John Le Carré (1931-2020)

Maj Sjöwall (1935-2020)

For the past year or so I’ve been leisurely making my way through Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Martin Beck novels. I have found them particularly comforting during the lockdown. I am currently reading The Locked Room, the eighth in the ten-book series.

Inspired by Ed McBain’s long-running 87th Precinct series, the Martin Beck police procedurals are the foundation of Nordic Noir. There would be no Kurt Wallander without Martin Beck.

As good as the mystery elements are in these crime novels, and they are quite good, the real appeal is the cast of recurring characters: Martin Beck, the cranky, but dogged homicide investigator; Lennart Kollberg, a brilliant investigator who refuses to carry a gun; Frederick Mellander, a walking database with his eidetic memory; Gunvald Larsson, who does not care that no one much likes him; . . .

The books are surprisingly funny. Martin Beck can be cranky, possibly because he seems to catch a cold in every book; Kollberg does not bother to hide his contempt for most other police or police in general; Mellander spends most of his time on the toilet; dandy Larsson manages to ruin some article of expensive clothing in almost every investigation; and the lazy and incompetent patrolmen Kvant and Kristiansson manage to screw up countless crime scenes.

But interwoven with the whodunnits and the humor is serious political commentary about then-current Swedish society. Committed Marxists, Sjöwall and Wahlöö created the series to spread their cultural critique, figuring crime novels would reach far more people than political tracts.

I learned yesterday that Maj Sjöwall had succumbed to a longtime illness. Wahlöö predeceased her in 1975.

Kids These Days!

The Washington Post reports:

One of the few mercies of the spreading coronavirus is that it leaves young children virtually untouched . . .

I may have to pull out my copy of Gas-s-s-s . . .

. . . Roger Corman’s 1970 satire about a world where everyone over 25 is killed when a deadly military gas leaks, leaving the young people to rebuild civilization.

Or reread Dave Willis’s 1964 novel Only Lover’s Left Alive * . . .

. . . in which the kids were also left behind by dying adults.

If the worst should happen, let’s hope Sham 69 . . .

. . . and The Who . . .

. . . are right.

Of course, The Who also famously declared, “I hope I die before I get old”:

Wash your hands!

---

* Not the basis of Jim Jarmusch’s movie of the same name, but that’s another story for another time.

The Day the Sixties Ended?

Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire throughout the community, and in a sense this is true, The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.

Joan Didion

The White Album

Wrapping the Lower East Side in Nostalgia

The debate over Target’s awkward attempt to appropriate CBGB’s enduringly cool brand is not really about who will define the neighborhood’s present (the developers have already won that fight), but who will define its past.

In the Village Voice, urban preservationist Jeremiah Moss described Target’s CBGB wrapping as “an entire Potemkin East Village,”* but this was actually the reverse. A Potemkin village creates a false-front to mask the old, or non-existent, to give an appearance of a new and thriving city. Target, however, placed a temporary sheath on a new building to evoke (a carefully sanitized version of) the old, like those “renovations” that save a building’s façade, but build an entirely new building behind it.

Target was clearly seeking to capitalize upon nostalgia.  And I understand why some people were upset by this commodification of their past, especially since the chain’s arrival is a later wave in the gentrification that priced CBGB out of the neighborhood in the first place, but the naysayers are promoting their own brand of nostalgia, albeit of a different kind.

Svetlana Boym, author of The Future of Nostalgia, distinguishes between two types of nostalgia. “Restorative nostalgia” attempts to revive or reconstruct a slice of the past, some supposed “golden era” a person or group misses, often based more on myth and vague childhood memories than historical reality, and in the process “make (fill in the blank) great again,” emphasis on the again. Target literally reconstructed an idealized version of the neighborhood’s past.

“Reflective nostalgia,” however, is steeped in melancholy and longing for a piece of the past that now stands in ruins, focusing on what might have been. These are the 1980s East Village ruins reflective punk nostalgics like Moss mourn, . . .

. . . here described by Jean Michel Basquiat, filmed in 1980-1981 (though not released until almost two decades later):

New York City came very close to declaring bankruptcy in the mid-’70s:

Artists of various sorts moved into the ruins of the East Village, SOHO and Alphabet City for the cheap rent in the remaining partially to completely abandoned apartment buildings and, especially, former factory spaces in SOHO. There were artists such as Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz (featured in a current exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art), Hannah Wilke, Nan Goldin and Sue Coe, along with “Pictures Generation” artists like Sherry Levine, Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman; performers such as Karen Finley, Ann Magnuson, Laurie Anderson and Eric Bogosian. Then there were the musicians, punk, jazz, no wave, minimalist and beyond, who flocked to the lower east side.

Of course, these divisions were nowhere near so distinct in practice. There was a lot of overlap, with artists such as Richard Prince and Robert Longo performing in bands, while designing record covers for still other bands, with musicians like John Lurie providing soundtracks for films, etc.

Publications such as Just Another Asshole (1978-1987), Bomb (1981-present), Raw (1980-1991) and the East Village Eye (1979-1987) were launched to feature all of this work outside the mainstream. Galleries and clubs opened for the artists to show their work, White Columns (1970-present), Colab (1977-present), especially its influential Times Square Show in 1980, the New Museum (1977-present), Club 57 (1978-1983) and Mudd Club (1978-1983). And CBGB (1973-2006). Many of the musicians who played these spaces also performed on the public access cable show TV Party (1978-1982), co-hosted by writer Glenn O’Brien and Blondie’s Chris Stein.

The neighborhood also served as the background in numerous indie films. The ghost town was the setting for Amos Poe’s The Foreigner (1978):

With no working streetlights, the no man’s (or woman’s) land provided the nightmarish setting for Abel Ferraro and frequent collaborator Nicholas St. John’s exploitation film Driller Killer (1979), in which a painter is driven mad by the band practicing next door:

The opening of Jim Jarmusch‘s Permanent Vacation (1980) contrasts the nearly deserted East Village with the still thriving business district:

Downtown 81, The Foreigner, Permanent Vacation and Smithereens mostly just follow one character walking around the empty streets of the East Village.

Soon enough, though, all tomorrow’s parties began to pall for many. At the end of Jarmusch’s Permanent Vacation, Allie departs the city for France. Wren spends much of Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens (1982) trying to gather enough money to move to Los Angeles with punk rocker Richard Hell, but is last seen alone, walking across the bridge to the New Jersey she had hoped never to return to:

Club 57 and the Mudd Club both closed in 1983. The following year Emily Listfield published her novel It Was Gonna Be Like Paris:

Note the past perfect tense and the wistful sentiment of the title, reflecting nostalgically upon what might have been, not what was.

Is it a coincidence that 1984 also made a best-seller of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City, in which Robert Longo’s suited “Men in the Cities” slum it in bohemian clubs?

That year was also the terminal date the Grey Gallery placed on the scene in its 2006 exhibition, The Downtown Show: 1974-1984.

It is only after a scene fades that nostalgia can take complete hold, no longer having to compete with reality. Instead, nostalgia relies on carefully curated memory.

Writers like Stewart Meyer, friend and onetime chauffeur for junkie laureate William S. Burroughs, and Stephen Paul Cohen reveled in the dirt and drugs of Alphabet City in their novels The Lotus Crew (1984) and Heartless (1986), as did Sarah Schulman in After Delores (1998). (Alphabet City was also the title of a 1984 Amos Poe film about a drug dealer.)

Arthur Nersesian’s The Fuck Up was initially self-published in 1992 under the aptly named imprint Hey Day Publications (with some very nice German Expressionist woodcut style illustrations by Kim Kowalski as chapter headings), . . .

. . . but was later reprinted by Akashic Books, which describes its contents as:

No simple tale of psychopathic yuppie greed, The Fuck-Up is a thriller with a literary soul set in the pre-chic Lower East Side. The narrative follows a nameless hero from the girlfriend who kicks him out for a most minor infidelity, . . . As he makes this emotional and socioeconomic odyssey through New York’s colorful if uncaring landscape, rarely with more than enough change for a cup of coffee at a Blimpie, he becomes embroiled in affairs and relationships built on mutual deceit and predicated on misinformation. The result is a descent into the world of the truly fucked up, a semi-delirious and amnesiac wandering that finds an end not in some predictable and cuddly redemption but in the solace of shared disillusion.

This novel is a, sometimes literal, crawl through the muck. It embraces a third kind of nostalgia, nostalgie de la boue (literally, nostalgia for the mud), which, as Tom Wolfe explains, “tends to be a favorite motif whenever a great many new faces and a lot of new money enter Society.” By the late ’80s, “a great many new faces and a lot of new money” were entering the East Village, so much that “The SOHO Effect” became the official title and model for the artists reviving abandoned, “bad” neighborhoods only to be priced out and forced to move on by gentrification pattern of urban development.

Now nothing’s left but the memories. But which memory will ultimately define this particular place and time for posterity? Will it be corporations’ nostalgic reconstructions, urban preservationists’ nostalgic reflections or novelists’ nostalgic wallowing in the mud?

But as Johnny Thunders, who helped define the East Village scene with the New York Dolls and, later, as the leader of the Heartbreakers, warned:

---

* Moss goes on to claim that, perhaps more than CBGB, he mourns the loss of stoops where building occupants hung out, interacting with their neighbors and passersby. I would counter that air conditioning probably had a far bigger impact on people staying indoors during the summer than the loss of stoops.

Sue Grafton (1940-2017)

Sue Grafton created Kinsey Milhone, probably the most famous female private eye in crime fiction. Grafton’s gimmick was that the titles of the books in her series were working their way through the alphabet, beginning with “A” Is for Alibi.

“Y” Is for Yesterday was published this past August. Grafton had long said the series would end with “Z” Is for Zero, but the book does not appear to have been written. Her daughter announced on Grafton’s Facebook page, “. . . out of the deep abiding love and respect for our dear sweet Sue, as far as we in the family are concerned, the alphabet now ends at Y.”

This reminds me of the longstanding, but apparently false rumors that John D. MacDonald wrote a final novel with Black in the title to end his color-coded Travis McGee series with the death of his hero.

Dylan’s Nobel Prize: Lyrics Are Not Poems (and Poems Are Not Lyrics)

Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan of Bob Dylan’s. His lyrics taught me that pop songs can have depth and be thought provoking. If there were a Nobel Prize for Music, absolutely, give it to Dylan, but literature?

While often poetic, his lyrics are not poems. In that light, it’s interesting to note that 1973’s Writings and Drawings . . .

. . . was re-titled Lyrics when it was updated 12 years later . . .

. . . and has retained that title through all of its later editions. I defy anyone to read those lyrics without hearing the tune that accompanies them in their head.

Dylan has written a bit of literature. There are some poems scattered through the above volumes and in 1971 he published Tarantula, but I’ve never known anyone who made it all of the way through that novel? Prose poem? I’m really not sure what to call it.

On the other hand, Chronicles: Volume One fully deserved its 2004 nomination for the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography (it lost to Mark Stevens’s and Annalyn Swan’s De Kooning: An American Master), but that was just one book and it was published over 12 years ago (speaking of which, are we ever going to see the other two promised volumes?). This is hardly a corpus of work deserving of a Nobel. Especially when there are writers like Don DeLillo who are still being overlooked.

So while I admit to a momentary knee-jerk thrill when I first learned that the “voice of my generation” (a label he has always rejected) had won a Nobel, that voice is heard as music, not read as literature.

 

Ain’t No Punk

Last week’s episode of Mr Robot featured The Cramps‘ “Garbageman” in the background of one scene (dealing with burning trash, how literal):

The song’s opening line — “you ain’t no punk, you punk” — captures the two contradictory contemporary usages of the word punk. Lux Interior at first implies it’s good to be a punk (as in punk rocker), but it’s also bad to be a punk (as in insignificant), thereby encapsulating the entire twisted history of the word.

The word can be traced back at least to Shakespeare, who used punk, even “taffety punk,”* as a synonym of prostitute. By the early 20th century, punk meant a worthless person, in particular referring to young boys taken under the wings of criminals and/or hobos. This is certainly the way the word was used by Jack Black, a turn of the century hobo and burglar (not the actor and member of Tenacious D), in his autobiography You Can’t Win (pictured here, a later reprint with a cover by Joe Coleman):

You Can’t Win was a favorite of William S. Burroughs‘s. In his introduction to the book’s reprints, Burroughs affirms the huge influence it had on his own early novels (which, in turn, had a huge influence on punk rock), particularly the semi-autobiographical Junkie, . .

. . . initially published under the name William Lee so as not to embarrass his family. Burroughs accentuated the earlier implied sexual connotation of the word when referring to punks in his own books.

The word’s negative valuation started to change in response to 1950s juvenile deliquency. Sure, adults still meant “juvenile delinquent” and “punk” as insults, but with the rising popularity of Marlon Brando in The Wild One . . .

. . . and, particularly James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, . . .

. . . along with a flood of cheap exploitation ’50s JD flicks, kids began embracing the leather jacketed punks in “black denim trousers and motorcycle boots” . . .

. . . that their parents rejected. And the labels along with them.

By the time West Side Story hit Broadway in 1957, Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics had wrapped the word heavily in irony (clip is from the 1961 film):

It seems clear that the word was first applied to rock in the early 1970s in the pages of Creem, the irreverent rock mag alternative to the more staid Rolling Stone, even if it’s not entirely clear whether it was first used by Greg Shaw, Dave Marsh (in reference to Rudy Martinez of ? and the Mysterians), or Lester Bangs (in reference to Iggy Pop).

As Lester Bangs explained in 1981 (published posthumously in 1987):

“I invented punk. Everybody knows that. But I stole it from Greg Shaw, who also invented power pop. And he stole it from Dave Marsh, who actually saw Question Mark and the Mysterians live once. But he stole it from John Sinclair. Who stole it from Rob Tyner. Who stole it from Iggy. Who stole it from Lou Reed. Who stole it from Gene Vincent. Who stole it from James Dean. Who stole it from Marlon Brando. Who stole it from Robert Mitchum. The look on his face in the photo when he got busted for grass. And he stole it from Humphrey Bogart. Who stole it from James Crosby. Who stole it from Teddy Roosevelt. Who stole it from Billy the Kid. Who stole it from Mike Fink. Who stole it from Stonewall Jackson.”

The term punk rock spread much further when future Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye used it in his liner notes to describe the trashy garage rock, many of them one hit (or non-hit) wonders, he compiled in Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968. Many of these songs would be covered by later punk rock bands as they fumbled to learn their three chords.

And in 1976, John Holmstrom launched Punk Magazine . . .

. . . using the traditional definition, . . .

. . . but clearly inverting it, just as ’50s juvenile delinquents had.

Hip hop culture seems to have reverted to the earlier, insulting, emasculating meaning of the word punk, often as part of a longer phrase like “punk ass” or “punk ass bitch.”

Clearly, a punk is not something good to be. As Ta-Nehisi Coates explains, “I ain’t no punk” too often serves as a prelude to violence:

Funny how the same word can have such different meanings and such different valuations in two musical subcultures, or even within just one subculture, which brings us back to The Cramps.

---

* Shakespeare refers to a well dressed prostitute as a “taffety punk” in All’s Well That Ends Well; in return DC’s Taffety Punk Theatre Company has produced a series of “Bootleg Shakespeare” plays, which the Folger Shakespeare Library refers to (approvingly) as “Punk Rock Shakespeare.”

The State of Funk

I recently found a book of essays by D.H. Lawrence in a used book store:

The title of one essay surprised me:

Who knew D.H. Lawrence was a fan of of the Funk:

Written in 1929, the essay came four years before James Brown was born, 14 years before Sly Stone and 12 before George Clinton. but decades after people “heard Buddy Bolden say, ‘Funky Butt, Funky Butt'” in New Orleans jazz clubs.

note — the essay is really a treatise on how censorship of artistic works openly dealing with sex was sapping England’s vigor, in other words, how the absence of funk, in the sense of the body, was adding to England’s funk, in the sense of depression.