The last time I saw Jean I was going home from work, had just passed through the turnstile at the 57th Street BMT station. We spotted each other, he at the bottom of the stairs, me at the top. As he climbed I witnessed a little silent movie. He stopped briefly at the first landing, whipped out a marker and rapidly wrote something on the wall, then went up to the second landing, where two cops emerged from a recess and collared him. I kept going.
A month later he was famous and I never saw him again. We no longer traveled in the same circles. I was happy for him, but then it became obvious he was flaming out at an alarming pace. I heard stories of misery and excess, the compass needle flying around the dial, a crash looming. When he died I mourned, but it seemed inevitable, as well as a symptom of the times, the wretched Eighties. He was a casualty in a war—a war that, by the way, continues. Years later I needed money badly and undertook to sell the Basquiat productions I own, but got no takers, since they were too early, failed to display the classic Basquiat look. I’m glad it turned out that way.
Then again, it could be said that historical fiction, like science fiction, is really always about the present. Llewyn Davis is a creature of the here and now, not of 1961. He has none of the communitarian goodwill, the erudite passion, or the optimistic idealism that marked the period. He is a confused, irascible striver who isn’t sure what he is striving for, apparently seeking a career when folk music was about the last place you’d look for one. It is suggested that he has been flopping on friends’ floors for months, when, at the time, people generally only did that when they first hit town, since it wasn’t hard to scratch up the twenty or thirty bucks a month it took to rent a tenement flat fifty years ago.
But if you excise the period details, he makes sense. Whereas in a better time he would spend five or ten years woodshedding and developing a soul, he has no choice but to enter some kind of race right away or die on the vine. He is consistently crass because he feels threatened by people and ideas he can’t dominate—and he can’t dominate very much because he feels threatened. (How else to explain his heckling an Appalachian singer, complete with autoharp and authentically awkward?) Somehow he has made a connection to something that is genuine and profound—the haunting music—but circumstances force him to treat it as a card to play rather than as a path to explore.
As Sante notes in the review, while the film is based on musician Dave Van Ronk’s memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street, it isn’t really about Van Ronk at all:
The impression is that of a young man who has a great many more mistakes to make in life before he wises up, if indeed such a thing is ever to happen, but who channels the accrued wisdom of the ages when he enters the folk-lyric continuum, becoming an entirely different person. This suggests a description not so much of Van Ronk—or Paxton, or Ochs, or Elliott—as of the man who upset the apple cart: Bob Dylan.
Everybody Street is a new documentary about the lives and work of New York’s street photographers and the city that inspires them. The film features photographer Bruce Davidson, Elliott Erwitt, Jill Freedman, Bruce Gilden, Joel Meyerowitz, Rebecca Lepkoff, Mary Ellen Mark, Jeff Mermelstein, Clayton Patterson, Ricky Powell, Jamel Shabazz, Martha Cooper, and Boogie, as well as historians Max Kozloff and Luc Sante. It looks amazing:
I wasn’t going to say anything about the death of Lou Reed — what is there to say? Like so many people, I discovered his music in my teens and was just as thrilled and confused by The Velvet Underground as anyone else — but I did want to post a link to a short New YorkeressaybyLow LifeauthorLuc Sante that seems to capture something of the man’s complexity, and the dark, ambiguous appeal of the VU:
The least you could say about Reed is that he was complicated. He was lyrical and crass, empathetic and narcissistic, feminine and masculine, a gawky adolescent and an old soak, a regular guy and a willful deviant, an artisan and a vandal. As a teen-ager he was administered electroshock, intended to cure him of either homosexuality or generalized waywardness, depending on which interviews you read. He studied poetry with Delmore Schwartz and songcraft in the teen-pop-counterfeiting ateliers of Pickwick Records, then absorbed the avant-garde trance state from La Monte Young via John Cale and Angus MacLise—but since he was already tuning his guitar strings all to one note when he met them maybe he’d absorbed it on his own.
The Velvet Underground, fruit of all those disparate lessons, encompassed so many contradictions it initially weirded out nearly everybody. Reed employed the marble-voiced Nico—foisted on the band by Svengali pro tem Andy Warhol—as a Brechtian device to spike his tender ballads, while pushing a wall of noise and lyrics about dope and queer sex directly in your face. That first record (“The Velvet Underground & Nico”) travelled by word of mouth for years, going from zero to classic entirely behind the industry’s back. It was among other things an aggressive declaration of New York gutter realism in a time of rising California pie-eyed bliss. It may well have launched fifty thousand bands, and it may also have launched a hundred thousand chippy dope habits. And at length it spoke to a million teen-agers, one by one, in the existential darkness of their bedrooms.
The first VU song I ever heard was I’m Waiting for the Man. It was a staple on Annie Nightingale‘s Sunday evening request show on BBC Radio 1 in the late 1980s and it sounded, if not exactly dangerous, then certainly wayward, grubby and glamorous in a way that only New York rock ‘n’ roll can. It sparked an unhealthy interest in the band that’s never quite gone away. The VU track that captures all their brilliant contradictions is probably the epic Sister Ray. But I couldn’t find the full 17:27 version (15 minutes might be enough anyway), and I’m not sure I want to end on that note, so here is Some Kinda Love from the VU’s eponymous 1969 album instead:
The scale of the office was intimate and I sat right in the middle of it, very self-conscious at all times but generally invisible to the great and the good who passed by. I imagined an early scene in some novel, maybe by Dreiser: the young clerk at his desk, his pen suspended in midair as he observes this or that eminence on parade. Isaiah Berlin, Lincoln Kirstein, Joan Didion, the debonair Murray Kempton, V. S. Pritchett who still sometimes turned in holograph manuscripts, Edward Gorey towering in his raccoon coat and white Keds. Not many of the names meant much to me at first; I came from another culture in another part of town.
Has Sante written anything on Gorey? It seems like a perfect match… or is that just me?
