Baby Steps & Big Leaps

The Village Voice, the storied New York alt-weekly that shut down in 2018 after a 63-year run, will live again. Brian Calle, the chief executive of Street Media, the owner of LA Weekly, said on Tuesday that he had acquired the publication from its publisher, Peter D. Barbey. “I think a lot of people will be hungry for this and I’m superoptimistic,” Mr. Calle said in an interview.

— “The Village Voice Rises From The Dead” Katie Robertson, The New York Times December 22, 2020

Although I never anticipated it, attending college in Ann Arbor, Michigan during the late Seventies awarded me with an accidental education in popular music. I couldn’t have received better training to be a rock critic if I tried — possibly not even in New York. Not only was there a thriving punk/new wave scene along the metropolitan Detroit-Ann Arbor corridor, but the student-run Eclipse Jazz concert series at the University of Michigan exposed me to the length and breadth of this native American music. Over the course of 1977 and ’78 I attended concerts by Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Ella Fitzgerald, Roy Eldridge, Johnny Griffin, Art Blakey, Woody Shaw, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra and The Art Ensemble of Chicago. Even as an unschooled 20 year old, I sensed my amazing good fortune. What I didn’t — couldn’t have — comprehended was the setting of a pattern. With regard to witnessing musical moments, recognizing historic explosions of vast talent, I repeatedly found myself in the right place at the right time.

      Though I was primarily motivated to attempt journalism after catching local appearances by Patti Smith, Talking Heads and The Ramones, my first assignment for The Michigan Daily turned out to be a concert review of a local bar band called The Look. And by this time, January 1979, I was looking beyond the Motor City for literary and musical inspiration.

      Indeed it was the deluge of fresh, outrageous music coming out of New York in those days — punk rock, new wave — that jump-started my growing fascination with The City itself. In late 1977 I subscribed to The Village Voice from my Ann Arbor perch in order to keep up with the scene. Just reading the outlandish names of all those bands playing CBGB and Max’s Kansas City was so exotic, so exciting in those heady days of discovery: Theoretical Girls on the same bill with Sick Dick & the Volkswagens! Pretty soon I was devouring the entire newspaper every week: the sharp-shooting columnists and critics, the zealous investigative reporting and most important, the weirdly mesmerizing features, where more often than not the writer became part of the story. New York City Mayor Ed Koch once said, disapprovingly, that “the writers run The Voice.” That’s how the paper read as well, to me anyway. The Village Voice was all about the writers’ voices: highly subjective, slightly anarchic, often political, always pointed and impassioned. Simultaneously I decided that a) I had something unique to say and b) this disarmingly personal approach to journalism was a way to say it so that other people might conceivably pay attention.

     Looking back at my article about The Look more than forty years later, I see how completely in thrall I was to The Village Voice. Rather than write a mere concert review I constructed a reported essay, including: a general overview of the Top 40 cover band circuit that also specified how The Look both conformed and defied conventions with their eclectic repertoire of borrowed and original material; quotes from audience members; a brief interview with the band’s lead singer Dave Edwards; and my positive critical evaluation. We were a good match: both subject and writer harbored ambitions beyond their present station. When The Look released an album several years later, I wasn’t nearly as enthused about their music but felt genuinely proud of them anyway. We’d both moved on from our small-town success to a more formidable challenge: becoming bit players in a larger production.

      I wrote dozens of other articles for The Michigan Daily over the next two years, mostly about music. Extending my senior year by a semester, I served as co-editor of the Arts Section for the calendar year of 1980. It was invaluable experience, learning by doing i.e. making mistakes on the printed page. Part of the enduring late Sixties legacy at the University of Michigan, the student paper in those days functioned without faculty supervision. In fact, during the one journalism course I took there, the professor urged us to keep the hell away from the Daily. As far as the staff was concerned, we weren’t student journalists; we were the college town’s morning newspaper, since The Ann Arbor News came out in the afternoon.  Arrogant? No doubt, but this prevailing attitude among my peers also buoyed my confidence and pushed me past whatever self-consciousness and insecurity lingered in my post-adolescent mindset. Meeting deadlines didn’t leave time for questioning yourself.

      Another New York publication kindled my writing aspirations in this formative period. I first read New York Rocker at my part-time record store job in Ann Arbor during the summer of 1979, before my senior year. This newsprint tabloid improbably appeared alongside slick publications like Billboard and Rolling Stone in the magazine rack near the checkout counter. My appetite for the new sounds coming out of lower Manhattan had been thoroughly whetted by The Village Voice, and New York Rocker further stimulated that hunger by covering each subsequent ripple, from radical no wave bands like the funky and confrontational Contortions to more user-friendly New York immigrants like the party-starting B-52s from collegiate Athens, Georgia. Sharp writing and splashy graphics distinguished New York Rocker from the amateur enthusiasm of the do-it-yourself journals that came to be known as fanzines. The Rocker proved to be an indispensable guide to the new music.   

      Abrasive and syncopated, the Contortions’ Buy LP took a while to sink in. But the B-52s’ joyous debut album became a favorite among my classically trained colleagues. While I still loved the energy of punk and the melodic thrust of power pop, when the Knack hit with “My Sharona” that summer, my taste began to expand beyond the confines of rock and roll.

     Controversially, I often picked the latest disco singles when it was my turn to choose the in-store soundtrack. Though never a dancer, I was attracted to Chic and Donna Summer by the soulful singing and sophisticated rhythmic pulse; disco trifles like “I Love The Night Life” by Alicia Bridges or Anita Ward’s “Ring Your Bell” were classic, catchy pop like the one-hit wonders of yore.

      I’d been working part-time at Discount Records since summer 1978. Clerking in a record store was relatively low-impact compared to my previous part-time gigs: dorm cafeteria dishwasher and furniture store stock boy. Unlike those jobs, the absence of demanding physical labor at the record store permitted plenty of time for listening, and learning. 

     It was a survey course in popular music, and the music business. Studying the charts in Billboard and Record World, I also kept track of what sold in the store — and what didn’t. Naturally the job also afforded ample opportunity to hear new music. Our constant in-store soundtrack was more for the employees’ benefit than customers. Discount Records was largely staffed by classically trained musicians; students and refugees from University of Michigan’s music school who nevertheless displayed catholic taste. I was the token rocker, a cliched role I played to the hilt. 

      We were all ferociously opinionated about music, but remained open. We didn’t force our likes, and dislikes, onto customers like the obnoxious clerks in High Fidelity. Or at the very least we kept the cutting remarks to ourselves until the offending customers exited the store. So I just smiled and gritted my teeth when attractive young women I knew from various classes came in and purchased ghastly albums by Dan Fogelberg or Gino Vanelli.

     For the next year, through the summer of 1980, I stayed busy and content: splitting my time between The Michigan Daily, the record store, oh yeah and attending classes too, never realizing that any idyllic season must end.

      Boom. Autumn 1980 was a time of personal and political upheaval. Ronald Reagan’s election caught me and many others completely off guard. On November 4, election night, I attended an informal staff gathering at the student newspaper office. We anticipated a late-night vigil, hunkered around the vintage AP wire machine and a cheap black & white television. Several six-packs of Molson were surely on hand. Eventual victory for Jimmy Carter was assumed if not at all assured. But the evening ended early, and joylessly. Awaking the next day and stumbling to class, the realization hit: I’d been living in a liberal college-town bubble for the last four and a half years.

      I graduated in December and returned home to Cincinnati. Armed with a BA in psychology and several hundred LPs, I reclaimed my old bedroom and fitfully plotted my next move. The holiday season sped by in a cheery, beery blur. January, however, proved to be a cruel month for job searching. Especially for a budding journalist, operating from his parents’ fake wood-paneled suburban basement. I sent out my resume and article clips, to increasingly smaller and smaller newspapers. The polite rejection letters piled up; taken individually they were depressing and considered collectively, devastating. I worried about where my chosen path was headed. At this rate, it might take ten years to land at The Cincinnati Enquirer or Cleveland’s Plain Dealer. High time to concoct a Plan B.

      My weekly copy of The Village Voice now arrived in my parents’ mailbox. I frequented a punk/new wave record store off Calhoun Street near the University of Cincinnati that carried New York Rocker along with all the latest UK import albums and indie-label singles. The nerdy Nimrod of a manager shrugged off my inquiry about part-time employment and registered open annoyance at my many browsing-only visits. Though I couldn’t afford to buy records, vicariously I tried to keep up.

      Driving my parents’ second car around town, I tuned in to WCIN-AM, the local R&B station; partially because the mainstream rock stations were so dire in those days, dominated by the AOR Axis of Evil (Journey, Styx and Kansas), but also because the bass-heavy sound of funk and the fleet-footed swing of disco sounded so much better, frankly, than everything else available. My epiphany occurred somewhere on Winton Road, heading uphill toward our modest family home in the ranch-house oasis of Finneytown. Lakeside’s “Fantastic Voyage” came pumping out of the cheap Volkswagen speakers and I realized this funky strut rocked more effectively than any current rock and roll, new wave or old hat. Growling along with the lyrics and drumming on the steering wheel, my mind accelerated beyond the speed limit. And as my musical horizons broadened, so did my dreams. Suddenly I realized where I’d always wanted to go and only now could summon the confidence to say out loud.

      Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as President of the United States on January 20,1981. Two weeks later, I bought a one way train ticket to New York City.

The Congressman Who Kicked a Hornets’ Nest

There is a history in all men’s lives, 
Figuring the nature of the times deceased; 
The which observed, a man may prophesy, 
With a near aim, of the main chance of things 
As yet not come to life… — Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 2

A newly elected congressman at age 35, Newton Leroy “Newt” Gingrich hardly fit the mold of a future Speaker of the House in 1978. He’d already run for Georgia’s Sixth congressional district seat twice before, in 1974 and ’76, losing both times. Though the former history professor (West Georgia College) came across as a nerdy scholar and political wannabe to some observers, he clearly viewed himself as a great statesman in the making. Right from the start, Newt Gingrich’s aspirations were always grand. Some might say grandiose.

In Burning Down the House, Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party, Julian E. Zelizer follows the Georgia congressman’s ruthless and relentless path to power during the Eighties, step by step.

As an assistant professor at West Georgia, Newt “lacked the patience for the slow crawl of university life. He couldn’t understand why the administration rejected his application to serve as university president after one year on the job or why the dean didn’t select him as chair of the department a year later.” Winning election to Congress amped up his already-healthy ego.

His personal style was dynamic, high-energy, yet he could also be unfocused and distant. “Newt was frenetic, moving from one idea the next, unconcerned with pushing any notable legislation. He was in constant conversation with everyone but intimate with almost no one. He found it easier to speak in slogans than to relate to the person in front of him.”

Reading about Gingrich’s bottomless self-confidence and sheer nerve can be comical today, though at the time, his Democratic opponents were not amused. Recognizing the majority party as vulnerable, Newt latched onto House Majority Leader (soon to be Speaker) Jim Wright of Texas as a soft target for his anti-corruption crusade. In perhaps his one truly brilliant and utterly cynical insight, Newt Gingrich identified the emerging media platform of cable TV news as the perfect medium for his partisan assaults as well as his personal assent. Especially C-SPAN, which he exploited as a sort of proto-Internet.

“This new cable television medium, a press without sentries, created opportunities to communicate with mass audiences that older Republicans didn’t understand and senior Democrats couldn’t handle. Through cable television, Gingrich would be able to carry out the guerrilla tactics.”

Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of political history at Princeton, didn’t interview Newt Gingrich for this book but did gain access to his voluminous papers. The bulk of his narrative details how Gingrich eventually unseated Wright, mostly through accusations of financial impropriety regarding a slim bound volume of speeches that the Speaker of the House had published by a small press and peddled at campaign events. It’s a complicated chain of events, bordering on convoluted even in Professor Zelizer’s careful retelling. The fact that Gingrich simultaneously fell under scrutiny for a sketchy book-publishing deal of his own reveals much of what we need to know about how far chutzpah can get you in politics.

“The purification that Gingrich was demanding from Democrats was almost entirely one-sided. Gingrich, who was under an ethics cloud of his own, one eerily similar to the charges he had leveled against the Speaker, had no intention of demanding the same strict standards from his own allies. The campaign against Speaker Wright was all about politics, not good government…[O]nce politicians lowered the bar as to what kinds of actions were permissible in the political arena, it was virtually impossible to restore conditions to where they had been. When politicians see a colleague get away with something, the temptation is strong to replicate what they have witnessed in one form or another.”

One can only hope Julian E. Zelizer writes another book about Newt’s Nineties: his contentious tenure as Speaker of the House including the hyped-up Contract With America, his beyond-hypocritical condemnation of Bill Clinton’s sexual misadventures while conducting his own extramarital dalliance with a decades-younger female assistant, his departure from the Speakership and eventually the House itself under looming ethical shade.

The spectacle of Newt Gingrich today, in the twilight of his career, comes as no surprise: he pumps out book-length jeremiads (three so far) positing the current President as the only possible cure for the decayed state of our nation, and preaches to the peanut gallery on Fox News. Trump and Newt: these first-name-basis icons, or their brands, have much more in common than might be first evident between a history professor-turned-politician and a real estate mogul cum authoritarian demagogue. They’re both men with an eye for the main chance, guys who managed to grab the brass ring without having much of a clue about what to do with it. Or what to do next.

Quick Killing, Slow Death, Eternal Art: Jean-Michel Basquiat Reconsidered

I can’t remember exactly where or when Jean-Michel Basquiat surfaced on my radar screen. Though music was my focus during the early Eighties in New York City, I was also fascinated by the booming art scene and frequented the East Village galleries. But I was neither knowledgeable enough to write about art as a critic nor socially confident enough to insert myself into the surrounding scene.

Jean-Michel Basquiat had already embarked  – or been launched – on his meteoric rise when I arrived in Manhattan during the banner year of 1981. According to Phoebe Hoban’s definitive biography, Basquiat never again equalled the quality of his early work despite the ensuing fame and fortune. By decade’s end he was gone, overdosing on dope in 1988.

Certainly I was aware of Basquiat by the time I started writing for New York Rocker and The Village Voice in 1982. While I didn’t dismiss him like the highbrow (read: reactionary) art critics Hilton Kramer and Robert Hughes, I didn’t connect with his epic canvases in the same way as I did with the staggering graffiti murals sprayed on the outside of trains on the IRT subway lines. Descending the stairs to the E train one day after work in 1982, I spotted Keith Haring rapidly chalking up one of his signature figures on a blank billboard space. But he’s another story.

When Basquiat produced the classic avant-garde rap record “Beat Bop” by Rammellzee & K-Rob in 1983, I declared (glibly) that it was a more significant achievement than his art work. It only took a quarter century to realize I was wrong. And “Beat Bop” still slaps.

In 2005 the Basquiat retrospectives at the Brooklyn Museum and LACMA in Los Angeles shot through me like a lightning bolt. Suddenly , I got it. All that floating type, his fever dream of words and phrases, numbers and equations, signified nothing less than the information overload of our digital age. Better late than never, I realized Jean Michel was ahead of his time while remaining a pure product of late Seventies/early Eighties NYC: amid the urban decay lurked multi-ethnic cultural detritus, the good/bad/indifferent just laying around, everything up for grabs.

 

Jean-Michel Basquiat Bird On Money 1981

Basquiat: A Quick Killing In Art clearly recounts Jean- Michel’s economically stable and emotionally rough childhood without using it as an excuse for his subsequent dissolution and penchant for selfish, cruel behavior. His marathon drug intake and catnip-to-women (and men) sex life are fully accounted for without actually reading quite as salacious as it sounds to describe them. Phoebe Hoban is even better at describing Basquiat’s intuitive methods and impulsive practice; he manically draws and paints while puffing weed and sniffing coke, blasting Charlie Parker and referring to a coffee-table book on Cy Twombly, all at the same time.

Hoban also captures the business side of Eighties art in all its rapacious, cynical hustle. This was only the beginning: the prices quoted as overvalued (the book was written in the late Nineties) will appear quaint in the current era of multi-million dollar paintings auctioned at Sotheby’s. And speaking of quaint, the “hot” artists cited here are forgotten (Kenny Scharf) or perhaps better known for other pursuits (film director Julian Schnabel).

The book’s subtitle is a tragic double entendre. In Hoban’s judicious telling, Jean-Michel was exploited by his dealers and in turn sought to take advantage of everyone – anyone – who crossed his path. Reading about his inevitable descent into addiction and isolation is no fun even though Basquiat is far from sympathetic or even remotely likable as he’s depicted here. Still, his charisma and talent shine through. I searched in vain, among the many names, for an acquaintance who humble-bragged about being one of Jean-Michel’s girlfriends in the mid-Eighties. But now I understand why she was drawn to his flame. Basquiat’s sad end felt like a waste then and doubly so today. Speculating about what he might’ve done had he lived is especially pointless given how much he left us. Speaking for myself, I’m only starting to grasp Jean-Michel Basquiat’s brilliance.

We Are The Robots

Set in the early 1980s, Ian McEwan’s fifteenth novel successfully juggles counter-factual and science fiction elements. Machines Like Me supplies a surprisingly fresh take on a by-now familiar theme: artificial intelligence and its implications for anthropoids. Narrator Charlie Friend is a thirty-something slacker who decides to blow his modest inheritance on the latest high-tech indulgence: instead of cocaine or sports cars, he buys a robot. Meet Adam: “the first convincing artificial person on the market.”

Charlie’s story begins in the United Kingdom during 1982 and his early Eighties are markedly different from what people my age (i.e. alive then) may remember. England loses an extended and bloody Falklands War to Argentina, for starters, which leads to Maggie Thatcher’s ouster and the rise of Tony Benn, a left-leaning Labour politician obscure to American readers and perhaps a few Brits. The Beatles reunite, though their comeback album, Love and Lemons, recorded with “an 80-piece orchestra” is “critically derided.” Self-driving cars dominate the roads while Charlie defiantly wheels his own ride, an electrically powered Sixties-vintage jalopy.

Charlie is given to freelance philosophizing and social observation, dispensing random nuggets of wisdom almost like the protagonist of a late Saul Bellow novel.

“Everything was rising – hopes and despair, misery, boredom and opportunity. There was more of everything.”

Personal opportunity proves somewhat elusive for Charlie, however. He pursues a fitful romance with his upstairs neighbor Miranda. She’s ten years younger, a “doctoral student in cultural history” who gradually becomes involved, intimately, with Adam. Embarrassment and mild hilarity ensue though I found this bizarre love triangle, much remarked upon by reviewers, the least remarkable aspect of the novel. Inevitably, Adam declares his “love” for Miranda (after a superhuman round of oral gratification), telling Charlie: “I feel things profoundly. More than I can say.”

The Adam and Eve bots in Machines Like Me may be programmed to experience emotions but as with their flesh-and-blood models, there’s a potentially fatal flaw in their algorithms. Those scripts can’t process the duality of human nature, our perverse capacity for good and evil. The robots are incapable of balancing two opposite notions in the vast data dumps that pass for their minds. As the legendary mathematician Alan Turing explains to Charlie in a cameo:

“There’s nothing in their beautiful code that could prepare Adam and Eve for Auschwitz.”

It’s been suggested that McEwan chose 1982 at least in part because Blade Runner, the filmic treatise on AI adapted from science fiction author Philip K. Dick, debuted that year. Maybe. Though the movie isn’t mentioned among the period pop culture references here. I suspect he chose the early Eighties in part because it was the dawn of the Device Era, that acronym age of VCRs and PCs, when the self-enclosing “personal stereo” aka Walkman replaced the boombox on city streets.  As Charlie Friend puts it:

“The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.”

Sounds current, no? In the end, Machines Like Me has much more to say about the present than the recent past or any possible future. Though another Charlie Friend monologue vividly reminded me of my own early Eighties.

“In my twenties, some of my most cheerful times were spent getting ready to go out. It was the anticipation rather than the thing itself. The release from work, the bath, music, clean clothes, white wine, perhaps a pull on a joint. Then stepping out into the evening, free and hungry.”

Could an algorithm generate that feeling of sweet expectation? I guess we’ll find out. Eventually.