Conversations among artists and writers about work often center on “how to make it work.” Craft, materials and considerations of space regularly come into discussion — work talk. Periodontists see diseased gums, wherever they are, just as musicians and composers hear with other ears.
I regularly question my preferences. Why I like or dislike writing, a photograph. I don’t trust experience, even if it has shaped me; I don’t fervently trust what I think or believe, while I believe it still. A pox on absolutes! I could trace a genealogy of what I think and like, which is, to some extent, what I was exposed to, taught, made conscious of, and decided not to be or accept. Tendrils of difference and objections sprouting rebellions and self-discoveries — I could list them. But I couldn’t create an order for my character, and hold it/me to a neat line. (When I learned to write, I wrote fast, not on the lines, only below or above.)
My preferences change and change again. Once I believed, doing studio painting with Ron Gorchov and Doug Ohlson, that the figure would never return. Once, involved in showing and making experimental films, I believed Hollywood movies were uninteresting. One night, watching a structuralist-materialist black-and-white film of its celluloid grain, I asked myself: “Why am I watching this?” Like Bartleby, I preferred not to, anymore. Whatever I’ve “renounced” resides somewhere, pinging and ponging, because ideas live on, more or less alive in different moments. Being for or against something now is less interesting to me than understanding what it does, how it does it, and why it’s being done.
Which brings me to the art world’s obsession with decadeism. The so-called literary world stores much less faith on periods of emergence. The new is treasured more in visual art than in writing; the literary world is backward in so many ways, and I will not count them. But a first book comes out in 1991, say, and the year stops being of interest, with the next book, whenever it comes out, which counts more, and then the next. A writer is thought to mature, even to write better and know more. The actual age of the writer matters today as a form of “branding,” but the brand becomes old, just as the writer will.
Artists get pinned to a decade. It’s as if time had stopped, the artist suspended in it. Artists think in and through their work, during all the decades after the one in which they debuted. If humans weren’t perverse, in Postmodernity the “post” would become valuable.
People now live so long, many past 100. Extended middle and old-age pushes youth further and further back in time, making being young really a thing of the past. Something interesting could emerge from that.
Q is for Quiet
At the Microphone
At a conference called “Schizo-Culture,” held at Columbia University in 1975, the speakers were magnetic and illustrious: William Burroughs. R.D. Laing. John Cage. The audience — graduate students, artists, writers and freelance intellectuals. Later on, “Schizoculture,” organized by Sylvère Lotringer, would be billed as the conference that launched French theory in America.
The gathering took place in a lecture hall or auditorium that seated about 300 people, a raucous, animated group, who heard, for instance, about psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and were told that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” R.D. Laing said that graduate students were the most depressed population in any society.
All day, men — no women — took the microphone and spoke. There was always a buzz in the audience, whispers, an audible hum of excitement. Then it was time for John Cage. He walked onto the stage and began to speak, without the microphone. He stood at the center of the small stage and addressed the crowd. He talked, without amplification, and soon people in the audience shouted, “We can’t hear you, use the mic. We can’t hear you.” John Cage said, “You can, if you listen.” Everyone settled down, there was no more buzz, hum or rustling, there was silence, and John Cage spoke again, without the microphone, and everyone listened and heard perfectly.
R is for Redux
The Rolling Stones, The Academy of Music, New York City, May 1, 1965
During college, I had to invent or reinvent myself every day, create a person who awoke, dragged herself out of bed, and went to class. I was morbidly depressed; life was futile. I had to move from despair and apathy to the shower, then find clothes to put on my naked body, even though for three years I wore a self-fashioned school uniform: Baggy Chinos and a long-sleeved, all-cotton, black T-shirt. A friend living near me on West 96th Street drove a Bucati, and when I could catch a ride on the back, getting to class was easier. She was depressed, too, but more manic, and sometimes she shouted above the engine and wind, “I want to kill myself.” I hugged her waist tighter then and felt my own desire to die tested.
I met my other best college friend in a required Introduction to Sociology class. She had a bad attitude like me, she was two years older, not a freshman, very cool, but then she disappeared for a while. “I dropped out,” she told me when she returned. She also told me to take studio art classes, and I did. I listened closely to everything she said, because she knew what was really happening; for instance, she knew the night Linda Eastman and Paul McCartney slept together for the first time.
The Beatles were cute, but they were too fresh and sunny for my dark, youthfully jaded, sort of hip character. The Rolling Stones existed for me and my friend, bad boys for bad girls. The Stones were anti-everything and suited my sensibility. My psychotherapist had asked me, “What do you want to do?” I said, “I want to rebel.” “Then,” she said, “my job is to make you effective.”
The Stones were rebels — at least their songs sounded rebellious — and they appeared effective. They could have whatever they wanted: sex, drugs, cars, houses, more sex, drugs. I didn’t question the implications of their being middle class boys, the Beatles working class boys, or what rebellion worked in them. I lived inside my troubled mind, and each day had to awaken in the same bleak and unchanging world and do what I’d done yesterday or something a little different.
Every night for dinner I broiled chicken wings and heated up canned, sliced beets. Like wearing the same shirt and pants to school, I ate the same dinner for three years, unless my knowing friend said, Come on, let’s eat out, or hear a band, or see a movie. Later, we shared a railroad apartment in the East Village. She fixed up her rooms reasonably, while I ripped plaster from a wall in one of mine, to uncover the brick, but it turned out to be the outside brick, so I stopped. The plaster lay on the floor of the room. I never cleaned it up; I couldn’t use the room anyway, because cold air blew in through the cracks.
My friend found out when the Rolling Stones were doing their first concert in New York: May 1st, 1965, at the Academy of Music. “Satisfaction” wouldn’t come out in the States until June 1965, but we were already hardcore fans. We had to be at the Stones’ triumphal entrance into our city.
The Academy of Music was on 14th Street between Third Avenue and Irving Place, where the Palladium would be in the ’80s. The first Academy of Music was a grand opera house, built in 1854 on the northwest corner of Irving Place and demolished in 1926. The Stones played the second Academy, erected in the ’20s across the street from the original. This one showed movies from the ’20s on, but by the ’60s, it was mostly a concert hall. Its marquee letters broken, its seats uncomfortable and seedy, its brilliance and glory faded, the Academy of Music was the right theater for the Stones, who were uncomfortable to parents, and seedy and glorious in their own way.