Celine’s pessimism—his hatred, even—is diagnostic, neutral, as humanitarian in its own way as the advances in antiseptic medicine made by his idol and the subject of his doctoral thesis, the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, that ill-starred “savior of mothers.” One must always proceed deeper, lower, in Celine’s cosmos
Culturewatch
Bob Dylan, Late Autumn
The two Asian-American women to our left had come from San Jose to Berkeley’s Greek Theater because the brother of one, who was boyfriend to the other, had been a great fan of the evening’s headliner; and the women knew, if he had not died six months before, he would have been at the concert. In fact, they believed him there now. Each held his photograph to contemplate, while they smoked the joints through which the music reached them, beneath the chill, grey, starless sky.
Only Love is Radical
The author wrote this brief Movement memoir in advance of participating in the upcoming conference at the University of Minnesota on the 50th anniversary of The Port Huron Statement [http://www.lsa.umich.edu/phs].
I was a child of small town Texas, and of a single parent mom, a feminist. We were poor closet liberals. Austin was my mecca. I excelled there, in the late fifties, and morphed into an existentialist at a residential community of learning alongside The University, the only integrated housing on campus, both by gender and by race. We met in rigorous seminars with a collegium of renegade Christian ministers, headed by a chaplain from WWII who’d seen the carnage, demythologizing the church fathers and scriptures; studying the contemporary theologians
Dreams From Our Avatars
“You should be asking what his wife thinks of him.” That was Bob Dylan last month stiffing a Rolling Stone interviewer who entreated him to endorse Obama or at least concede racism was at the root of right-wing rage against the President. Dylan’s evasions got me thinking about who he is now and how he became an American avatar. I’ve gone on to consider the aspirations of other pop artists who’ve dreamed big in the Age of Obama.
Lebron Gets It
I PROLOGUE
Lebron James has been a groundbreaking force in many ways, but who expected him to be in the forefront of the humanization of superstardom? A team player in all senses – even extending the notion to the NBA family of players – after seven years of Cleveland, he felt he needed someone to make the assist, help him carry the load. His buddy Dwyane Wade wasn’t quite enough last year, but this year, he found the perfect man; or, that man found him.
In Kevin Durant, whose calm self-effacing manner makes him a kind of anti-Kobe Bryant, James serendipitously was presented with the exact proper foil to carry him home without demanding that James trade too heavily on the alpha male aggression that he has seemed mysteriously to eschew.
Louis Reyes Rivera (1945–2012)
People are always talking about The Creator, meaning some great abstraction beyond ourselves for whom and to whom we give deference to if we don’t want to cop to God. (When we were in the organization we use to call our weapons “Gods” so you can understand the relativity of the term.) But for all our talk about the Creator, we rarely use that term for those moving among us whom we could concretely use that word to describe. And whose creations are knowable, tangible, though wonderful even if we could stand in a bar and have a beer with them. It is as if our familiarity with humanity downgrades its profundity. Like the only truly heavy stuff is what we don’t understand. Like the economy, what’s truly valuable is what we don’t have.
The Garden of Chelm
Russell’s Way, Lin’s Path
Philosopher-king Bill Russell used to say basketball is a simple game, played by grown men in short pants. As the hem-lines dropped, though, the force of Russ’s dictum waned. The Jeremy Lin phenomenon leaves one looking back to Russ’s clarities and ahead to a New Age of lucidity for homo ludens.
Manny and Bill, Willie and Joe
My Uncle Manny, a doctor, was at the Battle of the Bulge. When he came home, he lived with us on 46th Street. After he moved out, he left behind a collection of German beer steins and some books. He never talked about the war in my presence, and only one of those books pertained to it: the cartoonist Bill Mauldin’s Up Front.
Irrevocable
Diane Arbus: A Chronology 1923-1971 by Elizabeth Sussman and Doon Arbus. Aperture, New York, 2011. 185 pps.
During the last years of her life, Diane Arbus visited institutions for the mentally ill to photograph the residents, people often physically as well as mentally disabled. I remember being repelled by these photographs, and gathered that Arbus had by now crossed a line in her own mental state, becoming engulfed by a spiritual/emotional darkness from which she would never recover. She committed suicide by slitting her wrists in 1971 at the age of 48.
Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely
I can’t tell you exactly when I stopped being surprised to hear people say that the best American art was being made for TV.
Porn Theater: On Houellebecq & Bolaño
An oasis of whore in a desert of boredom: “La carte et le territoire”
Houellebecq, in the end, will probably be remembered as the kind of writer who never forgot to tell us how much an upscale prostitute charged extra for anal sex in the third millennium
Matinees and Memories
When I was a boy, my father took me to westerns (Whispering Smith, Red River) and my mother to musicals and Disneys (Easter Parade, So Dear to My Heart).
But once I entered fourth grade (1951), my parents decided I was old enough to attend Saturday matinees alone.
Marcel Mauss (& OWS)
Anarchist and ethnographer David Graeber – author of (among other timely works) Debt: the First 5,000 Years (2011) – doesn’t want to be known as the idea man behind OWS, but his vision of direct economic and political democracy is one key to the movement. Graeber helped organize the group that occupied Zuccotti Square. But, according to a report in Chronicle of Higher Education:
Three days after the protests began, Mr. Graeber left. Since then, he has kept a low profile because he wants to avoid what he calls an “intellectual vanguard model” of leadership. “We don’t want to create a leadership structure,” he says. “The fact I was being promoted as a celebrity is a danger. It’s the kids who made this happen.”
Nat Tate
Some of you know the story. It was briefly the rage in New York and London in 1998. But in my cultural backwater of Berkeley, where people were still plotting the revolution, I had never heard it. So when Robert the K, noted glass artist and critic, told me about a book he had just finished, I asked to borrow it. This book, Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960 was by William Boyd
Strange Gods
Pop star can’t resist pop quiz. Everybody knows Lady Gaga’s been flirting with Slavoj Zizek, but, hang on—as per Vanity Fair‘s kiss and tell column—Ke$ha is dating “radical” professor Fredric Jameson. This is an academic tycoon who knows how to $pend his time. The way he lives now sent First back to a passage where Robert Hullot-Kentor paused to wonder at Jameson’s knack for finding the green back not just of all things libidinal but of all things conceptual as well. Hullot-Kentor quoted—then queried—Jameson’s invocation of the investment values of “Adorno’s stock:”
“As for the current ratings of Adorno’s stock.”…Adorno’s stock? Its ratings? While these words beat about the ears, read also a few pages later that Adorno wants concepts “cashed at face value”. Cashed? Adorno wants cash for concepts?
Weiner’s Complaint
Not long after Philip Roth published Portnoy’s Complaint, Jacqueline Susann went on the Johnny Carson show. Susann, we remember, had become famous for her pulp novel Valley of the Dolls, which triangulated, in what seemed an all-American way, ambition, sex and barbiturates. Everybody was a “user” in more ways than one. By 1969, the year Portnoy’s Complaint was published, the paperback version of Valley of the Dolls had been as inescapable in the supermarket as the Coca Cola trademark.
Carson asked Susann if she had ever met Roth. No, she said, but that she would like to. Then she famously added, with the coyness of a Mickey Mouse Club graduate: “Of course, I would not like to shake his hand.”
Impact, Impact, Impact: Anxiety and Lebron James
I To Have or Not to Have?
So much attention has been paid to the Miami Heat—including myriad analyses of the nature of offenses revolving around a number of stars vs. one or two, what role players are all about, and how much experience/stature a contemporary coach hired (and presumably tutored) by Pat Riley must have—that it’s hard to have any new thoughts (feelings come easier) about Miami and LeBron James, who is becoming an enigma nearly as impenetrable as his thick tattooed arms.
The Woman in the Sunlight
Pride will vanish and glory will rot/
But virtue lives and cannot be forgot
On Present-Mindedness in the Writing of History
In The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History (2008), the distinguished American historian Gordon Wood warns against the distortions of reading the present into the past or seeing the present as an inevitable outcome of events in the past. At the same time, he knows that present-mindedness is not entirely avoidable. Its complete absence from a historical perspective turns into antiquarianism.
Hustle and Blows
Two weeks ago, the author sent First this commentary on the state of boxing.
Last night, HBO aired the best thing it has shown all year: a live broadcast of a middleweight championship boxing match between champion Sergio “Maravilla” Martinez and Paul “The Punisher” Williams. Both are widely regarded as two of the top five fighters active in the sport, and the drama and ferocity of their first match earned it widespread acknowledgement as the Fight Of The Year 2009.
Hipsters ‘R Us
Where were you on April 11, 2009? On that day, writers for and readers of the lit-journal n+1 participated in a symposium at NYC’s New School on “the contemporary hipster.” Papers were read, then a panel discussion was held to which audience members—there were 175 attendees—were invited to contribute. I missed it.
Left Behind: The Rapture
Michael Berube, The Left at War, New York University Press
The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, Semiotexte
Tom McDonough, ed., The Situationists and the City, Verso
The three works under consideration here – the first, a survey of assorted leftist interventions from the past couple of decades, the second, a political sensation from a couple of years ago, the third, an assemblage of texts from the 50s and 60s – have nothing to do with anything in the news now. But, taken together, they tell us enough about where we are. It isn’t good.