The Unblinking I
In my secret identity as a teacher of rhetoric and composition, one of
the cardinal rules I try to impress upon my students is "Keep yourself
out of the essay" -- that is, if you want to persuade or inform,
present your argument as a fact of which your reader is simply as yet
unaware. It's not, for example, that you believe there should be campaign
finance reform or that you think children should not be allowed to
watch South Park, but rather there must be reform or parental
intervention, for such-and-such following reasons. Your direct presence only
undermines the argument, turning it into your personal axe to grind.
Pop journalism, on the other hand, is a different critter altogether.
As Almost Famous showed us, it takes a special kind of reporter to
bridge the gap that separates celebrities from the rest of us, an intrepid
and ballsy sort with the fortitude to plunge headlong into the Bizarro
world of stardom, with its eccentric characters and arcane initiations,
and come away with some copy in time to meet a deadline. If the
greatest fear of the majority of us is to stand up in front of other people,
then performing and the active pursuit of fame are aberrant behaviors --
is it really that surprising that Michael Jackson and Madonna and
Prince, not to mention Elvis, are so fucked up? It follows that only a
personality that, if not just as skewed, is at ease in the funhouse can
confront celebrities and draw them out. No wonder pop journalists tend to
live celebrity lives themselves and tend to make themselves part of the
stories they file, whether it's the I'm-with-the-band ramblings of Lisa
Robinson and Kurt Loder, Lester Bangs' speed-freak manifestos, or
Hunter S. Thompson's field reports from his own personal unhinged universe.
Thus pop journalism tends to be largely metanarrative in nature, of
equal parts about celebrities, about knowing celebrities, about writing
about knowing celebrities, and about being celebrities themselves,
albeit by osmosis.
Beat Punks, by Victor Bockris, is that sort of book. Ostensibly it
centers around Bockris' thesis that in the Seventies the survivors of the
Beat Generation owed their resurgence to the vitality of punk, which
had been, in turn, inspired by the Beats. The problem here is that all of
the support for Bockris' premise is engineered by Bockris himself. As a
reporter for High Times and collaborator on books by Andy Warhol,
William S. Burroughs, and Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, Bockris was fond
of setting up summit meetings between his various interview subjects and
recording the results. Some of these summits are largely successful,
such as a wonderful conversation between Burroughs and Christopher
Isherwood so cosmically appropriate it's hard to imagine they had never met
before. Others are just awful, such as a dinner party with Burroughs,
Warhol, and Mick Jagger (who filled in for a recently arrested Keith
Richards and only so he could ask Bockris not to publish the transcript) in
which everyone contrives to be intellectual despite having nothing to
say to each other. Still others are simply baffling -- Susan Sontag and
Richard Hell have a lively discussion about literature and politics,
but why did Bockris feel it vital to show us Burroughs and Harry
discussing answering machines and why the French suck?
Because they're William Burroughs and Debbie Harry, and because they're
both casual pals of Victor Bockris, that's why. Beat Punks appears to
be largely an abbreviation for Beats and Punks Who Gave Me Their Phone Numbers, and the summit meetings appear to be less for the reader's
benefit as they are for Bockris' friends to be impressed by Bockris'
other friends. Bockris is a relentless name-dropper, and it is a wonder to
see how he can work the name of "Bill Burroughs" into any discussion.
This is not to say that the book is without merit. Fine moments abound
here -- Burroughs/Isherwood, Sontag/Hell, terrific interviews with
Keith Richards and Allen Ginsberg, and nice articles on Berlin in the
Seventies and the writing of Andy Warhol. Furthermore and surprisingly,
Bockris includes well-chosen material by other writers, especially Richard
Hell's insightful 1998 elegy to Burroughs, and a truly moving account
of the passing of Ginsberg by Rosebud Feliu-Pettet. There is a generous
helping of photographs here (enough to exclude stills from Rock'n'Roll High School), and some of the pictures don't even have Victor Bockris
in them. It's an apt visual metaphor for Beat Punks as a whole, a
lovely portrait of the Manhattan underground scene of the Seventies and
Eighties if you can ignore the photographer's everpresent thumb.
Kristine McKenna knows William Burroughs too. And Pauline Kael and Bo
Diddley and Artie Shaw and Werner Herzog and Nick Cave and Robert Crumb.
Where Bockris maintains a tight shot of Manhattan in his book,
McKenna's Book of Changes is a panorama view of relentless coolness, a
collection of 38 interviews with a broad spectrum of influential artists
thematically centered around discussions about change in themselves and in
the world.
Like Bockris, McKenna covered the late Seventies punk scene, but in Los
Angeles, originally for Wet magazine. Her portfolio grew to include
pieces for Artforum and Rolling Stone, and so the breadth of her
access to such a diverse group of creative individuals is almost
unsurprising. What's more, in several instances (the ubiquitous Burroughs, for
example -- jeez, now I'm doing it) McKenna was apparently able to
charm initially intractable subjects into second and third interviews.
These serve her well as she illustrates life changes in action in these
people's lives. An ongoing conversation with David Lynch, for example,
shows us the quirky filmmaker at the height of his powers, upon the
release of Blue Velvet, and again later in a more philosophical frame of
mind following the double crash-and-burn of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Lost Highway. Four interview segments with Brian Eno, from
1980 to 1997, detail a slow evolution and refinement of the musician's
worldview that will engender respect for his mind even if one finds his
music self-indulgent.
McKenna has a genuine affection for her subjects, but it is the
affection of a fan rather than an inveterate insider. She had the misfortune
of interviewing Werner Herzog after he was accused at the New York Film
Festival of causing the deaths of several extras during the filming of
Fitzcarraldo, and Herzog's raw hostility apparently drove her to
tears. She writes of her relief after Van Morrison complimented her on her
questions. And in her introduction, McKenna apologizes for the effusive
gushing in the prefaces to the individual interviews. She needn't
apologize, as it's her enthusiasm for her subjects that drives the book and
leads her to the refreshing decision to omit her questions in several
of the pieces, allowing the words of the interviewees to stand alone (in
the case of the ever-sermonizing Howard Finster, this is definitely for
the best).
The unfortunate flipside of said enthusiasm is McKenna's frequent
tendency to lob softballs at her subjects. McKenna states up front, "I think
it's possible to put an intimate conversation into print without
violating confidences or hurting anyone," but while that's a lovely show of
respect, it also undermines the unique power of the interview format, to
chisel away at the subject's public persona and reveal the artist's
true motivators. When Nina Simone says in 1999 that she's afraid she'll be
killed if she returns to America, or when Nico calls Charles Manson "a
prodigal son who went wrong, and that's what life is all about," they
should be challenged. To do any less is to be complicit in rank
persiflage, to aid and abet dishonesty.
Still, there are so many nice moments in Book of Changes that it is
worth the read, not the least of which are the illustrations. The book
is published by Fantagraphics Books, better known as the publishers of
such comics as Love and Rockets and Hate, and 28 cartoonists under
Fantagraphics' aegis provide portraits of each of the interview
subjects. Particularly good are Crumb's portraits of James Brown, Bo Diddley,
and Artie Shaw, Eric Reynolds' rendering of photographer William
Eggleston, Bill (Zippy the Pinhead) Griffith's Mel Torme, and David Lasky's
Peter Weir. But hands down my favorite rendering is Peter (Hate)
Bagge's Pete Townshend, if only because it never dawned on me before how
much Townshend looks like a Peter Bagge drawing in real life -- trust me
on this.
Or don't, because I've been doing that thing I tell my students never
to do, putting myself into the essay. I can't help it -- I'm a pop
journalist too, perpetrating metanarrative cubed: writing about celebrities
writing about knowing celebrities and writing about them. Or something
like that. I'm not terribly worried about it, though. If any of them
read this, I'll just remind them that language is, after all, a virus.
Bill Burroughs said that, you know.
