Asshole of the Century

Monday, June 23, 2008

Grilling the Sacred Cow

Within the tight circle of friends who read my blog, there was a common complaint that the targets on my list of overrated rock ‘n roll bands were too easy a mark. My initial response was to note that, easy targets or not, these bands were still far more respected than they had any right to be and that their mediocrity had been given a pass for too long. One specific complaint was that it would have been “a lot more fun” to read a withering critique of the Pixies or the Beach Boys, because they are widely acclaimed within our little cult circle. My response was that I love both the Pixies and the Beach Boys and wouldn’t dream of drilling any of them a new asshole, even if I could rouse up the muster to start such an activity.

But the complaint got me thinking: Yes, it would be fun to take on some of the sacred cows, the ones that add supposed meaning to our lives, and it didn’t take long for me to come up with a baker’s dozen who either don’t deserve the adoration that has been heaped upon them or who just plain bug me. It is my sincere hope that at least one of your own sacred cows is on the grill.

Wes Anderson: I admit that I’m not much of a movie guy, and in terms of movie criticism I will typically defer to others. So when folks whose taste I generally respect raved about “Rushmore”, I just assumed that I was missing something, even though to me it was just another indulgent tale of love between some rich kid and his own ennui. But at least “Rushmore” was grounded in what felt like real characters. Melissa and I kept hearing about how the “Royal Tennenbaums” was “funny”, so we rented the DVD, but I don’t think either Melissa or I laughed once throughout the entire film, and the characters were such cardboard cutouts that I fell asleep somewhere in the third reel. But nothing could have prepared me for the sheer absurdity of “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou”, which has to have the shakiest plot line to come out of Hollywood since “Straight to Hell” (that at least offered the redeeming facet of getting to watch Joe Strummer and a bunch of the Pogues drive around the desert in a fleet of old Yugos). “The Life Aquatic” should be mandatory viewing in film schools as a textbook example of what happens when you send a bunch of vacant rich people to the French Riviera with $50 million and tell them to make a movie. I admit that I never saw “The Darjeeling Limited”; I bet some people found it “funny”, but I’m sorry, Wes Anderson sucks.

Saul Bellow: “The Adventures of Augie March” has one of the best opening lines in all of American fiction: “I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” And there is no question that Bellow can turn a phrase with the best of them. But it is hard to claim someone is a great novelist who has a near total inability to write about over half of the human race, namely the female half. It is like there is some hard, corroded part of Bellow’s psyche that takes over his prose as soon as he begins to write about the fair sex. The women in his novels can be inscrutable conquests, or victims with no will of their own, or often just ciphers, but never human beings. Bellow’s not much at writing about anyone who’s not white, either, but that is a forgivable sin, as writers are first and foremost storytellers of their own culture. But that culture includes women, and everything I’ve ever read by the man immediately curdles with his own bile whenever he tries talking about “the ladies”.

Leonard Cohen: One problem with this poet-turned-musician is that he’s not that great at either. While not a bad wordsmith, he’s no Walt Whitman; he’s not even a Philip Levine (to my mind the best poet currently living in America). And Cohen’s music is pretty run-of-the-mill too, if you ask me. I think a lot of folks fall for his persona, the “serious artist” routine, with a deep voice, deeper passions, and even deeper despair. I can’t really argue with all that, other than to note that I’m not buying it. Cohen’s despair is the despair of someone who expects wild berries to proliferate across the land, free for the picking, for sex to save his soul, for the world to be fair. I’m sorry, I have no patience for that kind of thinking. I don’t wring my hands that things don’t always work out for those kind of folks. And I try not to hear their song.

Elvis Costello: I know the man behind the New Wave triptych My Aim is True/This Year’s Model/Armed Forces has earned at least half a suitcase of mulligans, and Costello gets style points for marrying Pogues siren Cait O’Riorden. But his prolific past can only forgive so much. The fact is that Costello has probably written as many mediocre songs over the last 30 years as anyone this side of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and his collaboration with Burt Bacharach was a musical trainwreck that should have been confined to the early morning hours of the Jerry Lewis telethon.

Phillip Glass: The midget of modern counterpoint, the king of scales, Glass is living proof that less is often a bore, and he has probably done more to turn folks off to contemporary classical music than anyone on the planet. There is a way to infuse repetitive musical structures with soul: Bach, Scott Joplin, some Gamelan comes to mind. Unfortunately, the more appropriate comparison in Glass’ case is C.L. Hanon.

Ira Glass: I already have “This American Life” alum David Sedaris on this list, but I have to add Mr. Glass himself. For the first year or two of its existence, I actually liked his radio show, as you could sense Glass and Co. trying to get their sea legs, looking for inventive ways to tell people’s stories. But that was many moons ago. Glass now acts on the air like a past-master running through his turns, like an old equestrian taking another Dappled Grey through her paces, and there are few people on this planet who can simultaneously bore and annoy me like some art school clown grown cocksure with his own relevance.

Chuck Klosterman: When I half-heartedly railed on Klosterman in response to one of Random Anthony’s blogs, he accused me of just being jealous. Actually, the fact that there is a separate Klosterman display at the local Borders fills me more with hope than jealousy, as it means that not every successful writer has to be a purveyor of thrillers, or chic lit, or grand metaphors for the African American experience, or kids books, or fine, academically-honed literary form. But the more I read by this guy, the less interested I get, with his tired recitations of how much he loved Tesla growing up as a teen in North Dakota, like that makes him more of a real man, more salt-of-the-earth, than his editors, whereas if he tried pulling that kind of shit where I grew up for sure someone would have cold-cocked him right out of those stupid looking glasses, because Tesla is for pussies. Maybe I just don’t relate to his Midwest enthusiasms, or maybe moving to New York and becoming a show pony has gradually taken all the stuffing out of him, because the only thing he’s written that I’ve really enjoyed was the essay on the Lakers and the Celtics from his first published collection, “Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs”, along with maybe his wrong-headed tirade from the same book about how much he can’t stand Coldplay. Whether it be his rock ‘n roll travelogues or his readings on NPR, Klosterman is a one-trick pony, a vessel full of generational relevance that the book industry could sell to “his people”, a la Tama Janowitz and Bret Easton Ellis. But as his vessel empties and his audience slowly ages into a less desirable demographic, it has become clear that there is a whole lot less here than meets the eye.

Toni Morrison: I remember Sandra Hunt teaching Multicultural Lit back at NEIU, hammering home all the symbolism in “Song of Solomon”, a perfectly fine story absolutely destroyed in the last 150 pages by Morrison’s need to turn the book into a monument to the 400-year struggle of the African-American people. It is unfortunate that literature has become hijacked by academics. On the one end are the university professors hired to talk about bullshit like symbolism and foreshadowing, turning a passionate and personal act like writing into some kind of mining operation, requiring advanced study to decipher its structural engineering. On the other end are the writers themselves, by and large kept men and women, hired by the universities as creative writing instructors or guest lecturers, who have become enablers in the process, willing to dirty their stories with overt symbolism and other obvious stunts indicative of the writer’s intent. Morrison is probably the most egregious perpetrator of this crime, and the fact she won the Nobel Prize for Literature is a travesty, on a par with Yasser Arafat winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

David Sedaris: On the odd occasion when I’ve picked up a tome by either Oscar Wilde or Voltaire, I am quickly bored by their eager desire to play the show pony, to wax clever on things of which they have only a dilettante’s knowledge, all for the amusement of their well-heeled audience, who like nothing better than a clever smart aleck. As I put the book back in its place on the shelf, I think, “Thank God society is no longer run by vacant aristocrats, so we don’t have to listen to turds like Messieurs Voltaire and Wilde.” Unfortunately, the recent popularity of David Sedaris has disabused me of that relatively mild optimism about the human race, because it is clear that, at least in some circles, the kind of arid, self-satisfied humor popularized by the likes of Wilde and Voltaire and now perpetuated by Sedaris has an eager audience in the here and now. That chestnut that public radio hauls out each year where Sedaris waxes on about being an elf at the Macy’s Santa display was kind of funny the first time I heard it (although I don’t think that it ever actually made me laugh out loud), but please, give it a break already. And I don’t give a crap about how wacky it is being a gay man in France, or what it’s like being able to pick up everything and move to Japan on a whim. Sedaris is amongst the group of writers whose entire shtick boils down to going, “Hey guys, I’m so clever. Look at me!”, augmented with an occasional, “Look at all the other people; aren’t they stupid.”

David Foster Wallace: Wallace’s popularity is argument number one that we live in a decadent, irrelevant age. The many hours I spent plowing through “Infinite Jest”, Wallace’s epic tome, were an unredeemable, wheel-spinning waste of time. When an author takes you on that kind of an extensive ride, you take it for granted that you will actually end up somewhere, that plot lines will be tied together, themes clarified, that the conflicts and travails facing major characters will be resolved, or at least referenced, before the author decides to put the book to bed. Apparently Wallace didn’t think any of those things were important enough to include in the 1,200+ pages of “Infinite Jest”. There is all of this bowing down to Wallace’s “talent”, as if being an overwriting show-off makes you brilliant. If Wallace’s wit and word play, signifying nothing, are the best our generation has to offer, I’d prefer a tale told by an idiot.

Andy Warhol: Another cultural bellwether, whose spot atop the artistic pantheon is an indication that the medium has indeed become the message, that the will to popularity, the drive to put yourself in the right place and hobnob with others of your ilk, is a more important indicator of artistic success than inspiration or insight into the human experience.

Wilco: If earnestness were one of the Seven Deadly Sins (and it probably should be; being earnest is at least as deleterious to the health of your eternal soul as gluttony or sloth, for instance), then Mephistopheles is probably busy decorating a dorm room for Jeff Tweedy in the Fifth Circle of Hell, tacking up a poster of the surf crashing on the shore and a seagull in flight, with some platitude about catching the updrafts in life or turning your face to the sun, because such a poster would be an appropriate reminder of Tweedy’s own unctuous “charm”. I had heard so much about the “experimental” nature of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” that I was actually suckered into buying it, even though everything from the album that they played on the radio (it’s a very bad sign when the only radio station that will play a band is WXRT) sounded like typical singer-songwriter shit. I would put on the CD, shut my eyes, and imagine six white guys onstage, three of them with beards, feet planted, strumming away with a self-satisfied eagerness. As an intro to some of the songs, there would be the beginnings of “experimental” noodling, which occasionally offered the prospect for something interesting to develop, but these mini-jams were abruptly shut down so the band could commence with its 4-chord strum, kind of like hard rock bands in the 70’s would tack 30-seconds of lush instrumentals onto the beginning of a song before rocking out, a kind of musical nonsequitor where the band hinted that it could play something much more interesting if it just wasn’t so compelled to rock your socks off, except that in Wilco’s case it is more like Jeff Tweedy walked into the studio, sipping herbal tea, and announced, “Alright guys, you’ve had your fun, but Tweedy is back. Make room.”

Classical Philosophy: In the past 20 years, there has been this attempt to revive the “classic” writings of ancient Greece and, to a lesser degree, Rome. It started with a bunch of crotchety old guys like Allan Bloom, who used the argument to bludgeon the multi-culti types against whom they were fighting a rear-guard action for control of academia. By now, the cultural focus on Classical thinkers, from Plato to Virgil, Aristotle to the Stoics, has trickled down to the rest of us, but the joys and revelations of Classical philosophy are dim ones at best. The entire methodology of Greek logic, with premises and the resultant conclusions, is a house of cards if the premises are wrong. And almost all of Classical logic and science are built on faulty premises, as neither ancient Greek nor Roman used inductive reasoning or the scientific method to test their extrapolations and hypotheses. I hate the rigidity of Roman rhetoric, especially compared with the soaring prose of the Jewish prophets that form the other basis of Western lit. Language is a gift of the spirit, whereas the Romans treated it as architecture, as something to be constructed like a math proof. In terms of the critical questions of our existence, I much prefer folks like Wittgenstein, or Kant, or Hegel, who discuss the nature of truth and language, about whether the human race has a destiny, of the relationship of Man, God, and Law. In contrast, Classical philosophy is dominated by platitudes. Today, a Plato or a Seneca would fit right in on the Oprah show, which is all fine and good, I guess, but, in all of my readings of these marbled logicians, not a single one has ever offered any kind of real answers for either my own life or the world around me.