(no subject)

[sanpaku_backup]

I am reading this Greil Marcus book Lipstick Traces which is nominally about punk music but actually turns out to be a long explainer of Situationism. Marcus will have many pages about Guy Dubord and the Lettrist International, and then say, "as the Sex Pistols demonstrated..." in the most amazing way. I want to ask Greil Marcus (who is still around) what he makes of the fact that Johnny Rotten turned out to be a horrible Trumpist asshole. 

This is the central paradox of our time, I think — not just that our heroes have turned out to be terrible, but that the last moments in our culture where anything genuinely new occurred — the 1960s and 1970s —  turn out to look, in retrospect, like they paved the way for Reagan and Trump. In fact, of course, there were plenty of people pointing out at the time that these "revolutions" looked a lot like con games.

Growing up in the shadow of these failed revolutions, we never believed that even demands for change were authentic. Compare that with the film Judas and the Black Messiah, which is excellent and very earnest. I feel like even 20 years ago, the messages that we (white people) find upsetting couldn't even be said in a film, let alone an entire film in which police are unapologetically referred to (and depicted as) as "pigs" throughout. The film does try here and there to show that there was a certain amount of thuggery in the enterprise, but overall it is pretty dedicated to revolution. Which makes me wonder if it's only possible because the events and mindset are so distant to us, it may as well be about Frodo going to Mordor. We like our fantasies to be as outlandish as possible, after all.

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Writing about "languishing" did not actually make me feel better; it made me meditate for most of the day on all the different schemes and diversions I have tried over the years. Most people I know who seem happy are geeks about one sort of thing, and I always envied that. (My go-to reference for this was a couple in Rhode Island I was friendly with who were totally into ukeleles. Like, the walls of their house were covered in ukeleles.) But whenever I have tried them they have not been sustaining enough for me to make a life out of; I put them back on the shelf. Now I have a pretty full shelf and a lot of self-imposed sense of failure.

But maybe it did help, because yesterday it was easier to get into cleaning the house and feeling slightly more satisfied with things. Maybe I need to ponder the feeling sometimes and then put it aside, too. 

H's French is finally at a bare C-, but only briefly, because the teacher still hasn't recorded a test that she warned me he hadn't done well on. I did email the principal and I am meeting with her on Monday. And if there is one thing that pushes aside ennui, it is me working myself into a lather cataloguing something that upsets me. Wish me luck.

Comments

[lookfar.livejournal.com]

I, too, have admired people who have the single-minded happiness of the true aficionado. You know, people unworried by the stream of desperate bad news coming at us at all times because they are hot on the trail of a 1939 Mickey Mouse baby plate. My brother, who is reasonably outraged at the bad tidings, nonetheless finds great comfort in his enormous saltwater fish tank, his collections of Worlds Fair memorabilia and German hedgehog figures. I suppose if I have a Thing, it's journaling. Like my brother, I've done it since childhood, and like him, I find it worthwhile apart from any benefit (monetary, world-changing) visible to anyone else. But I don't have the aficionado gene like he does.

[alsoname.livejournal.com]

Would you recommend this book to someone who might not have a lot of patience for poetic waxings about Situationism? I feel like I've read a lot of that in my past life as a punk-rock pseudo-academic (i.e., I wrote a lot of term papers and read stuff for fun). I am curious about the claims of paving the way for your Reagans and your Trumps, as I always blamed that on the older Boomers, not the younger Boomers who created punk rock. (And I didn't learn about John "Rhyme Queen with Fascist Regime" Lydon until a couple of months ago ... Totally shocked me!)

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

Oh no, this book is heavily marinated in Boomer stream of consciousness for the first 60 pages or so and it almost made me want to give up on it. In fact I am wondering how much you might have read about situationism before drew on his writing, since he is a giant in music criticism and people quote him endlessly. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend the book if you already understand this stuff. I personally am very obtuse about artistic things so I found him kind of helpful, especially midway through the book where he kind of settles down and explains things like Situationism and dada more clearly.

The line between punk and Trump starts to make sense when you see that nihilism can be a potent force for conservatism. The "fascist regime" he was singing about in 1976 was a Labour government, after all. Marcus is actually pretty good about how this works; he talks about how the futurist component of dada lent itself to Mussolini when the time came. You can find really glib comparisons between Trump and artistic "disruption" today from twerps like Slavoj Zizek. So it is one of those depressing phenomena that makes a certain kind of sense, part of why we don't trust Boomers like my ex-father in law not to be gigantic fucking hypocrites.

My favorite story about Johnny Rotten is that Malcom McLaren apparently intended someone else to be in the band. He said, "get that guy who is always hanging around the store" and they got the wrong guy. The level of fraud intrinsic in the Sex Pistols story is just irresistible.

[alsoname.livejournal.com]

I think most of what I've read about Situationism in a punk context was contemporaneous. For example, I have these huge copies of Search & Destroy, a late '70s zine from San Francisco, and they were definitely inspired by a lot of weird art movements. I remember Frank Discussion of the Feederz giving long interviews in which he expounded on the influence of Situationism, for example. They were definitely aware of their influences at the time.

I guess we could get into a "No True Punksman" standoff, but (without reading his argument), I wonder how much of punk was truly nihilist and how much of his argument was just cherrypicking nihilistic bands. I don't know which bands he used as examples, but are the Sex Pistols truly representative of all punk? They were a manufactured band just like the Village People and the Backstreet Boys. I see how their lyrics created a stir 40+ years ago, and their fashion raised eyebrows as well (they were created to advertise a boutique, were they not?), but there is nothing interesting about them musically. I don't remember anyone being impressed by them when I got into punk, which on the one hand was in the early '90s when people had been bleating "Punk Is Dead!" for more than a decade already, but on the other hand was closer to punk's heyday than we are now to the '90s.

On the other hand, there are tons of punk bands who were wonderfully creative, the opposite of nihililstic, often politically engaged. I'm not surprised when I stumbled upon Alice Bag's Twitter feed and find that she is engaged in what's going on here and abroad, tweeting about police brutality, anti-Asian racism, and Putin. I am surprised when I learn that Exene Cervenka or even John Lydon fell off the freakin' rails. I would not call the Dead Kennedys nihilist either, and they railed against the "Zen fascist" administration of Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown — who Jello Biafra endorsed for reelection to governor decades later.

Anyway, I've probably said too much about a book and argument I didn't actually read. I am still intrigued by how he draws those lines, I just wonder if the kind of people who are given to voting for Trump (or liking Trump for his "disruptive" qualities but not actually voting at all) are the kind of people who will be attracted to the more nihilistic corners of punk (or any other subculture, like gun culture) earlier in life. That is, does listening to the Sex Pistols actually cause a Trump vote decades later, or is the person who was going to vote for Trump also more likely to be attracted to the nihilism of the Sex Pistols?