DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

In this interview, novelist David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) discusses black humor, politics, literature and suicide in America. As usual, he's provocative and thoughtful and doesn't mind stirring the hornet's nest--you might not agree with him, but if you've read "Infinite Jest" or any of his marvelous essays you know he's a serious thinker and worthy of your time. There are easier people to read (he mentions a few, in passing) but serious readers are rewarded for grappling with his work.

"If what's always distinguished bad writing--flat characters, a narrative world that's clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.--is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then [Bret] Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? [...] Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving." -DFW

JIM WOODRING HAS A NEW BOOK

Jim Woodring is a visionary artist who captures dreams in a fine net and brings them back to share. His vivid paintings and beautifully rendered pen and ink drawings have blown minds for years, and now he has a new graphic novel called Weathercraft. If I told you how good it was you wouldn't believe me, since I'm a friend of Jim's, so here's what the New York Times (May 27, 2010) had to say:

"Over the last few decades, Jim Wood­ring has been drawing a series of wordless, blissfully cruel slapstick fables, set in a world of grotesque entities and psychedelic minarets: half unshakable nightmare, half Chuck Jones cartoon filtered through the Bhagavad Gita."


Sounds like the New York Times is smoking something funny, you say, but they are simply under the powerful psychedelic spell of Jim Woodring. That's the risk you take encountering his work. The new book is no different, and pulls you into another dimension. It's hard to describe. Here's the Times again, taking a stab at it:


"WEATHERCRAFT (Fantagraphics, $19.99) throws a spotlight on the venal, piglike creature Manhog, who’s often the villain of Wood­ring’s stories. After a series of scourges inflicted by bees, flat-headed monstrosities and a flesh-warping devil, Manhog attains enlightenment or something like it, then rips open the Veil of Maya with his bare hands and avenges a horribly mutated pyramidal chicken, eventually sacrificing his enlightenment again. At least, that’s what seems to be going on: Woodring’s story flows so smoothly and delightfully from each image to the next that it’s easy to ignore that it has its own idea of sense, which may not jibe with anybody else’s."
-New York Times, (5/27/10)

Woo-eee, those city boys sure can talk.


Jim was interviewed recently on the Dusty Wright Show for his opening in New York. He won't watch it, but you can.



Jim was just interviewed by the AV Club at the Onion--check it out here.

NOT TV

People want simple answers and despise ambiguity, and artists are always making things less simple, pushing boundaries, expanding the dimensions of what is possible, undermining cliches, remixing disparate elements. You want absolute clarity--try religion or hard science--don't ask artists to make your world a smaller, simpler place. There are no absolutes. Artists show beauty in ugliness, light in darkness, sorrow in joy, and skip comfy cozy dichotomies--including those within art itself (high vs low art, for example--jettison that notion) and that is precisely what most people don't want. If one judges success in merely monetary terms, it's pretty simple to see what is successful, but success in artistic terms is harder to nail down. Sometimes a work that is successful to the artist doesn't sell, while something that she feels is derivative or hackwork sells. The world itself is complex and boundless and the artist tries to remind people of the fact with a gentle slap or a kiss or whatever--if people want to hear it or not.

FIRECRACKERS

Firecrackers were dangerous and forbidden and had the devilish reek of sulfur and sin. They could blow your hand off. They were illegal, sort of, unless you went to an Indian reservation or some dilapidated fireworks stand outside the city limits where you slapped your money down and got the hell out of there before everything blew up. Or you went to a third world country. Our California cousins would score fireworks in Mexico and show up with enough ordnance to restage the Normandy Invasion. They'd unload strings of firecrackers, cherry bombs, smoke bombs, bottle rockets, Roman candles and M-80s--which were basically quarter sticks of dynamite. They were trouble, but without the California cousins we only had spindly sparklers and a few snakes that scorched the driveway. With their military support, the 4th of July was a serious wartime action. (To my knowledge, they still have all their fingers.)

Firecrackers were made in sweatshops overseas, that much we knew. You pictured endless hangars of old women and children stuffing gunpowder into colored paper tubes while armed guards strode on catwalks overhead eyeballing the workers. Busy busy busy until someone collapsed from heat exhaustion and were dropped through a trapdoor, then it was back to work, doubletime, chop chop, or forget about that noonday ladle of stagnant rainwater. Meanwhile, stateside, we rode Stingray bikes and gorged on hot dogs and potato salad and somebody tossed a football around and eventually the summer evening twilight came and we watched the fireworks.

The labels were beautiful, especially the old ones. Black Cat was my favorite, but there were beautiful birds and landscapes and devils. Wonderfully weird illustrations. You never knew King Kong had wings, did you?

RED, WHITE & HULLABALOO

Spike Jones perfectly expresses our feelings about patriotism in this clip. It's kind of crazy, huh? Hear the rattling sabers and the pounding drums, the fizzle of fireworks and the flatulent brass--this is America, by golly! Hooray! We're putting up this special red, white and hullabaloo a day early because tomorrow we'll be out grilling hot dogs and shooting off rockets and drinking beers and forgetting all common sense. You know, freedom stuff. Take a whiff. You can almost smell the gunpowder and ballpark franks--it smells like victory. Have a happy 4th of July. With that in mind, here are some mindful thoughts on patriotism:

“As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities.”
—Voltaire

“Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism…Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others."
— Emma Goldman

“The loud little handful will shout for war. The pulpit will warily and cautiously protest at first…The great mass of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes, and will try to make out why there should be a war, and they will say earnestly and indignantly: ‘It is unjust and dishonorable and there is no need for war.’ Then the few will shout even louder…Before long you will see a curious thing: anti-war speakers will be stoned from the platform, and free speech will be strangled by hordes of furious men who still agree with the speakers but dare not admit it...Next, statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”
— Mark Twain

ANNUNCIATION

Abdul Mati Klarwein painted "Annunciation" in 1961. You may remember it used for the cover of "Abraxas" years later. Miles Davis also used the artist's work for the cover of "Bitches Brew." Klarwein's lurid, lysergic surrealism seemed to invite either seductive pipedreams or unsettling nightmares. Musicians responded, using it to represent some of their most experimental work, and it's hard to separate these discs from their "cover art." With the reduction of album art to CD size, and then finally vanishing altogether in the age of MP3s, it's hard to imagine the role cover art played in the total experience of the music. Mati's artwork was used on album covers for many others besides Miles and Santana, including Eric Dolphy, Jackie Maclean, Osibisa, The Last Poets, Leonard Bernstein, Greg Allman, Brian Eno and Earth, Wind and Fire. (click images to enlarge)

"A picture might be worth a thousand words but a good sentence is worth a thousand windows" — Mati Klarwein

Mati Klarwein (1932-2002) was born in Hamburg, Germany, of Jewish origin. His family escaped when Hitler rose to power, moving to Palestine. In 1948, when the territory became Israel, his family moved to Paris where Mati attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and later studied with Fernand Leger. Mati traveled and lived in many places, including India, Tibet, Bali, North Africa, Europe and the Americas before finally settling in New York in the early 1960s.

ASTOR PIAZZOLLA & THE TANGO

Astor Piazzolla plays the beautiful "Adios Nonino" with the Cologne Radio Orchestra.

Astor Piazzolla, Argentine tango composer and bandoneón player, was born in 1921 to Italian parents, Vicente Nonino Piazzolla and Asunta Manetti. He lived in Argentina, New York, Uruguay and Paris, and all the drama and mystery of these places came together in his music, which stirred a tango revival called the "Tango Nuevo," or new tango.

The tango first emerged in the 1890s in the rough slums and mean streets of Buenos Aires, and it was "the tango of the knife and the brothel." The music and the dance--with its close embrace, quick steps and complex footwork--can be traced back to a time when street barrel organs played in the working-class slums of BA that were packed with European immigrants, primarily Italians, Spanish and French.

This was the rough tango, the brutal tango so beloved by Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote about it many times. "Musically, the tango ought not to be important," he says. "Its only importance is that which we give to it. This reflection is correct, but perhaps applies to everything. For example, to our own personal death or to the woman who disdains us...The tango can be debated, and we have debates over it, but it still encloses, as does all that which is truthful, a secret."


In a way, the secret was out a long time ago. By the turn of the last century, the tango craze swept Paris, Berlin, London and finally the world, and soon tango orchestras were touring and everyone was doing it. Tango became respectable. Before long there was ballroom tango and sophisticated tango, jazzy tango and elegant tango--and some of the rough old crowd, including Borges, lamented the loss. Things change. You can still feel the old school tango in Piazzolla, and the respect he pays to the past. This is passionate music, in whatever form it takes--and critics would divide the music into three types--the Old Guard (the creole tango Borges sorely missed), the New Guard (including tango-milonga and tango-cancion), and the Tango Nuevo (the avant-garde tango a la Piazzolla).

Listen. See if you can feel the old drama, or catch the flash of the knife. It's all there. Piazzolla died in 1992 but his influence is still wide ranging and his music still enjoyed. Borges is dead, too, but his labyrinthine fiction lives on, entrapping new readers all the time. And tango is alive and well.