america adrift

I’m unplugging from the Matrix for week starting from now. Everyone else here at aa is presumably still around, although it is Autumn Break. As for me, I need to burn one down.

Ben Harper performing at Boonaroo about 4 years ago. Or was it five?

Lately, I have been preoccupied with a new research project that I am trying to work up into a paper for the next Nordic Association of American Studies conference in May 2009.

These days I spend about 10 hours a week commuting, which means that I get to listen to a lot of CDs. One of my recent faves has been The Street Was Always There, a collection of songs by American protest and folk singers from the 60s, all performed by Eric Andersen, who himself was a member of the Greenwich Village scene at the time. The disc contains songs by virtually all the great singer-songwriters of that era - with the notable exception of Bob Dylan. Most of the contributors I was at least vaguely familiar with, but some required intensive Google’ing on my part to get their back-story.

The first thing one notices about the circle of singer/songwriters in question is that almost none of them got out of Greenwich Village alive (and the few that did, did not get away unscathed) - with the notable exception of Dylan, of course: Phil Ochs hanged himself, Paul Clayton took an electric toaster with him in the bathtub, Richard Fariña crashed his motorcycle at 90 mph, David Blue had a fatal heart attack at 42, and Peter LaFarge died of a stroke, possibly induced by a drug overdose, in October 1965. He was 34.

Many of these untimely ends can be traced back to disappointments with the singers’ careers (most realized that Dylan would be the only folkie making a successful transition into superstardom) and disillusionment with the loss of the potential of the counterculture to change the world. Among the luckier ones who didn’t die young, but ‘merely’ went into internal exile were Fred Neil (d. 2001) and Paul Siebel, who both quit the music scene almost entirely as the sixties revolutionary spirit waned into the commercial twilight of the early 70s.

But I was particularly interested in why things went so badly with Peter LaFarge, esp. after I discovered that he had been involved, at the time of his death, with Inger Nilesen, a Danish woman who had come to the US to work as a stewardess in long-distance buses - a job which she had soon quit in order to work as a hostess in a Miami Playboy club, only to follow her love of folk music to Greenwich Village’s bohemian heartland, where she soon hooked up with Peter LaFarge.

In the case of LaFarge some particularly interesting identity issues must have combined to exacerbate his discontent, and yet he seemed to have everything going for him in 1965. His song “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” had been a major country and cross-over hit for Johnny Cash the year before. LaFarge was a bit older and more experienced than most of his peers, and had already been recording folk and sea shanty albums in the late 50s, so he knew the music business quite well. He had recently met Inger Nielsen, whom he publicly expressed deep affection for, she had given birth to their daughter, and had even managed to astound everyone, including LaFarge, by recording and publishing an album of her own on Folkways Records, featuring Danish folk songs. Why, then, did things suddenly go so badly with Peter LaFarge?

To trace this enigma further one has to look at the precarious identity construction at the heart of the story everyone knew to be Peter LaFarge’s: An Indian of Hopi descent, he had been adopted at age nine by his stepfather, Oliver LaFarge - Pulitzer price winning author of the novel Laughing Boy, himself a descendant of the nearly extinct Narragansatt tribe. After educating himself, Peter decided to try his luck as a rodeo rider, which he was nearly great at until suffering an accident that almost cost him a leg - after which he discovered a talent (which was mentored by folk legend Cisco Houston) for singing and song-writing, specializing in bringing the plight of Native Americans to the attention of a wider public  - after which he served in the US Army in the Korean War, before moving to the Village to take part in the growing folk scene there, hanging out with Rambling Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan, whom he took extra pains at keeping out of trouble - ultimately becoming as known for his talent as a painter as for his singing, and, to crown it all, signing a major label record deal with MGM.

Most of this rags-to-riches story, however, hinges on a string of fallacies and inventions (as uncovered by Yuval Taylor in the article linked to above) which LaFarge either actively created and spread, or at best did nothing to dispel. My paper aims to chart these ‘fake’ identity constructions and to read LaFarge’s life as a cultural text illustrating the twin hazards of aiming for cultural authenticity and cosmopolitan sophistication (esp. when one tries to do it together with a Danish-born ‘Playboy bunny turned folk singer’ as Inger Nielsen is often referred to…)

This project is still very much work in progress, and I have not yet had time to track down the recent documentary film on LaFarge which should give some enlightening background on his life. Nor have I yet been able to find out much about the later life of Inger Nielsen, other than discovering that she had at least one other child after LaFarge’s death. I need also to trace whether her record was ever reviewed in Denmark and whether she came back here to perform or to live… Help and info on such matters will of course be greatly appreciated.

In a Cold War context, “jazz was a natural” in the arsenal of cultural diplomacy. So concludes Fred Kaplan a piece in the New York Times on the Jazz Ambassadors Program of the mid 50s. Possibly because jazz during the years when the program was launched, was not only a purely homegrown art form, but also a regular mass culture export.

So, it is interesting that when Kaplan asks what would be today’s “secret sonic weapon” the answer seems to still be jazz.

Present day’s version of the Jazz Ambassadors Program is called Rhythm Road and although it does offer what is referred to as “urban” music (not sure whether this is supposed to be an inclusive term, or just a euphemism), the main focus of the program is still jazz. It is however not with the stars of yesterday or even today, the groups are all fairly unknown. Not that this would make much difference in terms of impact, as the great names of jazz today hardly receives the world press attention of big rock, pop or even “urban” names.

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Whatever metaphor we may use, this is “crunch time” for many of us writing, editing, and grading papers, preparing for exams, getting out those last minute proposals, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.

In the weeds, the jungle, buried in paperwork, up against the clock, 4th and goal. Well, you get the idea.

I always liked Devo’s cover of Allen Toussaint’s “Working In The Coal Mine” from their 1981 album New Traditionalists and thought this as good a metaphor as any. Perhaps some of you may vaguely remember this track from the soundtrack of the animated movie, Heavy Metal.

This is dedicated to all the summer slaves of academe.

“When my work day is over I’m too tired for having fun………“

NPR.org, June 2, 2008 - One of the fathers of rock ‘n’ roll died Monday at the age of 79. Bo Diddley was born Ellas Bates in Mississippi and grew up in Chicago, where he played guitar on street corners before being discovered by Chess Records. He leaves behind a sound that helped build a musical movement.

What made Bo’s music so unique? I don’t know exactly but if I had to assign to it just one adjective it would be, crunchy. Yeah, what a wonderful crunchy sound.

A few months ago I posted an article, Postmodern Presidential Branding, which highlighted Obama’s “O” logo in particular, as a example of open ended visual narrative, easily recreated and reproduced. Here’s exhibit 3,569. I was never a Dead Head (though I dated one) but I’ve been a Grateful Dead fan for as long as I’ve been choosing what I listen to. The Dead Head community has always actively recreated and reproduced the Grateful Dead image which makes this image all the more interesting as it merges two open-ended narrative icons. The employment of Obama’s campaign slogan,”fired up and ready to go” was also not lost on this gentle commentator. This flew under my radar at the time but here are some photos of the band from the “Dead Heads for Obama” GOTV event.

Here’s Bob Weir endorsing Obama which links to both Mickey Hart’s and Phil Lesh’s endorsement. Why didn’t this get as much press coverage as John Edwards’ recent endorsement? Anyhow, there’s also video from the concert which you can scroll through but I thought the quality was so poor I’ve posted the song bellow instead.

In my little neck of the woods here in Denmark, after three glorious weeks of sunshine we received a little box of rain this morning. Dead Heads were doing “viral marketing” long before Time Magazine named “YOU”, person of the year, but this “user generated” video is pretty sweet. Happy Monday.

Next week will be a busy academic whirlwind tour of two Nordic capitals for me: Helsinki and Oslo. The two main American Studies events of the year are crammed together as Consecutive conferences: The Renvall Institute’s Helsinki do, The Maple Leaf and Eagle Conference, has reached instalment no. 12 in its fine run (it will be my third time around as a participant). The theme is always broad and this year is no exception: “North America - Relations and relationships”. My contribution is about the cultural importance of one specific, iconic brand of car: The Cadillac…

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For the last couple of weeks or perhaps a month, I’ve been rediscovering The White Stripes, a Detroit City garage rock band. I knew and liked them before my visit to Detroit two and a half years ago, and I can’t say that my visit to Detroit really had anything to do The White Stripes - but I did discover another garage band The Detroit Cobras while there. Not sure why I’m re-tuning myself to Stripes, probably because their sound is quite close to The Detroit Cobras - unpolished, raw, energetic and not filled with a pitch-perfect ProTools sound.

The song that really stays with me is “The Big Three Killed My Baby”, a song that is both typical and atypical for the Stripes. It was their third single ever, also the third track on their debut album. The sound is typical of their early years, which is more unpolished than the later, and Jack White’s vocal is more scratched and raw and pulled a bit back in the production. The result is pretty close to MC5, who of course also hailed from Detroit. Lyrically, the song is atypical for the Stripes, as it is quite political, while most of their songs are relationship songs (for lack of a better word). Continue Reading »

So, Bob Dylan won an honorary Pulitzer, for his contribution to American culture. It seems that people are surprised by this, as it is the first time that rock’n'roll has been awarded. It doesn’t really seem surprising to me. Awarding Bob Dylan the Pulitzer now seems more like getting it done before closing time, possibly even spurred on by I’m Not There. Also, all it really shows, is that Bob Dylan is an icon of the Sixties and that the Sixties counterculture is slowly being completely incorporated into American cultural life.

Whatever the musical merits of Dylan’s post-1980s output, it seems a safe bet that Dylan won for his work in the 1960s. He certainly didn’t win for his album Modern Times (2006), so his recent work is less significant than his collected output. Dylan has been awared quite a bit in recent years, but the Pulitzer is probably the highest honor so far.

But in fact, what is interesting about the Dylan Pulitzer, really isn’t Dylan; it’s about how these awards work. It was inevitable that Dylan ended up getting a Pultzer Prize, and not surprising as commentators say. It was clearly necessary for the Pulitzer committee to reinvigorate the Pulitzers by making them more relevant to the times, otherwise they were in danger of never being able to award other musicians than jazz musicians and classic composers. Dylan’s honorary award is the first step in this direction, and in that sense, the Pultizers need Dylan more than he needs a Pulitzer.

Times are a-changing, then, as the awards need the celebrities and the celebrities in fact award the prizes with their glamor, rather than the prizes awarding anything to the celebrities. Perhaps this was always the case, and with the ubiquity of award shows all over the world, it definitely seems that the awards needs the celebrities.

This week’s class in The Beat Generation Revisted course was an introduction to the life and works of Allen Ginsberg, whose famous poem “Howl” inspired the title of Jonah Raskin’s 2004 book (subtitled “Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation”) and gave me the title of this blog entry. American Scream is an examination of the cultural roots of Ginsberg’s great outpouring in poetry of what made his generation unique in its maladaptation to an American conformity. As a communication studies professor Raskin’s primary interest is not in “Howl” as a literary work, but more in the effect of the poem on its contemporary society, as well as the personal development Ginsberg underwent before he could gather his ideas in this compendium of anecdotes about life as “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…” Raskin has, as the first scholar ever, had access to some unique background sources, such as psychiatric reports on Ginsberg, interviews with his psychoanalyst and extracts from the poet’s journals:

American Scream shows how “Howl” brought Ginsberg and the world out of the closet of a repressive society. It also gives the first full accounting of the literary figures–Eliot, Rimbaud, and Whitman–who influenced “Howl”, definitively placing it in the tradition of twentieth-century American poetry for the first time. As he follows the genesis and the evolution of “Howl”, Jonah Raskin constructs a vivid picture of a poet and an era. He illuminates the development of Beat poetry in New York and San Francisco in the 1950s–focusing on historic occasions such as the first reading of “Howl” at Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955 and the obscenity trial over the poem’s publication. He looks closely at Ginsberg’s life, including his relationships with his parents, friends, and mentors, while he was writing the poem and uses this material to illuminate the themes of madness, nakedness, and secrecy that pervade “Howl”.

Raskin’s book is just one among many books focusing on Ginsberg as the chief poet of the Beat Generation and one of the key focal characters in the nascent counterculture from the mid-fifties and onwards. One can point to Barry Miles exhaustive biography of Ginsberg from 1989, Ginsberg - A Biography:

or Michael Schumacher’s critical biography from 1992 Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg which has more focus on analyses of the poems:

Apart from these bios, there is excellent information to be found in the facsimile version of “Howl”, edited by Barry Miles, in which one gets a full annotation of the poem by Ginsberg himself as well as background on the “Howl” obscenty trial, Ginsberg’s struggle to correct the contemporary image of the poem as a nihilistic protest, instead of a spiritual credo, and much other invaluable material. Of course one must also own a copy of the original black and white covered City Lights Pocket Poets series edition of Howl and Other Poems which is still a cool object to carry in one’s jacket or jeans pocket…

As for my lecture today I took my starting point in a clip from Bob Dylan’s 1978 film Renaldo and Clara, showing Dylan and Ginsberg together at Kerouac’s grave, discussing poetry, gesturing and walking about looking at the various mementi mori at the cemetery:

I thought it only appropriate to link back to last week’s talk about Kerouac and his untimely death in 1969 of alcoholism-related causes, but also to point forward to the great connection between the Beats and the counterculture of the 60s with Dylan as one of its less willing figureheads. This connection gave me an occasion to explore the great meetings in 1965 (recently commented on by Todd Haynes’ film I’m Not There) between Dylan, Ginsberg and The Beatles in London, where Ginsberg mediated as if he were a diplomat negotiating a peace treaty between two rival superpowers. Miles describes (p. 370) how Ginsberg managed to break the ice between the oversized egos of Lennon and Dylan by clowning around telling stories about William Blake, Jack Kerouac and the other Beats.

The relationship between Dylan and Ginsberg continued to be close, and Dylan helped Ginsberg take a step towards using music in connection with his poetry, teaching him a few chords on the guitar, and in general inspiring Ginsberg to approach other, more traditional forms, such as the blues - a popular form Ginsberg seems to have been unfamiliar with before meeting Dylan. In Don’t Look Back, D.A. Pennebaker’s well-known documentary of Dylan’s tour of England in ‘65, Ginsberg takes part in what has really become an independent music video of “Subterrenean Homesick Blues” (it was also used as the original trailer for the film). While Dylan holds up and discards cue cards with the song lyrics, (”don’t follow leaders, watch pawking metaws”) Ginsberg is seen in the background vigorously debating with another individual, waving his arms and a weird shepherd-like walking stick about. The action all takes place in the back alley from the hotel they were staying at. This was only the first of Ginsberg’s many cameo appearences with musicians over his career…

I went on to briefly mention some of Ginsberg’s other activities in 1965, including the visit to three Communist countries (Cuba, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovachia) and getting thrown out of all of them (although in Prague the students crowned him King of May). I also pointed to Ginsberg’s rapidly accumulating FBI-file, which didn’t seem to reflect that since Ginsberg was treated as a dissenter and a misfit everywhere he went, it made little sense for the Feds to think he was some sort of Communist infiltrator and spy…

After this excursion into Ginsberg’s ushering in of the 60s counterculture and passing the mantle of prophet and critic of America’s contradictions on to a new generation, I returned to the main works of the mid-fifties Ginsberg, discussing how Kerouac’s list of essentials for the production of spontaneous prose inspired Ginsberg during the writing of “Howl”. The other raw material for “Howl” was of course personal experience, both from Ginsberg’s childhood where he suffered greatly because of his mother’s mental illness and his own troubled sexuality, and the more recent experiences from his circle of friends in New York, both at Columbia and Times Square, and later on in California.

In the facsimile version of “Howl” Ginsberg actually provides a rather elaborate line-by-line key to the anecdotal evidence immortalised in phrases such as: “who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull” - references to Ginsberg writing on his dirty dorm window and getting suspended from Columbia for claiming that (Columbia President) “Butler has no balls”. Many other otherwise obscure lines refer to specific incidents involving friends of Ginsberg, such as Philip Lamantia, Herbert Huncke, Joan and William Burroughs, Kerouac, or Neal Cassady (who famously is “N.C. - secret hero of these poems”). There is also a reference to Bill Canastra who was a legendary bohemian on the outskirts of Ginsberg’s circle who decapitated himself by leaning out of a subway car while it was leaving the platform…

With regards to the structure of “Howl”, Ginsberg insists in a letter to the critic Richard Eberhart that the poem is built “like a brick shithouse”. By this he means that there is a solid, predictable construction of each of the 3 main segments and the so-called “Footnote to Howl”. Each of the sections of the poem has a “fixed base” and a repetition-fueled structure: The “catalogue” of section I contains the anecdotes I referred to earlier, and they are anchored by the relative pronoun “who” initiating each line. Part II is a condemnation of “Moloch” - Ginsberg’s name for the military-industrial complex which in Old Testament fashion demands a burnt offering of each citizen. This section ends with the speaker “abandoning” Moloch. This portion is the katabasis element of the poem, i.e. its descent into Hell. After that, part III features a statement of solidarity and brotherhood, where the direct address to “Carl Solomon!” is followed by the reassurance: “I’m with you in Rockland where…”, repeated as the beginning of each line. Finally, in the Footnote (which really is the poem’s part IV) we are back out of the mental hospital, and hear a list of all things holy, from the lowliest body part (”The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!”) to the highest aspiration of a man: “Holy the supernatural extra briliant intelligent kindness of the soul!” This portion opens with 15 times “Holy!” and after that every line opens with the same incantation. This structure can be summarised in terms of language functions: Lament, Curse, Praise, Incantation/Prayer…

(By amazing coincidence, my friend Gray from Washington just sent me a news item that a hitherto unknown tape recording of Ginsberg reading “Howl” has been discovered in a university library at Reed College in Portland, Oregon! The tape will be available from the college website soon…)

After this in-depth survey of “Howl” we briefly discussed and heard some other poems, including “America”, the funny tongue-in-cheek politics of which hinge on a parody of media stereotypes of “them bad Russians”. In “America” Ginsberg still signs into the American project, putting his “queer shoulder to the wheel”. The America outside his poem was less than forthcoming in accepting the help he offered.

We also discussed the role which some poetical predecessors have played as inspiration for Ginsberg. Here I singled out Walt Whitman, as the peripatetic American bard whom Ginsberg offered to follow early on: “Which way does your beard point tonight?” (”A Supermarket in California”) (this post discusses Whitman and Ginsberg and the American Dream); Wiliam Blake whose voice Ginsberg heard in a vision, and to whom his “Sunflower Sutra” pays homage; and finally Oriental traditions, both within religious thought and poetic practice (for instance the haiku).

In closing we heard Ginsberg perform his moving “Father Death” (taken from a 90s BBC program) where he plays the harmonium and sings this simple lyric about accepting and embracing the inevitability of death for all. Thus we started the day at Kerouac’s grave and ended with a celebration of both life and death. Ginsberg passed away in 1997…

Ginsberg at Academy of American Poets
Ginsberg at Levi Asher’s Literary Kicks
Ginsberg at Modern American Poets

Also check out the recent Allen Ginsberg movie…