kenneth nowell

Larkin on Jazz

2011-01-11T13:14:00.000-08:00

This is everything a certain type of person needs to understand.

Introduction to All What Jazz
Philip Larkin

And yet again, there was something about the books [of jazz criticism] I was now reading that seemed oddly familar. This development, this progress, this new language that was more difficult, more complex, that required you to work hard at appreciating it, that you couldn’t expect to understand first go, that needed technical and professional knowledge to evaluate it at all levels, this revolutionary explosion that spoke for our time while at the same time being traditional in the fullest, the deepest. . . .Of course! This was the language of criticism of modern painting, modern poetry, modern music. Of course! How glibly I had talked of modern jazz, without realizing the force of the adjective: this was modern jazz., and Parker was a modern jazz player just as Picasso was a modern painter and Pound a modern poet. I hadn’t realized that jazz had gone from Lascaux to Jackson Pollock in fifty years, but when I realized it relief came flooding in upon me after nearly two years’ despondency. I went back to my books: “After Parker, you had to be something of a musician to follow the best jazz of the day.” Of course! After Picasso! After Pound! There could hardly have been a conciser summary of what I don’t believe about art.
The reader may here have the sense of having strayed into a private argument. All I am saying is that the term “modern”, when applied to art, has a more than chronological meaning: it denotes a quality of irresponsibility peculiar to this century, known sometimes as modernism, and once I had classified modern jazz under this heading I knew where I was. I am sure there are books in which the genesis of modernism is set out in full. My own theory is that it is related to an imbalance between the two tensions from which art springs: these are the tension between the artist and his material and between the artist and his audience, and that in the last seventy-five years or so the second of these has slackened or even perished. In consequence the artist has become over-concerned with his material (hence an age of technical experiment), and, in isolation, has busied himself with the two principal themes of modernism, mystification and outrage. Piqued at being neglected, he has painted portraits with both eyes on the same side of the nose, or smothered a model with paint and rolled her over a blank canvas. He has designed a dwelling-house to be built underground. He has written poems resembling the kind of pictures typists make with their machine during the coffee break, or a novel in gibberish, or a play in which the characters sit in dustbins. He has made a six-hour film of someone asleep. He has carved human figures with large holes in them. And parallel to this activity (“every idiom has its idiot,” as an American novelist has written) there has grown up a kind of critical journalism designed to put it over. The terms and the arguments vary with the circumstances, but basically the message is : Don’t trust your eyes, or ears, or understanding. They’ll tell you this is ridiculous, or ugly, or meaningless. Don’t believe them. You’ve got to work at this after all, you don’t expect to understand anything as important as art straight off, do you? I mean, this is pretty complex stuff: if you want to know how complex, I’m giving a course of ninety-six lectures at the local college, starting next week, and you’d be more than welcome. The whole thing’s on the rates, you won’t have to pay. After all, think what asses people have made of themselves in the past by not understanding art–you don’t want to be like that, do you? Keep the suckers spending.
The tension between artist and audience in jazz slackened when the Negro stopped wanting to entertain the white man, and when the audience as a whole, with the end of the Japanese war and the beginning of television didn’t in any case particularly want to be entertained in that way any longer. The jazz band in the night club declined just as my old interest, the dance band, had declined in the restaurant and hotel: jazz moved, ominously, into the culture belt, the concert halls, university recital rooms and summer schools where the kind of criticism I have outlined has freer play. This was bound to make re-establishment of any artist-audience nexus more difficult, for universities have long been the accepted stamping ground for the subsidized acceptance of art rather than the real purchase of it–and so, of course, for this kind of criticism, designed as it is to prevent people using their eyes and ears and understandings to report pleasure and discomfort. In such conditions modernism is bound to flourish.
I don’t know whether it is worth pursuing my identification of modern jazz with other branches of modern art any further: if I say I dislike both in what seems to me the same way I have made my point. …
To say I don’t like modern jazz because it’s modernist art simply raises the question of why I don’t like modernist art: I have a suspicion that many readers will welcome my grouping of Parker with Picasso and Pound as one of the nicest things I could say about him. Well, to do so settles at least one question: as long as it was only Parker I didn’t like, I might believe that my ears had shut about the age of twenty-five and that jazz had left me behind. My dislike of Pound and Picasso, both of whom pre-date me by a considerable margin, can’t be explained in this way. The same can be said of Henry Moore and James Joyce (a textbook case of declension from talent to absurdity). No, I dislike such things not because they are new, but because they are irresponsible exploitations of technique in contradiction of human life as we know it. This is my essential criticism of modernism, whether perpetrated by Parker, Pound, or Picasso: it helps us neither to enjoy nor endure. It will divert us as long as we are prepared to be mystified or outraged, but maintains its hold only be being more mystifying and more outrageous: it has no lasting power. Hence the compulsion on every modernist to wade deeper and deeper into violence and obscenity: hence the succession of Parker by Rollins and Coltrane, and of Rollins and Coltrane by Coleman, Ayler and Shepp. In a way, it’s a relief: if jazz records are to be one long screech, if painting is to be a blank canvas, if a play is to be two hours of sexual intercourse performed coram populo, then let’s get it over, the sooner the better, in the hope that human values will then be free to reassert themselves.

Shadow Play

2009-09-03T12:22:00.000-07:00

Plato’s “Cave Analogy” tells us that the physical world is a shadow of a spiritual world. Beyond our actual experience is a higher reality.

How is the world a shadow?

This idea becomes clearer when you look at how modern science has inverted Plato’s formula: The spiritual/psychological world is really just a shadow of the physical.

A boy meets a girl. He feels as though he’s known her for all eternity. He feels as though they were one soul before being split and sent to earth. These feelings are shadows cast by the reptilian impulse to procreate, seasoned with anthropological conditioning for how to find a mate.

A mother gazes at her newborn baby. She feels that she is one with the universe. Everything is connected. Life has meaning. All of this is a shadow cast by elevated levels of oxytocin.

God, of course, is also a shadow.

However, to talk about God as just the product of organic processes, you have to clash with Saint Anselm’s famous ontological argument. You have to assert that we could think up the IDEA of God from scratch, regardless of whether God actually exists.

God, in concept alone, is a being who is GREATER than anything you can conceive. If you say that God is ONLY an idea of something that doesn’t necessarily exist, Anselm answers, “Well, then you can think of a greater being: one who does exist.” God is a concept of something that MUST, according to the concept, exist.

Which means, in Anselm’s eyes, that God cannot be a shadow of something else. The concept of God couldn’t spring up as an accident or by-product of natural selection. Only God could project the shape of this concept on the cave wall of our minds.

Yet where could this concept reside in us other than our brain’s organic tissue? What besides hormones could create our euphoric emotions about the idea of being connected to God?

Saint Augustine would have no problem with this. At the beginning of his autobiography “The Confessions,” thinking about how he began his life, he thanks God for filling the breast with milk and making his nurse willing to put the nipple in his mouth.

So we’re back at the idea of a higher reality beyond or behind reality. God makes the mammary glands produce food for a young saint. Oxytocin is the vehicle or conduit for maternal love, not the cause. Testosterone is the conduit for Romantic Love or Noble Courage. Or Evil.

The world is a shadow. Or a stage.

A Play Descending a Staircase

2009-07-09T07:16:00.001-07:00

One cloudless summer day I was coming back to my office from lunch and noticed a shapely woman ahead of me. Not a skinny girl. Lots of curves. She churned down the sidewalk and up the steps into our lobby. I trailed a few paces back, taking it all in.

She was wearing a simple silk dress. Probably artificial silk, because it had a metallic shimmer. It fell straight down from thin shoulder straps. As she moved, points on her body tapped the fabric like a hand behind a curtain. Left shoulder blade and right hip. Inner curve of left torso and right shoulder blade. Right butt cheek and upper spine. From each tap the silk would ripple and trick the eye into seeing a rough sketch of a body – like a rapid charcoal drawing. It was like watching a rapid sequence of nude studies move through space. In fact, it was like watching an animation of Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” – except that she was ascending an escalator.

A funny thought occurred to me. If you saw that dress hanging on a rack, you wouldn’t think that it was a work of genius. In itself it would be a failure as an aesthetic object. Just a scrap of fabric. But some design genius knew: “You put this boring piece of silk on a curvy woman, you will see this amazing effect. Especially if she’s in heels.”

This is how I feel about writing plays. A good play is like that dress. It has to be designed for a MOVING body – a moving body followed by a lustful eye. What happens when an actor walks in your piece of silk?

I recall how a really good actor said “okay” in one of my early plays. He paused first then said the word very slowly, raising the pitch at the end. It was full of complex meaning that rippled through the play. And in several performances it got a huge laugh!

But if you were reading the script and came to the word “okay” you’d never say, “My God! This playwright is a literary GENIUS!”

I think the theater is suffering from this paradox – the paradox that what works best on stage is not always “literary.” Yet producers and artistic directors fall back on the literary because they need some criteria for judging scripts. They look to see if plays read well. Like a short story or a poem. Is the silent text a “work of literature”?

This tendency is complicated by the embattled role theater has come to play in general culture. Theater is no longer a truly popular art form. As art forms lose their hold on the masses, they retreat into snobbery. (Consider jazz in this regard.) So it is increasingly important for the play as text to be regarded as a standalone literary object like poetry and fiction.

This literary pressure makes playwrights focus on point-of-contact with the readers who might green-light a play. How can I make it impress the reader at Playwright’s Workshop Theater Forum In The Round as a work of literature?

You can imagine the tragedy this would be for my dress designer! So he has this vision. He can SEE this big butt swinging like a bell in his silk number down Liberty Street. He can SEE that the fabric and the minimalist design will transubstantiate this into a living Duchamp. Then he thinks, “Oh, but no one will ever make it if it’s just a shred of silk!” So he selects a swatch of fabric with a pattern. Stripes maybe. Interlocking lozenges. Daisies. And then he thinks, “Oh, I better display my sewing skills.” So he adds some clever pleats. And so forth and so on.

By the time he ships it off to be made the dress will no longer be able to produce the dazzling effect I saw that summer afternoon.

God Studies

2009-02-12T11:46:00.001-08:00

I’m noticing a lot of God studies, scientific articles and reports that more or less claim to locate and/or explain God.

The neurological articles are the weirdest. Here! This little cluster of cells in this part of the brain … this is God! Or what about this pattern of firing neurons? See how they light up in the subject when we play “Amazing Grace”? This pattern is God.

As a standard disclaimer, most of the scientists insist that they are ONLY studying the belief itself. God’s actual existence or nonexistence is not a factor.

This disclaimer would be unnecessary if you were studying the belief in fairies. You can explicitly ask, “Okay, given that fairies DO NOT exist, what OTHER explanation can we find for this subculture’s shared lunacy?” But scientists feel the pressure to treat God with more respect.

Nevertheless, the studies all assume that human evolution created God. God formed in our collective minds as we were struggling to survive. It’s like that XTC song, “Did you make mankind after we made you?”

For example, the evolving human brain needed to see a tiger in every shaking bush. Maybe an invisible, imaginary God is just a by-product of this brain function?

In light of these studies, it’s fun to wonder about God’s existence in a scientific sense. God, like space aliens, either exists or does not exist. Intelligent life is either “out there” right now or not. And God, factually, either does or does not exist.

Of course, you can say this about anything. Maybe fairies do exist but are just very furtive. The thing is, it’s just too much to ask me to believe in the corporeal existence of tiny humanoids with wings. “Oh, no, I don’t think that they have PHYSICAL bodies.” Then what? Are they made of light? Light is physical. “No, no, I don’t mean that they are made of actual photons.” It’s a slippery slope when you start breaking it down.

But when you’re talking God God … Jehovah as opposed to Pan ejaculating on the crops when we weren’t looking … the prophets were never asking anyone to believe in a man with a beard. Not even 5,000 years ago. They knew that they were talking about a transcendental abstraction, even if they didn’t yet use the terminology. That’s what all that “no graven images” business meant in the first place. God transcends physical reality and being itself.

This means that you cannot simply ask whether God exists. For some mystics, the true God CANNOT exist. Why? Because even existing is too limiting for a truly Supreme being. Saying that God exists is ultimately too much like saying that God has red hair and freckles. So for God to be God, God must not exist.

Weird.

Nanny's Bridge

2009-02-10T18:32:00.000-08:00

Freud says the psyche is like Rome. I've never been to Rome. But he's thinking about how everywhere you go in Rome there's some ancient wall poking up among modern structures. Similarly, your psyche is a patchwork of bits and pieces from different stages of your development.

To get a good buzz from Freud you have to resist your desire to normalize what he's saying. In this case, you need to appreciate how he's saying that we are fundamentally fragmented. It's not just that we have mood changes. Or that our wishes change day to day. No, the point is that some other self inside your brain breaks through the soil of whoever you think you are at some given moment. Something in you caves in to expose a whole different person. We are all Sybil.

Whenever I drive my family into Manhattan we usually take the Manhattan bridge. As you reach the other side, before hitting Canal Street, you can see on the stone base of the bridge a relief sculpture of a lion. The lion's fat paw is on top of sphere.

My son noticed it one trip and shouted, "I see a lion with a soccer ball." After that we started playing a game every time we drove over the bridge. "Okay, kids, tell me when you see the lion with the soccer ball." They wait. Then one of them shouts, "I see the lion with the soccer ball!" Or they miss it as we drive by and start crying. This has gotten so ritualized that as soon as we get on the bridge on the Brooklyn side I think about when to start the game.

Then it hit me that I was duplicating a game my father played. To visit his mother, whom we called Nanny, we'd pile in the station wagon and drive the 50 mph speed limit up the Natchez Trace Parkway from Jackson to Kosciusko. It was an incredibly long one-hour drive. Seeing a certain stone bridge meant that we were almost there. We'd shout: "I see Nanny's bridge!"

In that seat belt indifferent age, we all crowded over the front seat and competed to see it first. Your eyes would play tricks. In the haze behind every cluster of leaves in the distance was a bridge.

So here I am ... the Manhattan skyline looming beyond the harp strings of the bridge, gritty Chinatown approaching ... and I've turned it into the Natchez Trace. And it's too late to say that I didn't. I am my dad.

The New Jet Man

2009-02-08T03:19:00.001-08:00

I was on a crowded subway the other morning and noticed a new Manhattan Mini-Storage poster: some slogan about making space for your new home office. Just what I need to think about as I slog my ass to Wall Street.

The ad shows a happy man. He is a recognizable type. Fashionable square glasses. Close cropped hair. Calculated stubble. Some sort of Hugo Boss-ish casual shirt. Thin and healthy, of course. Big smile. He's leaning back in his chair ... pleasantly relieved that he's simplified his life by setting up his office space at home.

Let me call him Mr. Wired.

What I'm wondering is why Mr. Wired isn't in his underwear, my uniform of choice when I work at home? Why did the advertisers depict Mr. Wired as though he's at a latte meeting in Soho for the next Twitter?

Because what makes this guy Mr. Wired is that he's not just some lonely guy doing everyone's taxes in the corner of the bedroom. No, he's forging a new reality, a new future. This is why he's not in his dirty wife-beater. He requires a uniform every bit as much as the suits in my Wall Street office.

My mind jumps to this Barthes essay about the "jet man." He says the image of the jet pilot poses a paradox: an excess of speed turns into repose. An earlier generation of aviation heroes were humans on an adventure. People flying in propeller planes experienced speed. You had to hang on. You were in a machine that moved you much faster but still within the range of comprehension. You smiled and waved. Your scarf flapped in the breeze. You dug a sandwich out of your lunchbox.

But the jet man just sits there. He goes "faster than speed." This kind of speed becomes motionlessness.

Mr. Wired is our new jet-man. His work at the computer is setting the world in such rapid motion that it immobilizes him. Like the jet-man, he has to have special clothes. For Barthes the jet-man's suit is the skin of a new species. People who go this fast are no longer human. The same with Mr. Wired. A human wouldn't change out of his pajamas. But Mr. Wired isn't really human. And he's not really at home. He's in the aether.

The Last Hurrah

2009-02-05T09:52:00.000-08:00

My old friend Jim just reminded me of our band from high school. The Last Hurrah. Our singer was a guy name Bert. His father just passed away. Jim had just been up to Jackson for the funeral, and a guy I can barely remember said to him, “Was there ever a better band than you and Bruce Stuckey on drums and Kenny Nowell burning up that guitar?!”

I don’t think there ever was. Bruce didn’t have a hi-hat. That’s the little tap-tap-tap cymbal you hear on 99.9% of every drum track you’ve ever heard. To compensate, he had to play Keith Moon’s craziest parts all the time, thundering around on the toms.

Jim played bass. He’ll promptly post a comment correcting anything I say about his gear. But I remember that he played flat-wound strings through this monster Sun amplifier. Every song sounded like a B-52 landing.

Our luckiest stroke was Bert. With most young bands, the singer is just some popular guy with long hair, some guy who just looks like he could sing. Bert didn’t have long hair, but he could really sing with a real rock voice. Bert and I were a big hit a few years earlier at Ms. Little’s guitar recital when we did “Ramblin Man.” Years after, my folks were always saying, “Boy! I sure liked that ‘Ramblin Man’ with you and Bert!"

I was free to live out my Pete Townshend fantasies. My main instrument was this Les Paul-styled guitar my dad made. I still use it for slide and have no idea how I played it as a regular guitar. The neck is as thick as a dobro’s. My dad used one solid piece of mahogany. That is, the neck was not bolted onto the body. Like Bruce, I had to compensate for some of the challenges the guitar posed by playing crazy all of the time.

I remember the music was pure rock. We played Tom Petty’s “Breakdown,” a bunch of stuff by The Who, “Purple Haze” … stuff like that. I don’t recall that we ever worked too hard to get anything right. We never even rehearsed that much. Once we knew the basic chords of the song, we just tore through it. I just remember it was all the biggest noise you ever heard.

RECOVERY OF LOST TIME

2009-01-07T12:29:00.000-08:00

It's one of those days at work where I'm absolutely paralyzed. Hogtied. Brainfreeze. I can't do anything.

So what do I do? I google some old friend. I zoom into street level of Naples, Florida. Looks nice. Think I'll take a drive.

I zoom down some long avenue then it hits me that I could take a drive in my childhood neighborhood in Jackson, Mississippi. Take a look at the old house.

There it is. There's the lawn I mowed a thousand times. Behind that window is the tiny livingroom where ... everything.

Kind of weird to be sitting here at work with tears rolling down my cheeks.

Let's go down Keele Street toward my first school. There's the park. Tripped with my friend Kerry in there. Middle of the night. Looked at a toad for half an hour. Then a tree.

But then ... ouch ... ahhhhhhh ... owwwww ... the real memories. Childhood. Dying of thirst after a field trip. Teachers let all the class play in the park before going back to school. I was only a couple of years older than my daughter is now. The memory of the light on that afternoon day is pure. Some cells in my brain are still registering it. Mississippi is hot in its own special way. Remember running to the water fountain when we got back to school.

Next we have the first of the ugly cheap apartment complexes they were building back when. Deep in the complex we once set up for band practice on Bruce's patio. Got halfway through Baba O'Riley before someone made us stop.

Now we're going over the creek. Where's my school? Gone. Nothing. Except there's the gate I went through in the first grade. My dad once started singing "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" as we pulled up. I wouldn't get out until he stopped singing. I do the same thing to my daughter now. She jumps up and tries to put a palm over my mouth. Full circle.