A folk-jazz riff on the rift

Lee and I lay on the couch last night watching Neil Young in "Heart of Gold." Her legs were on my lap, the kittens nibbled on her toes, the children were out, and although the band did sing some old songs, they were mostly from his recent album, new to me. The music bathed us in waves of joy and sadness, a glorious shock and rich vein of feeling I wasn't really prepared for. It made me feel old and timeless.

The concert connected neatly with the book I'd read that morning as I rocked outside under the trees in the hammock, Andrew Holleran's "Grief." A brief read, an elegant tone poem, certainly based on his own life, about AIDS and loss and family and friends and Mary Todd Lincoln, too. As in Heart of Gold, underlying the book is a current of connection of an artist to his parents. Maybe that was the surprising thing about both works (especially when the country is talking about defining marriage), about how powerful and indelible a stamp the idea of family really is, parents and children. Heart of Gold is dedicated to Young's "daddie" who had died just months before the performance. Young's stage patter and songs related to parents, children, old men and children, and dying...

I finally heard from my agent over the weekend, too. Writing books follows a timeline I am just learning. My last book took three years to write. I don't know why I should expect these two I've been tinkering with should take any less, with no expectation of sales (or even completion, for that matter), and with a wavering sense of audience.

Holleran said in one of many insightful comments thrown out casually that when your parents die, you lose your audience. I'd never thought of it that way. We do things for our parents, or for our children, probably forever, dead or alive.

I think I'm going to be getting somewhere with this fractal of thinking. Maybe or maybe not. We'll see.

I so frequently had told people -- editors, therapists, myself -- that I could only write if I had already sold the story. That I had pitched it to some specific publication and pre-sold it. I couldn't write unless I had that reason to do so, that direction.

But maybe it was audience that I had received, rather than the promise of money, that spurred me on. Money probably didn't have that much to do with it. The stakes were remarkably low in any case. The deadline also provided some additional push. I've often said I'd pay for a deadline. I need a deadline dominatrix. But it was also the incentive of knowing my audience, knowing who would be buying my material, and -- in turn -- knowing who I was supposed to be. My own persona came into focus when that audience was defined for me.

Did you see this letter in Sunday's paper? Nora Poland of Bellflower wrote: "Why is it that some of our military men fighting in Iraq have to stand trial for the murder of a few people in Iraq but opposing forces can slaughter, beat and behead members of our military? Is this not a war we are fighting? Someone please tell me, where is the justice here?"

Letters like this one are fascinating to me. I don't understand why the Gazette publishes them. They are illogical (at best) and make false assumptions. If a semiotician were chopping it to pieces, he could probably write a book about this letter alone. "The murder of a few people" is dismissive, missing the point that these are civilians and not soldiers, and possibly racist (the whole letter is xenophobic). The phrase "opposing forces can" is what pushes the letter over into stupidity. Who gives them permission? No, opposing forces may not kill. But they do. And this letter is not worth publishing. It reflects upon the ignorance of the populace. It furthers no new ideas.

The Crockhead and I have argued about this. He thinks people's stupidity is revealed when such letters are published. I disagree. If the News-Gazette publishes such letters in order to point out their lack of logic, then they should also publish an editor's disclaimer. They give credibility to the irrational and the unreasonable by publishing Nora's letter. Call me a fascist. It is part of my anarchy that allows me NOT to allow, that allows me to discriminate (another word for taste, isn't it?).

When the Crockhead wrote his reviews of The Sting and then A Prairie Home Companion, he made fun of people who analyze movies, who discriminate, who invent in their determinations about art. I don't know if he was joking or serious when he said all New York critics kowtow to Frank Rich. I guess it was supposed to be funny, but I think his audience believed him, just the way the Gazette readership will believe Nora's letter, nod their heads in agreement, and reconfirm their prejudices.

There are different ways to review movies. Two of them are:

a) to judge them
b) to interpret them

Maybe interpretation is false, pretentious, and unnecessary. But for me, the act of interpretation itself provides meaning. It opens a window to what one audience member, the critic, sees. It allows me, as another audience member, to participate in the work of art rather than merely consume.

If there is nothing to interpret, there's no reason to go. I try to enjoy the popcorn and the projection, but I generally prefer more protein in my intake.

Writing for blogs, I'm not sure who the audience is. Maybe I prefer to define it in my own mind. Maybe I prefer to write for an anonymous or even imaginary person spying on me. This is perverse perhaps. I forget who once said "everything is better through a keyhole." Maybe I did. Or Andy Warhol. There's something delicious to me about home movies found at a garage sale, watching an incomplete picture, being able to fill in the blanks. I like YouTube videos without context. Apart from the aspects of voyeurism and exhibitionism, with blogs there is the sense of the audience being a mystery, a fantasy. So, no, I don't want comments on my blog. I don't want to know who's watching me. I know God is watching me every minute. I got used to that years ago. It even became that I was able to sin and say "hello, God" at the same time.

Granted, I am crazy. No, not even that. I'm probably insane, which is a the upper class elite of crazy. I recognize that the creative crockpot of anarchy produces both nothing and bubbles of something now and again and there I am, stewing like the helpless victim in a cannibal's lunch.

I think stuff should be free. It's the lesson Abbie Hoffman taught me that I could never shake. I have gone to the movies for twenty, thirty years without paying for them. A sense of privilege is hard to give up. My press pass probably is what kept me in this small town, if you want to know the truth of it. I found it too hard to give up that entitlement. Because I had publications to write for, to review things, I could go to New York once or twice a year and see scores of Broadway and off-Broadway shows, I could eat at the best four-star restaurants to review -- Le Cirque, Chantarelle, Jean-Pierre's -- when otherwise I could not get past the door.

And I developed a sense that if I had to pay for these things, I did not enjoy them. If I paid for them, they became evaluated according to cost. Were they worth it? Was the Le Cirque food with Sirio Maccioni's personal attention worth the $500 price tag? (Well, in that case, maybe so. I know, I'm boasting. I apologize.)

When money was involved, I rated these extravagances, these entertainments, according to value and bargain rather than meaning and worth.

All of the above of which is the most incredible way of getting around to the way the Crockhead reviews movies and the way I review movies, the way he approaches art and the way I do.

Using a star system to review things reminds me of singing praise music at church. Why bother with four part harmony, with hymnals and the detail of written music, when you can just cut to the core, praise God, wave your hands, make your point, and be done with it before sharing time, when we can talk about our illnesses and travels?

That's a stretch, praise music and movie reviews. But it's the very kind of interpretation, parallel, comparison, that I find interesting to ponder in my Dada kind of way.

Now, I don't know who crossed the line in our differences, where real anger emerged in place of play. The Crockhead prefers star systems. In the case of a play I liked and recommended, The Pillowman, it became impossible to discuss the merits or demerits of that work because The Crockhead had given it a ZERO star rating. There was no discussion. It was judged and dead. The judgment of star ratings makes it necessary to argue, rather than discuss.

Judgment believes in the possibility of a complete communication, a finality. No home movies found at garage sales. No Stan Brakhage. Interpretation is open-ended. In his various posts, The Crockhead rated me with ZERO stars for my way of accumulating art, which he believes is illegal. But I don't pirate work and I (perhaps narrowly) fall within the guidelines of legality. When I was basking on the beaches of Yugoslavia, a honeymoon financed by sales of reviews of the Zagreb Film Festival (with absolutely no profit, an accepted hand-to-mouth, break-even experience, like my whole life has been), I was trading in my opinions and ideas for the experience.

I think the argument between Crockhead and me happened because of our proximity as much as anything. We rubbed each other's edges somehow. I parodied, not entirely fairly, some of the ways he reviews movies. The Crockhead believes that my parody was unfair because it infringed on his good name, or his audience's perception of his good name, but if he is honest, he should recognize that it might be a little more complicated than just that. Otherwise, he could have simply asked me more strongly to indicate the authorship rather than denounce me as a liar and a thief.

The Crockhead parodied film analysis and claimed that all analytical critics flock together as one. He has the right to that view. (I want to remind him that, when I stood all alone in criticizing Mark Robert's "Rantoul and Die," he provided half a dozen other critics who had lavished praise on the play and asked me, "Why is it you are different?")

Well, that is indeed the question.

What happens now? Nothing. Nothing can change. I'm still an anarchist, as likely to dismiss something one day as honor it the next. The Crockhead is still addicted to compulsive judgment that gives him comfort and a sense of security.

I don't know who wins. I don't care. We should be playing in a band, making folk music, creating something.

There's arguing and there's invention. I know which I aspire to do.