I was going to say you ought to be super smart if you’re going to attempt to interview Nick Cave and Roland Howard. But unironically idiotic questions from journalists probably make for more entertaining reactions.
And look how young they are!
This other interview is actually really nice, though.
I know everybody’s talking about the new season of The Wire, but I only just saw the end of the fourth. I can’t get over those kids. All of them, but especially Dukie for some reason.
The Wire kept coming to mind a few months back when I finally picked up J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground, a book of journalism that reads like a novel. It resembles The Wire in its scope and downbeat depiction of individuals struggling within and against the institutions that are failing them. The time and place (Boston in the 70s — a blurb on the back rightly notes that to say Common Ground is “about busing in Boston is a bit like saying that Moby Dick is about whaling in New Bedford”) are different but the heartbreak is the same.
I’m looking forward to reading more Lukas, specifically his last book Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America. Among his many talents was a knack for exploring larger cultural-historical currents through the lives of individuals — without reducing those personal experiences or shoehorning them into a convenient, simplistic narrative. You could say he gave you the Big Picture by giving you little pictures. But the little pictures themselves feel big.
You can see him developing these skills in a remarkable New York Times piece published in 1967: “The Two Worlds of Linda Fitzpatrick.”
“Certainly we knew the Village; our family is at 2 Fifth Avenue,” said Irving Fitzpatrick, the wealthy Greenwich, Conn., spice importer whose daughter, Linda, was found murdered with a hippie friend in an East Village boiler room a week ago yesterday.
Mr. Fitzpatrick spoke during a three-hour interview with his family around the fireplace in the library of their 30-room home a mile from the Greenwich Country Club.
For the Fitzpatricks, “the Village” was the Henry James scene they saw out Dr. Sklar’s windows and “those dear little shops” that Mrs. Fitzpatrick and her daughters occasionally visited. (“I didn’t even know there was an East Village,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said. “I’ve heard of the Lower East Side, but the East Village?”)
But for 18-year-old Linda–at least in the last 10 weeks of her life–the Village was a different scene whose ingredients included crash pads, acid trips, freaking out, psychedelic art, witches and warlocks.
are working on me this weekend. So that I’m taking Vince Lombardi quotes to heart. Especially this one: “The greatest accomplishment is not in never falling, but in rising again after you fall.“
I could probably be enticed to read just about any account of being a twenty-something in mid-1970s New York and going to movie matinees. But this one in the American Scholar would likely rank as the best. (Thanks to A Special Way of Being Afraid for leading me to it). Mark Edmundson not only nails the particular kind of resentment that New York breeds, but — via Robert Altman — offers a potential way out of it. Every paragraph of this essay has something to highly recommend it. I particularly like this one:
A lot of my classmates who had downplayed their cash and connections at college were redeeming these previously invisible chips. They latched onto free apartments in the Village and cool and unusual internships; they hit cocktail parties uptown and down where they augmented their already impressive stock of connections. My former teachers—broke on their laughable Bennington salaries and in hock because of their midlife, late-1960s divorces—paid their former students court, cadging weekend couches in their living rooms and invites to openings at galleries like OK Harris. As for me, being broke, unconnected, Irish Catholic (in origin), and vaguely promising didn’t fork a lot of lightning. My degree, of which I was vaguely proud, cut no ice either. A couple of editors interviewed me for jobs in publishing. I managed to insult the editor-in-chief at Newsweek by offering him a vaguely Roland Barthes–style critique of his magazine as a maker of contemporary myths and “a source of slick, palatable entertainment.” I blew my chances for an editorial assistantship at a sailboat magazine by bringing a copy of Hegel’s Phenomenology to the interview. At every encounter I was asked the same question: What was it like going to a girls’ school? Beyond that, I didn’t seem to be of much interest. So I drove a cab, I stacked the amps at rock shows. I collaborated on perky pieces for the Village Voice Centerfold, one of them on the best places to take a whiz in New York if you had no money so couldn’t duck into a restaurant and order something cheap. The best place turned out to be the men’s room in the Plaza Hotel, where for whatever reason the lobby staff didn’t kick you out. The editor of the piece nearly got fired for running it; the owner of Voice and New York Magazine supposedly thought that the article was written to parody the consumerist idiocy—where do you buy the best dog sweater in New York?—that made New York (and I suppose in some measure New York, too) shake, rattle, and go.
And at the risk of blockquoting the entire thing and having nothing more articulate to add, I’ll just say that what follows is very nice, too:
Altman’s camera—ignored, roaming, left to itself—seems to achieve a sort of freedom. The camera doesn’t need to aggrandize life, but it doesn’t offer resentful rejections, either. It seems to accept all it encounters, taking things in with a bemused, affectionate, mildly complacent eye, gently curious about what will come next but not exerting itself unduly to find out. Altman’s camera, Altman’s eye, a little like the eye of New York’s great hobo poet Walt Whitman, seems both in and out of the game—though surely more out than in—and watching and wondering at it.
Might not this be a little like my own condition, or at least a condition I could aspire to? I could, maybe, give up questing for big and exciting things (Those connections! Those parties! That job!) and stop resenting the people who enjoyed them. I could amble and loaf and look around and perhaps store up a few impressions. I was low on cash most of the time, sure, but I had enough to get by. What I had in excess was what Altman and his camera seemed to have, time—time and a marvelous place to spend it, Manhattan, the greatest paradise for walkers and loiterers and trippers and ramblers ever created. Looking around—affectionately, forgivingly, gently—turned out not to be a half bad way of expanding the day. In this particular ambling mood, you don’t ask anything from the world because the world, in its sheer there-ness, is enough, or almost.
So, next week we’re going to see how far can we make one chicken go! There’s definitely something satisfying about economizing. It’s sort of bracing and clarifying — like facial toner for your life. And I like having occasion to use the word “thrift.” It’s a great word, almost onomatopoeic — the sound of a belt tightened, a coupon clipped. Apparently, it’s not just me.
Here’s the rabbit blog after facing the prospect of a bean-driven diet:
And you know what else? Being a sad little recipe and coupon clipper feels sort of invigorating and honorable when our once-great nation is falling on its face and we’re about to slide into a recession. Hard Times, got a pocket, all in change! It puts a kick in my step, somehow, throwing all my goddamn pennies into the change machine and coming away with $32. I like knowing that I can’t afford to move and I can’t afford to quit my job and I can’t afford to think about the boundless possibilities that the universe has to offer, I can only afford to wash my own stupid floors and eat leftovers and lose weight so the clothes I already own don’t look like shit on me.
I keep thinking of Mildred Pierce, the Depression-era heroine in James M. Cain’s masterwork of hard-boiled domestic fiction.
So she walked down to the gas company office and paid the bill, carefully saving the receipt. Then she counted her money and stopped by a market, where she bought a chicken, a quarter pound of hotdogs, some vegetables and a quart of milk. The chicken, first baked, then creamed, then made into croquettes, would provision her over the weekend. The hotdogs were a luxury.
When her husband leaves her for a large-breasted woman who doesn’t wear a bra, Mildred struggles to support her two daughters (one of whom is a total bitch and a half — the one Mildred masochistically lives to please, of course). Too vulnerable to be cold-hearted, Mildred is however, quite canny and tough-minded. Like when she reluctantly compels herself to seduce a “fat blob” named Wally, a task she thinks might require some Scotch:
But as she twisted her head to keep her mouth from meeting his, it flitted through her mind that if she didn’t have to open the Scotch, she might be able to get six dollars for it somewhere.
Throughout, Cain logs these budgetary, possibly banal details and somehow it doesn’t feel like bookkeeping. In fact, it starts to feel menacing – in an excellent noir way. Mildred Pierce is a crime novel with no prosecutable crime, just massive amounts of betrayal. Hello, Bush Administration!
Okay, gotta go hoard some Splenda packets.
Was having the kind of blah day where allowing yourself to get hit by a car almost seems like a preferable alternative to going back to your desk and finishing up the afternoon. But back at that desk I somehow stumbled onto this old show review, which reminded me that Kristin Hersh exists, which made me feel a lot better about the world.
I confess I haven’t done a good job of keeping up with her music of late. But I loved Throwing Muses. I loved them not only for their sound but for what their sound represented. They didn’t have a platform — they didn’t talk or sing about being kick-ass women (and one or two guys) who fucking rocked. They just did. Fucking rock, that is.
In the liner notes to In a Doghouse, Hersh recalls how they thought, at age 16 or 17, that they “were a party band” and were therefore “stunned and horrified to see audiences react with something like stunned horror.” Then, of course, “this sound became our mission”:
It has been suggested that I was insane during the Muses early days, something I have vehemently denied in my effort to prove that this stuff could come out of our girlfriends our sisters, and our mothers. Listening now, I wonder if I was all there, but maybe that was the point. Our girlfriends, sisters and mothers have been known to go elsewhere at times, too.
The difference is that I had lovely, funny, talented musicians to go there with me. These Muses saved my life, quite literally, over and over again. They are full of colors and sweat and memories and potential; they are great people. I miss them.
They were a party band — for the party that goes on inside a certain kind of young woman’s head.
Anyway, Kristin Hersh has a blog! Where she writes things like this:
I say I don’t believe in the music business because I hate what it celebrates and yet…I have no other business. Like it or not, I rely on the same construct I always did… the same business that turns music – which is my religion – into nothing more holy than Fritos. I have to care if no one buys my record, I have to care if no one comes to my shows.
And this:
On my last tour, our bus broke down and left us stranded in Idaho for a few days. When my band members and I finally arrived at a hotel, we were at first too dirty and disoriented to mind that we were either trapped in our rooms watching bad t.v. or trapped in the hotel lobby with sports fans and evangelist types. It got old fast, however and so did living on complimentary apples from the front desk.
I took refuge in the pool where it was quiet, swimming laps for days. Under the green, hyper-chlorinated water I began to time trip back to a winter night at Logan airport where I sat on a bench in the cold for hours, waiting to be rescued, as I was doing now. This is how songs work; they take your life stories and mix them up because, like old relatives and unconditional lovers, they really don’t care about getting it right, they just care.
I’m a sucker for the Herskovitz/Zwick brand of talky, analytic, what-am-I-doing-with-my-life TV (thirtysomething, Once and Again, My So-Called Life), and I’ve been watching their latest effort, quarterlife. Yes, the fact that the web episodes are positioned online as part of “a new social networking site for artists, thinkers, and doers” kind of makes me want to barf. But then, that reaction makes me feel like a curmudgeon.
Quarterlife has its share of clunky, cringe-worthy moments and it’s relatively easy to dismiss it (and probably each of the Herskovitz/Zwick programs) as a show about privileged, good-looking white people and their personal problems/cliches. It’s not “The Wire.” But it’s not “The O.C.” either. The characters here are privileged to the extent that they have time to be reflective, to think about their situations. They’re privileged enough to have ideals and desires and a (sometimes dimming) belief that they have options, but they’re not so blessed as to escape the struggle of reconciling all of that with reality (in particular, the reality that this is a generation of kids who can’t expect to do better than their parents). Quarterlife’s depiction of that struggle rings emotionally true often enough to elevate it above the level of, say, “Friends.” (I don’t know, maybe that’s not saying much?)
Anyway, now that I’m thirty-something I want to watch “thirtysomething,” which I pretty much missed the first time around because I was twelve.
There’s some kind of sad irony in turning up the Pogues’ “Thousands are Sailing” on your iPod to drown out the guitar of the immigrant busker in your subway car, right?
The “30 Rock” episode guest-starring Carrie Fisher as Rosemary Howard, Liz Lemon’s idol, may have this season’s highest laughs-to-minutes ratio. Starting with Liz receiving the “GE Followship Award” for her mastery of “product integration, cross-promotion and adverlingus” — which sets up the conflict between what she does (produce a network TV show) and what she thought she wanted to do (what Rosemary did, write comedy that makes people “think.”) Great lines ensue:
Liz to Rosemary: You are my heroine. And by heroine I mean Lady Hero. I don’t want to inject you and listen to jazz.
Jack to Liz (about Rosemary): Don’t ever make me talk to a woman that old again.
Liz to Jack: This is my show.
Jack to Liz: No, this is my show. And once a week I rent it out to the good people at the erectile dysfunction companies.
Jack to Liz: Push the envelope. You know who uses that phrase? People who don’t have the guts or the brains to work inside the system.
Liz to Jack: Rosemary says that women become obsolete in this business when there’s no one left that wants to see them naked.
Jack to Liz: You make enough money, you can pay people to look at you naked. To the future, Lemon!
Meanwhile, Jack helps Tracy sort through some issues with roleplaying and we get Alec Baldwin’s astounding and manic 4-in-1 impersonation of Tracy’s father, mother, the white man Tracy’s mom took up with, and their neighbor Mrs. Rodriguez.
And some of the best throw-aways ever!
Jack to Tracy: What’s the one thing I asked you not to do?
Tracy: That 227 movie. New Jackée City?
But as much as I loved this episode, it kind of left me feeling like my soul had been stepped on just a little bit. Rosemary, it turns out — with all her high-minded ideals — has become a crazy, desperate drunk lady who lives in a rat-infested apartment that may have no toilet in a neighborhood called “Little Chechnya.” Also, she thinks it’s the 90s. “Yikes,” says Liz as she flees in horror to beg Jack for her job back (after having left in protest, under the influence of Rosemary). Obviously, jobs are good things to have, if you enjoy food and shelter, not to mention discretionary income. But it’s the way Liz chooses between Rosemary’s world and Jack’s. Of course, Rosemary and Jack are two comic extremes. But I don’t think it’s too much of a leap to say they fit into the facile narrative in which all of the excesses, wrongs, and failures of a ridiculous, naive 60s radicalism get righted by free-market capitalism/business culture/the Republican Party/trickle-down economics.
Somehow, the episode doesn’t quite satirize this narrative so much as uphold it — which is disappointing. It’s like riding a big wave of irony that breaks in the shallows and just leaves you there as it washes back out.
And, um, right, it’s a sitcom on NBC. What do you expect? Why are you even giving this much thought to it? But I guess that’s where the let-down comes in – because this episode does make you think. And then a promo for “Deal or No Deal” flashes at you, followed by some ads and then you’re like, Oh, hey, it’s that one for a sleeping pill with Abe Lincoln and the guy in the diving bell and the talking beaver. Talking beavers are funny. Wait, there’s a Law and Order: SVU rerun on at 9? Have I seen this one before? That developmentally-disabled little girl looks familiar. Whatever. It’s on and I’m not moving. God, I love my couch.