Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy

UNBREAK MY HEART, AN OVERTURE

Two nights ago, I was talking with some local artists about things that used to be cool and weren’t anymore—things that we missed. These artists were mostly kids, so they missed some really stupid stuff, I thought, like Adam Ant and giant shoulder-pads in women’s clothes. I told them that I missed standing alone—the whole idea that standing alone was an okay thing to do in a democracy. "Like High Noon, I explained, and one of them said, Oh, you could do that today . . . (pause for effect) . . . But first you’d have to form a Stand-Alone Support Group!" Everyone laughed at this, and I did too, because she was probably right, but I didn’t laugh that hard, because, at the time, I was proofing this book, which constitutes my own last, tiny fling at standing alone. It’s hardly High Noon, I know, but these essays do represent an honest effort to communicate the idiosyncrasy of my own quotidian cultural experience in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century—to recount some of that experience and, whenever possible, account for it.

The stories that this book tells populate the deep background of everything I have ever written, but I am telling them now because too often in the past I have spoken their lessons in the shorthand of authority. I spent my childhood, for instance, in the cacophonous, postwar milieu that gave birth to bebop—to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. It was my father’s world, and I remember it today with the brightness of a child’s vision. Its stresses and permissions are manifest in things that I have seen with my eyes and felt in my body, so I know, in a physical sense, what virtuosity and improvisation meant in that moment, as a style and a lifestyle, how necessary they seemed. Too many times, however, alluding to these complexities, I have simply written Jackson Pollock, and let it go at that. On too many other occasions, rather than trying to evoke the sense of queasy dread that has accompanied my every encounter with the diffuse network of proprietary surveillance that permeates this society, I have simply written the diffuse network of proprietary surveillance, etcetera, footnoted Foucault, and moved along.

This book is an apology for that sort of authoritarian behavior, because, in truth, I have never taken anything printed in a book to heart that was not somehow confirmed in my ordinary experience—and that did not, to some extent, reform and redeem that experience. Nor have I had any experience of high art that was not somehow confirmed in my experience of ordinary culture—and that did not, to some extent, reform and redeem that. So I have tried to reinstate the connective tissues here, and, in the process, have written an odd sort of memoir—a memoir without tears—without despair or exaltation—a memoir purged of those time-stopping exclamation points that punctuate all our lives.

So there are no Mozart Requiems here, nor masterpieces by Velázquez, no mind-bending sexual encounters or life-confirming acts of friendship, no bloody curtains or puking withdrawals, no heartbreaks, gunshots, humiliations, or bodies hanging in the bedroom. This is just the ordinary stuff—the ongoing texture of the drift, where, it has always seemed to me, things must be okay, or the rest will certainly kill you; and if I have any real qualification for the job that I have undertaken, it is that I have always been okay with everyday life and beguiled by the tininess of it—and beguiled as well by the tininess and intimacy of artistic endeavors—by The Bird with his horn and Velázquez with his tiny brush—and by the magical way these endeavors seem to proliferate.

When I was a kid, books and paintings and music were all around me, all the time, but never in the guise of culture. They were remarkable domestic accouterments that I encountered nowhere else. They were not to be found in the homes of my friends, and I can assure you that my family played no part in any larger cultural community. We played no part in anything, except America. We were just out there in the middle of it, on the edges of it, and on the move. So cut apart were we, in fact, that I can remember being amazed that whatever city we landed in, my folks could always find these little bookstores and record shops, art galleries and jazz clubs that no one else knew about. I thought of them as secret places where you could go and meet other people who were part of this secret thing.

So the whole cultural enterprise, when I was growing up, was at once intimate and a little mysterious. It took place at home, in other people’s homes, and in little stores. Yet, as we moved around, I begin to get a sense of how huge an enterprise it really was. Everywhere we went there were bookstores and record shops, art galleries and jazz clubs, where otherwise normal-looking people did all these cool things. And nobody noticed. Nobody knew anything about it! My teachers didn't know about it. The newspapers didn't know about it. My scoutmasters didn't know about it. The television didn't know about it. My friends didn't know about it. Even their parents didn't know about it. For a kid, this was awe inspiring. I was like Oedipa Maas, in The Crying of Lot 49, when she discovers the Tristero, because, thanks to my folks, I was privy to this vast, invisible, underground empire that, unlike the Tristero, trafficked in nothing but joy.

I chose to dwell in that underground empire for the first forty-seven years of my life—in record stores, honky tonks, art bars, hot-rod shops, recording studios, commercial art galleries, city rooms, jazz clubs, cocktail lounges, surf shops, bookstores, rock-and-roll bars, editorial offices, discos, and song factories. I lived the freelance life, in other words, and did okay at it, until 1987, when this nation, in its wisdom, decided that citizens who lived the way I did were no longer deserving of health insurance, by virtue of their needing it a lot. Faced with this reality, I began to take teaching gigs in universities and soon discovered that, for the length of my whole life, from birth until the day I stepped on campus, I had been consorting with the enemy. According to the masters of my new universe, all the cruelties and inequities of this civilization derived from the greed and philistinism of shopkeepers, the people who ran those little stores, who bought things and sold them, as I had done.

I found this amazing, because the problem for me had never been who sold the dumb object, or bought it (it was just a dumb object), but how you acquired the privilege of talking about it—how you found people with whom you could talk about it. My new masters were obsessed with things. So I wondered if they had known any shopkeepers. What, I wondered, would these people have thought of Sumpter Bruton, a tasty jazz drummer by night and shopkeeper by day, who ran the little record store where I learned about everything from bel canto to Blind Lemon to Erik Satie, who loved every kind of noise that human beings made—with the possible exception of the noises made by Neil Diamond? And what would they have thought of Mickey Ruskin and Hilly Kristal who ran great bars where new worlds were made, where you could talk about things and listen to music? And what would they have thought of Harold Garner and David Smith, whose bookstore was their baby and the site upon which I discovered Twentysix Gasoline Stations and Logique du sens, who would order weird books because they thought I might be interested in them, and never tell me if they weren’t returnable? The books I didn’t buy would just lay around, gathering dust, until I figured that out. Then I would buy them for cost, and cheap at the price.

I know, of course, what my colleagues think of Leo Castelli, Richard Bellamy, Paula Cooper, Klaus Kertess and the Janis brothers, because they are (or used to be) art dealers and, thus, the very embodiment of Satan. Even so, when I was a youngster adrift in Manhattan, these people recognized me the second or third time I wandered into their stores. They came out and talked to me about what was hanging on the walls. They even pulled stuff out of the back so we could talk about that, knowing full well (by my outfit) that I was a cowboy and no kind of a collector at all. That was the best thing about little stores. If you were a nobody like me, and didn’t know anything, you could go into one of them and find things out. People would talk to you, not because you were going to buy something, but because they loved the stuff they had to sell. The guy in the Billabong Surf Shop, I can assure you, wants to talk about his boards. Even if you want to buy one, right now, he still wants to talk about them, will talk you out into the street, in fact, you with the board under your arm, if he is a true child of the high water.

And I love that kind of talk, have lived on it and lived by it, writing that kind of talk for magazines. To me, it has always been the heart of the mystery, the heart of the heart: the way people talk about loving things, which things, and why. Thus it was, after two years on university campuses without hearing anything approximating this kind of talk, I began feeling terrible, physically awful, confused and bereft. I kept trying to start this kind of talk, volunteering my new enthusiasms like a kid pulling frogs and magic rocks out of his pocket, but nothing worked. There was no bounce, just aridity and suspicion. It finally dawned on me that in this place that we had set aside to nurture culture and study its workings, culture didn’t work.

It couldn’t work in this place, because all the things that I wanted to talk about—all those tokens of quotidian sociability that had opened so many doors and hearts for me—all those occasions for chat, from Tristram Shandy to Roseanne, from Barnett Newman to Baby Face—belonged to someone. But not to everyone. All the treasures of culture were divvied up and owned by professors, as certainly as millionaires own the beach-fronts of Maine. So, even though, in the course of a normal day, I might chat with the lady in the check-out line about Roseanne, might discuss the Lakers’ chances with some guy at the blackjack table, might schmooze on the phone with Christopher Knight about Karen Carson’s new paintings, and maybe even dish with Karen herself about an all-male performance of Swan Lake, there was no hope of my having a casual conversation with an English professor about what a cool book Tristram Shandy was.

Because, in this place, books and paintings and music were not cool stuff. In society, these objects were occasions for gossip—for the commerce of opinion where there is no truth. In school, they were occasions for mastery where there is no truth—an even more dangerous proposition—although my colleagues, being masters, had little choice but to behave masterfully. Exempted by their status from the whims of affection and the commerce of opinion, they could only mark territory from the podium, with footnotes, and speak in the language of authority about things they did not love—while I listened. Which I did, and I learned a lot, returning to school. All the secrets of the universe, however, would have been poor recompense for the miasma of social desolation; they could never have redeemed the fact that, within the cloister, we moved among one another, and among all the treasures of human invention, like spiteful monks sworn to silence, like silly, proprietary eunuchs in some sultan’s harem—while all the joys that bind the world together kept us sullenly apart.

So this book is about other, more ordinary, uses for art and books and music—about what they seem to do and how they seem to do it on a day-to-day basis. It is not about how they should work, or must work, just about the way they seem to have worked in my experience, and the ways that I have seen them work for others. The pieces in this book, then, are quite literally speculative writing, neither stories nor essays but something more like fables: compressed narratives, grounded in real experience and as true as they need to be, with little morals at the end. They move directly from what I have seen and experienced to what I think about it, from the particular to the general, with none of the recursiveness of ordinary essays and short stories. So there is a lot more thus, then, therefore, and because than I would ordinarily tolerate. This is endemic to the form and the consequence, as well, of my having written them straight through, under deadline, in hope of enlisting haste as an aid to candor.

Unfortunately, since some of these deadlines were very short, there is probably a surfeit of candor in this book, occasionally at the expense of felicity. I have tried to smooth out some rough spots in revision, but the fact remains that some of these pieces end in places that I should never have gone, had I not started out in the direction that I did. Some of them conclude on notes that I should never have played, had I not begun with the simple little riff that I did. So understand that I have not set out to shock or offend, only to speculate on the consequences of my own experience, the shape of it; and be assured, as well, that all of these essays began in innocence, in extremely simple, even childlike questions that begin with Why?

The real heart of this book, in fact, lies in a little why? During the nineteen seventies, when I was writing rock criticism and pop songs, and playing music, I used to wonder why there were so many love songs. More specifically, I wondered why ninety percent of the pop songs ever written were love songs, while ninety percent of rock criticism was written about the other ten percent. My own practice complied with these percentages. When I wrote songs, alone or with cowriters, I wrote love songs—happy ones and sad ones, mean ones and sweet ones, hip ones and square ones: hundreds of them. When I wrote about music, I wrote about other things, mostly about music history, politics, drugs, hanging out, and playing the guitar.

Why? I wondered—and I wondered all the time, because it’s disquieting to be doing something and not know why you’re doing it. I came up with a provisional answer on a cool, windy afternoon in the zócalo of a little town on the slopes above Mexico City. I was sitting in a shady arcade with my old friend Brownie, who isn’t called that anymore, since he is presently in the Federal Witness Protection Program. We were down in Mexico on a nefarious errand that doubtless contributed to Brownie’s uncomfortable accommodation with the Feds, but, on this afternoon, nothing very nefarious was going on. We were just sitting at a little table, shooting nothing but the breeze and enjoying the air. Brownie was drinking a beer. I was drinking coffee. At one point, Brownie reached over and touched my arm, nodding at something in the square behind me. I turned around and beheld a perfect Latin American tableau.

On the edge of the curb, on the other side of the square, three people were standing in a row. There was boy of about seventeen, wearing a cheap black suit, a white shirt, and a narrow black tie. Beside him was a beautiful girl of about the same age, in a white lace dress, and, beside her, a duenna in full black battle-regalia with a mantilla over her hair. The duenna was a large woman, and looked for all the world like Dick Butkus in drag. The three of them had been about to cross the street into the plaza when they found their way blocked. Now, they were just standing there, at a loss, lined up on the curb with two dirt-brown dogs fucking in the street in front of them.

It was a scene deserving of Murillo. The boy was biting his lip, full of antic life but holding onto his composure, trying not to grin at the ludicrous spectacle. The girl had lowered her eyes demurely to stare at the tips of her black patent-leather shoes. The duenna was discombobulated, agitated. Her eyes were darting about. First she would glare at the offending canines, who showed no signs of stopping, then she would glance sideways at the young couple, policing their responses, then she would scan the square with her social radar, hoping against hope that no one was seeing them seeing brown dogs fucking. Brownie and I, being gringo assholes, were cracking up, and suddenly it occurred to me (probably because I had written a nice melody that morning) that these kids, having a duenna and a lot of other structure besides, did not require a wide selection of love songs. Then, perversely, it occurred to me that the dogs didn’t need any love songs at all.

That was my answer. We need so many love songs because the imperative rituals of flirtation, courtship, and mate selection that are required to guarantee the perpetuation of the species and the maintenance of social order—that are hardwired in mammals and socially proscribed in traditional cultures—are up for grabs in mercantile democracies. These things need to be done, but we don’t know how to do them, and, being free citizens, we won’t be told how to do them. Out of necessity, we create the institution of love songs. We saturate our society with a burgeoning, ever-changing proliferation of romantic options, a cornucopia of choices, a panoply of occasions through which these imperative functions may be facilitated. It is a market, of course, a job and a business, but it is also a critical instrumentality in civil society. We cannot do without it. Because it’s hard to find someone you love, who loves you—but you can begin, at least, by finding some one who loves your love song. And that, I realized, sitting there in the zócalo with Brownie, is what I do: I write love songs for people who live in a democracy. Some of them follow.

A HOME IN THE NEON

It’s the strangest thing. I have lived in a lot of cities, some of them for substantial lengths of time, but I have never thought of any of them as home. I thought of them as where I’m living now. Then, the other morning, I woke up and realized that Las Vegas has, indeed, become my home—that I routinely think of it as such. Somehow, in the few years that I have been living here and traveling out of here, this most un-homelike of cities has come to function for me as a kind of moral bottom-line—as a secular refuge and a source of comforts and reassurances that are unavailable elsewhere—as a home, in other words.

Even as I write this, however, I realize that claiming Las Vegas as my home while practicing art criticism in the hyper-textualized, super-virtuous high culture of the nineteen nineties probably sounds a little studied—a bit calculatedly exotic—as if I were trying to make a statement, or something. In truth, this condition of feeling at home in Las Vegas makes me wonder just how far back things really go, since, when I was a child, whenever I heard about Las Vegas, it was always being discussed as a potential home by my dad’s jazz-musician buddies and their so-called wives (as my mom invariably referred to them).

This was back in the nineteen fifties, when Las Vegas was rapidly becoming the only city in the American West where a professional musician might hold down a steady gig without living out of a suitcase. So, for my dad’s pals, Vegas shone out there in the desert like a grail, as a kind of outlaw town, like Butch Cassidy’s Hole in the Wall or Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious, where a tiring swing musician or a jive-talking bopster might find a refuge from the road and from respectability as well. A player might work steadily in Vegas, and perhaps get a taste of Fat America, might rent a house in the suburbs, for instance—with a two-car garage and a yard, even—and still be able to play Charlie Parker in the kitchen at 4:00 A.M. and roll the occasional funny cigarette. The only time I was ever in Las Vegas as a child, we spent a hot afternoon in the dark kitchen of a pink-stucco bungalow doing approximately that.

While the sun glared outside, my dad and his friend Shelton drank beer out of tall brown bottles and played Billie Holliday’s Gloomy Sunday about a zillion times. The whole afternoon, Shelton kept marveling at the ease with which he would pick up his axe later that evening, put it in