Bent Notes

I’m not sure how I could add anything to what Roger Kimball has to say about the novelist who passed yesterday at age 84.  From his desire to overcome his childhood self-image as a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn to his preoccupation with buggery to his woefully underbaked views on the Vietnam conflict and America’s feelings about it, to the gargantuan vanity of his lifeong quest to write the greatest novel ever, Kimball has it covered.

I might have an observation or two about his place in the overall culture.  BN readers know I’m currently making my way through Diana West’s supremely important Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.  She looks at such cultural unfoldments as the advent of rock and roll (and she’s thorough, going back to the birth of BMI in 1940 and what ending ASCAP’s monopoly on royalty clearance did to American music), the impact of Lenny Bruce, the rise of mass media geared to teenagers and the pervasiveness of consumerism.  Where does Mailer fit into all this?  He exists at an interesting nexus:  he was clearly trying to emulate Hemingway, with all that boxing and carousing and boozing.  His rise on the cultural radar screen loosely coincides with that of the actor Robert Mitchum, and they share in common aspects of the pot-smoker-with-the-volatile-personality persona.  Mailer got going on his leftist bona fides early on with the founding of the Village Voice.  On the other hand, he relished building up his creds among the New York intellectuals and the east coast glitterati.  He loved nothing so much as an A-list cocktail party.

We can definitely say that he was self-absorbed.  I think what we ought to find noteworthy about that was the success with which he got American culture to be fascinated by his self-absorption.  Even in Armies of the Night, when writing about this Pentagon demonstration the perceived nobility of which he ostensibly wanted to impart, it wound up being all about Norman. and that’s what critics were left with to write about.

His passing marks a good occasion for asking a question that’s more pertinent by the day:  Isn’t it time to quit ascribing depth or even cleverness to artists who spread chaos to all they touch in the name of making a statement?

In her column today, Diana West very effectively ties together several recent sociocultural developments and show how they spell “The Death of the Grownup.”  She’s covering much the same ground that the always-marvelous Joseph Epstein did in a 2004 essay for The Weekly Standard called “The Perpetual Adolescent“, but these new observations of hers add substantive elements to the argument. 

It was most interesting to come upon this Myron Magnet piece in City Journal after my four days at Indiana Black Expo.  Magnet is one of the most rigourous and clear-eyed observers of the upheavals in American society in the last fifty years, and here he applies that scrutiny to the question of why we have the simultaneous phenomena of an expanding black middle class and a huge black prison population.  It’s long, but I invite anyone who starts into it to read the whole thing before drawing any conclusions.  And if anyone feels the need to get the same message from someone of another pigmentation, may I suggest the works of John McWhorter or Shelby Steele.

Finally, BN has somebody to enthuse about, rather than make excuses for their shortcomings.  (Okay, Fred got on board with McCain-Feingold, but as far as I know that’s the goofiest move he’s ever made.) 

We’ve got the real deal here.  An utterly human, personable, seasoned, brilliant, principled, articulate and unafraid statesman.

In descending order, if it can’t be him, BN gets stoked by -

- Romney

- Giuliani

-Hunter

-Brownback

The things you gotta ask yourself are:

- who is realistically electable, and

- who can make mincemeat out of the H-word creature in a debate and show her for the socialist phony she is.

 These people qualify in descending order on the first count, but any of them could handle the second requirement.  One, though, could do it grandly, in a way that would have all Americans with intelligence and integrity levels above the level of slugs leaping out of their armchairs and pumping their fists into the air.

The number one fan of the man from Tennessee!

I knew about the one-square-of-toilet-paper proposal, but Michelle Malkin has the scoop on - are you ready for this? - “dining sleeves.”

Sheryl’s getting boorish and pathetic in the past few days, but there was always something about her that bugged me.  It seems to me she’s always wanted to have it both ways - rock & roll creds and the uptown-nice-lady image.  She’d do songs about drinking beer for breakfast or running into a jam in Vegas, but she also dug being on the women’s magazine covers and doing the girly-girl morning TV shows.  And strictly from a musical standpoint, I always thought her sound was derivative and calculated to take her as high on the pop charts as possible.

When I heard that she and Lance Armstrong broke up over irreconcilably divergent views on W, I filed it under “Hee hee.”  I’d kind of figured her for a limousine moonbat, with her “Key-to-no-war-is-not-to-have-enemies” spout right before the Iraq invasion.

Now comes her double-team accosting, with Inconvenient Truth producer Laurie David, of  Karl Rove at the White House correspondents’ dinner.  Hey, what’s a little inappropriate behavior when the sea levels are at stake? 

I’m about to wind the semester up in my rock-history class.  I still have a couple of decades to go if I’m going to continue to gear my lectures toward stuff like development of genres, or changes in the recording industry or the radio biz, or technological developments, or in-depth looks at significant individuals, but, given that there’s not much time left and the only significance of rock since 1980 has been its role in our culture’s rot anyway, maybe Ms. Crow would make a nice case study. 

Rock stars telling us it’s urgent to change the way we tend to our anal hygiene. 

File under “pathetic,” and also “Western civilization sure did a lot for humankind before it collapsed.”

When I put up the link to that great Johnny Otis footage, I didn’t know my next post was going to be a link to a bunch of vile hip-hop videos.  My intention with the Johnny Otis post was for us here at BN to take a break from World War III and the erosion of our economic liberties and even pervasive cultural rot and have some fun, have a dance party.  Now it feels like Mims and R. Kelly have spoiled my party.  (I realize Michelle Malkin put those videos up on her site to make a point regarding the Don Imus matter.   I’ll let her point about it, as well as what the always spot-on Teri O’Brien has to say, speak for me on the I-man’s situation.)

That’s one of the larger cultural points I’m striving to make here at BN.  Our modern culture spoils the party so much of the time.  Is there anything fun about Britney Spears, who is ostensibly a prominent figure because she sings pop music, or Rosie O’Donnell, who is ostensibly a talk-show co-host, or, for that matter, Don Imus, who is ostensibly a radio guy?  No, and it’s because these people have chosen to morph into purveyors of ugliness, which is the main thing they are all known for now.  That’s a much faster route to fame these days than having a particular skill set in some branch of the media or entertainment.

Then there’s the matter of their overblown stature.  Such clowns occupy the public’s attention at a time when Iran announces the firing up of 3,000 centrifuges (and one government official brags that it’s just the latest milestone on the way to 50,000) and North Korea is once again found to be in non-compliance with yet another deal the objective of which is to get it to give up its nukes.

And to think we’re back to all this stuff so quickly when I though maybe we could take off our shoes and do a little hand-jivin’.

Actually, I think my latest round of thinking about such stuff (see post below) got started last night.

One of my rock-history students made me a CD which, on several levels, is very cool.  It contains about seven or eight albums- about 200 songs.  About four volumes of some comprehensive series on the Brill Building hits - all those late-50s-to-mid-60s tunes written by the likes of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil, etc.  Classic performances by Connie Francis, Bobby Darin, The Shirelles, Little Eva, The Chiffons, The Righteous Brothers, Paul Revere & the Raiders, etc.  A few volumes of some series on the British Invasion.  Again, some great classic performances. 

Some of that stuff is as well-crafted as the classic performances of the Great American Songbook standards.  No doubt about it.  But as I listened to the anthems of teen love, I thought about how the point - for the writers, performers and the guys upstairs like Don Kirschner and Phil Spector - was to market to a particular demographic that had lots of spending cash. 

In fact, one can go back to the mid-1950s, when Alan Freed had moved his Moondog Rock & Roll Party radio show from Cleveland out to WABC in New York and put on those shows at the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn to see that the up-and-comers in the music business had a deliberate agenda of getting adolescent Americans to feel that their youth somehow made them special.

Those early rock hits didn’t foster teenagers’ narcissism quite as overtly as modern stuff, but it’s still there in hefty doses in such tunes as “Where The Boys Are,” “He’s A Rebel,” “It’s My Party” and even the surfing-and-drag-racing anthems of Brian Wilson and Jan Berry.  The whole my-parents-don’t-understand-me/I-have-a-right-to-my-gadgets-and-toys/my-steady-date-is-so-hot-this-must-be-love vibe got going in earnest in rock’s first decade.

And we continue to strengthen it in this age of MySpace and ringtones.  The message is that youth is, to employ a phrase that served as a title for a mid-60s rock TV show, where the action is.  Which has some merit; youth is the stage of life during which we have boundless energy and vision, when our sense of fun gets a little wacky, and when we see ways of assembling the basic elements of life that become less apparent as we take on more responsibility.  But people in that stage are ill-equipped to fully address such considerations as character, courage, decency, consideration, and real love.

Somebody has to be willing to grow enough to deal with those matters.

A number of conservative bloggers have weighed in on Ann Coulter’s tasteless remark at CPAC yesterday.  Uniform disgust, from what I can tell.  Hugh Hewitt, for instance, says it’s time to quit inviting her to headline at such conferences.

It’s a shame.  She is intelligent, has thought out positions on the issues that I certainly concur with, and she’s definitely easy on the eyes.  But she has this history of shooting off her mouth, going back to when National Review Online let her go for her rant right after 9/11.

We can’t afford cheap and vulgar outbursts on our side.  I, for one, think that one of the things conservatism is about is exulting refinement in human discourse.