that is such a stretch I can't even count this as a spoiler, Murray gets hold of a clip of Arthur being foiled in an attempt at standup due to his laughing disease, and makes fun of him on the air. So add public humiliation to Arthur's worries. This is almost like a second film spliced onto at least one, if not two or three others, for the sake of adding another opportunity for Arthur to spill blood. It's also a cheap way of getting off, though I don't want to say anything that would spoil the unsurprising ending. But I'm jumping the gun a bit - let's go back.

The first two encounters that set Arthur off are both with black people - a group of violent youths who steal the "Going Out of Business" sign he is carrying in front of Kenny's and beat him up, and a woman on a bus who shows remarkable insensitivity. But Arthur is not going to seek revenge on these people, which would immediately put in question the moral assets he needs to attract our sympathies by pitting him against other down and out individuals. Instead, the appropriate opportunity presents itself when he is, rather dubiously, attacked on a subway by three Wall Street dudes who have turned from harrassing a woman to pummeling Arthur. He has been given a pistol by the aforementioned lummox at the agency he works for, and the one-percenters and sexist jerks get their bloody comeuppance in an act that could be called self-defense.

Well, it is self-defense, but it is also feels like a reference to the Bernard Goetz shootings of 1984. This is the first instance of how the film is not just psychologically murky but politically questionable. The stage for Fleck's killing spree is set with incidents perpetrated by minorities, but to make it acceptable at first Phillips engineers an unlikely subway assault by white guys in business suits. Of course, neither the actions of a Goetz nor the shooting to death of three white guys really is morally defensible, though some use of the gun might have been in that situation. But Phillips also needs this incident to incite a grander theme of epic violence by people who worship the clown as something like the leader of an Occupy Wall Street movement. So the film is now involved with yet another, almost contradictory, theme: what begins as a parable of urban decay (the outer representation of Arthur's psychological decay) turns into an Occupy story, only grafted onto scenes of violence reminiscent not of the Occupy encampment or marches but of New York during the blackout, of Chicago or Paris in 1968, of Watts and Newark and other scenes of resistance by the poor, minorities and students to the mess that their cities had become and the power structures that kept them that way. All of which is carried out by demonstrators in clown masks, which both hides their racial identity and tacks on an urban legend about violent clowns, a sort of visceral mockery of a movement that was subjected to violence by the police, not the other way around.

Cinema can be great entertainment even when its content is highly questionable. Joaquin Phoenix's performance as Arthur is so brilliant it shouts "Academy Award" and keeps you riveted even as the film's endless multiplication of strands leaves you wondering what meanings it is trying to put across. Comparison with Heath Ledger's Joker is inevitable, and if Ledger has anything on Phoenix it is just that he played this kind of character first. But in Christopher Nolan's film one thing the Joker clearly lacks is any justifying motivation; it is his embodiment of pure malevolence that marks his character. Phoenix's ability to enter the overly complex psyche of this mentally fragile Joker is remarkable, even if there is ultimately no way to reconcile all the disorders it encompasses. The cinematography is also terrific; Lawrence Sher depicts bleakness both indoors and out with a vividness that recalls not only Scorcese's 1970's films but Blade Runner, Repulsion and others that disturb visually as much as they do psychologically.

The moral shape of the film runs like this: we are initially somewhat sympathetic to Fleck in defending himself, and willing to at least understand as he takes revenge for his child abuse. Arthur, as the lingo of narrative fiction goes, now has "agency"; he is not going to simply disappear down the tubes of abuse, illness and depression. But at this point we are led to believe that Arthur has exorcised his demons and is on the way up - the expectation, for me, was that he would be healed but then have to face the consequences of the way he got there. Instead, we are treated to additional, quite gruesome, murders with a pretense of justification so thin that it is all but irrelevant. We are left in a kind of moral limbo, where Arthur's "recovery" turns into the lame idea - supported by extraordinarily lame speeches that are presumably supposed to have an effect on the audience - that whoever hurts you in any way whatsoever should be blown away.

This sorry outcome is then appended to a mythos of a city upended by clown-suited protesters who sanctify Arthur and his violent spree, so that not only Arthur but the Occupy-like critique of social inequality is compromised by the descent into random violence. That is a mythos that does not really resonate. The egalitarianism of the moment, from the Occupy movement to Black Lives Matter to the Democratic primary debates, is a potentially transformative development that needs to be taken seriously, and has nothing to do with violent clown myths. Ultimately, the joke is on us: the film sucks you in to Arthur's mission of righting every wrong done to him only to invite you to a clownishly violent form of opposition to social injustice. I have to pass on the invitation. Feel the Bern, if you are so inclined, but not the burn.