By David Ross. Erik Mongrain’s “Air Tap” (see above) is a genuine benchmark of the modern guitar. The composition is perfect, the technique largely novel. Beyond the slightly uncharacteristic “Air Tap,” Mongrain’s music seems at first merely atmospheric in the Windham Hill tradition, but his compositions turn out to be aggressively intricate and even scholarly – as it were solutions to thorny riddles of musical theory. One realizes that Mongrain has fully departed from bop and rock histrionics in order to create a new mode on an entirely different basis of order, symmetry, and almost Asian apertures of silence. If Bach had played the koto, he might have sounded something like this. Mongrain’s two albums – Fates (2007) and Equilibrium (2008) – are as deceptively understated and precisely reflective as Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (1913):
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough.
I would call Mongrain a link in the guitar’s fundamental evolution. He is, of all things, a Quebecois – see here for biographical details.
By David Ross. Two propositions about James Brown: 1) He was the highest energy performer ever. In full overdrive, he was the rubber-legged soul incarnation of Chuck Jones’ Tasmanian Devil. Nobody – not Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, or Bruce Springsteen – ever approached Brown’s expenditure of calories per second or approximated his capacity for what amounts to self-detonated metabolic nuclear explosion. 2) His bands of the late fifties and sixties – featuring vocal backup by the Famous Flames and best captured on the classic album Live at the Apollo (1963) – were the greatest of the R&B and rock era. These bands were not necessarily the most gifted, but they were the best rehearsed, the most cohesive, the most rhythmically agile, and in all ways the most pinpoint. The most virtuosic rock units – The Who, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Led Zeppelin, Mahavishnu Orchestra, The E Street Band – sound tattered in comparison. While the rock ethos tended toward drug-induced laziness, Brown was an obsessive-compulsive Karajanesque whip-cracker, as his sixties-era sax player Maceo Parker recalls:
You gotta be on time. You gotta have your uniform. Your stuff’s got to be intact. You gotta have the bow tie. You got to have it. You can’t come up without the bow tie. You cannot come up without a cummerbund … [The] patent leather shoes we were wearing at the time gotta be greased. You just gotta have this stuff. This is what [Brown expected] ….
This YouTube chestnut (see above) shows footage from the famous T.A.M.I. (Teenage Music Awards International) concert, which was held in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on October 28 and 29, 1964. In addition to Brown, the concert starred the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye, Chuck Berry, the Supremes, and Smokey Robinson. The Stones famously whined about having to follow Brown onstage – one understands why. You can purchase the full concert here.
By David Ross. In the annals of the prematurely departed, nothing compares to the world-catastrophe of Keats’ death. English literature lost its best chance at another Shakespeare; Western civilization lost its most promising spokesman. Here’s my Hall of Fame of Bereavement, my Tenebrous Top Ten, in descending order of regret:
• John Keats (1795-1821)
• Percy Shelley (1792-1822)
• Jane Austen (1775-1817)
• Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970)
• Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986)
• Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964)
• Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855)
• Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-1828). Perhaps the most gifted of all British painters.
• Sandy Denny (1947-1978). See here for additional elegy.
• Stevie Ray Vaughan (1954-1990)
Steve Ray comes last on this list only because the blues is a relatively blunt instrument. All the same, his death is a raw and bitter recollection. While Jane Austen and possibly even Charlotte Bronte had entered a terminal pattern, Stevie Ray was in the process of transcending the constraints of I-IV-V and taking up the kaleidoscopic jazz fusion that Jimi Hendrix had initiated (see here) before wastefully doing himself in. Listening to “Lenny,” recorded at Toronto’s El Mocambo Club in 1983, we’re haunted by the sound of things never to come. The song is an epitaph for Jimi, for Stevie Ray, and for an entire school of American music that was conceived but never born.
By David Ross. In Catcher in the Rye, Holden goes down to Greenwich Village and hears Ernie the piano player and says:
“You could hardly check your coat, it was so crowded. It was pretty quiet, though, because Ernie was playing the piano. It was supposed to be something holy, for God’s sake, when he sat down at the piano. Nobody’s that good. About three couples, besides me, were waiting for tables, and they were all shoving and standing on tiptoes to get a look at old Ernie while he played. He had a big damn mirror in front of the piano, with this big spotlight on him, so that everybody could watch his face while he played. You couldn’t see his fingers while he played – just his big old face. Big deal. I’m not too sure what the name of the song was that he was playing when I came in, but whatever it was, he was really stinking it up. He was putting all these dumb, show-offy ripples in the high notes, and a lot of other very tricky stuff that gives me a pain in the ass. You should’ve heard the crowd, though, when he was finished. You would’ve puked. They went mad. [ …] In a funny way, though, I felt sort of sorry for him when he was finished. I don’t even think he knows any more when he’s playing right or not. It isn’t all his fault. I partly blame all those dopes that clap their heads off – they’d foul up anybody.”
Whenever I hear Oscar Peterson, this passage goes off like a firecracker in my head. I’m sure this is terribly unfair, but there it is.
Peterson, in any case, is indeed “that good.” He’s preposterously good, impossibly good, infinitely over-the-top in every way relating to the intersection of the piano and human fingers. This heated blues romp – an encyclopedia of forms and variations and cute little subversions thereof – is typical. If you happen to play the piano, be advised that whatever little self-regard you’ve developed over the years will be completely crushed. This is for non-players only.
By David Ross. Every so often I dip into contemporary literature to confirm my sense that I’m not missing very much. I recall forays into the work of Paul Auster, Angela Carter, Douglas Coupland, Dave Eggers, Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Franzen, Michel Houellebecq, Jay MacInerney, Cormac McCarthy, Rick Moody, Chuck Palahniuk, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterston, and other passing fancies of Time and Newsweek. Zadie Smith waits her turn on my shelf. All this sifting of silt has produced only a few glinting nuggets. I discovered in Houellebecq a fierce and welcome fellow despiser of modernity (see my comments here), and something even more in David Foster Wallace: a vast nineteenth-century mind struggling to find itself.
The “covering cherub,” in Blake’s parlance, was the postmodernism that DFW formally embraced against the grain of his personality. He was profoundly sincere, empathetic, and humane, a believer in “the sub-surface unity of things,” as he puts it in his famous Kenyon graduation address of May 2005, and yet devoted his career to self-conscious intricacies of irony and gamesmanship. He made great art in this mode – only Nabokov and Borges are his postmodern betters – but it was not, I can’t help feeling, the art he was born to make.
I have additional misgivings about his prose, though he is the only prose writer of his generation even worth noting. While meticulously attentive to his art, he was ambivalent about the formality of his art, the ideal of the well-wrought urn. His language is often splendid, but always splendid despite a certain scruffiness and loose-limbed sprawl. My eye is always instinctively performing the function of an editor, pruning, reshaping. He was too invested in his own unpretentiousness, too much infected with the modern American ideal of jeans and sandals, which ultimately expresses a yearning to be liked, to be no better or different than the rest of the crowd. I suppose this is the symbolic meaning of DFW’s hallmark bandana, an accouterment of kitchen and field workers, housewives and athletes. Great writers don’t care about being liked. They scorn our right to judge. They discover themselves amid the execrations of the crowd.
Even with his foibles and arguable failings totted up, DFW was the redeemer of his literary generation. He saved it from the humiliation of being the first generation in American history to lay nothing – not the least nosegay – on the graves of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. He saved it from the gaping wound of a great naught.
DFW’s rightly famous Kenyon Commencement Speech (here and here) has become a pop-cultural touchstone. Perhaps enthusiasm for it has already become a bit of a cliché. Yet I defy anybody to listen attentively without succumbing to its moral seriousness and sinking into an inner hush just as the initially boisterous Kenyon audience stills into an outer hush. In the guise and moment of his speech, DFW defies the default setting of the culture. He sheds his celebrity – the unpeelable skin of the Oprah era – and becomes the conduit and servant of a message more urgent than himself. Thus Emerson spoke from the podium of the Concord lyceum.
By David Ross. The kiddy culture – the culture of sneakers, fast food, and video games – has subsumed the adult culture; or rather adolescents have stopped graduating from one to the other. Thus, as I read in Mark Steyn’s latest tome, the chilling and funerary After America, “males 18 to 34 years old play more video games than kids: according to a 2006 Nielsen survey, 48.2 percent of men in that demographic amused themselves in that way for an average of two hours and forty-three minutes every day – that’s thirteen minutes longer than the 12- to 17-year-olds” (181). Kay Hymowitz provides the definitive account of the new “child-man” in City Journal.
The kiddy world is characterized by impulse; the adult world by purpose. The kiddy world belongs to the playpen of the present moment; the adult world tethers itself to both past and future. The kiddy world passively imitates and downloads; the adult world discriminates and invents.
If I had to offer a living symbol of the “adult world” – its tenderness, stoicism, rigor, mature calm – I would point to Tony Rice’s version of “Shenandoah.” I would say to our thirtysomething sneaker-wearers, this is what it means to be grown up, to carry yourself like a man.
By David Ross. Erik Mongrain’s “Air Tap” (see above) is a genuine benchmark of the modern guitar. The composition is perfect, the technique largely novel. Beyond the slightly uncharacteristic “Air Tap,” Mongrain’s music seems at first merely atmospheric in the Windham Hill tradition, but his compositions turn out to be aggressively intricate and even scholarly – as it were solutions to thorny riddles of musical theory. One realizes that Mongrain has fully departed from bop and rock histrionics in order to create a new mode on an entirely different basis of order, symmetry, and almost Asian apertures of silence. If Bach had played the koto, he might have sounded something like this. Mongrain’s two albums – Fates (2007) and Equilibrium (2008) – are as deceptively understated and precisely reflective as Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (1913):