How Many Levels of Nostalgia Are You On?

 

In the Greyhound Journal, two poems of mine have appeared. Both of them deal with historical memory. The first is called 1776 Versus John Adams/Boogie Nights Versus American Hustle, the second rolls out under the title Participation Prizes in Byzantium

The History in Prospect Park

 

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon c. 562 BC

The Battle of Salamis c. 480 BC

Balboa sights the Pacific c.1513

The Battle of Lepanto 1571

The First PEZ Dispenser c. 1927

Woodstock (not pictured: Hippies) 1969

The Worst Monument in DC

In this age of statues coming down their plinths, and places being renamed, calling something the “Worst Monument in DC” brings to mind the usual culprits. However, this monument is not bad because it honors a Confederate, a slaveowner, or somebody who did medical experiments on enslaved women. It is also not problematic like the statues honoring the Emancipation Proclamation. You know the kind: they show a helpless and shirtless Black person in chains being uplifted by a very starch-shirted Abraham Lincoln.

No, this infamous title belongs to a monument because of its aesthetics, not its politics. At least with those other kinds of statues you know what they are supposed to represent. I don’t mean on a deeper level in terms of just dog whistles, but on a surface level as well. A statue of General Robert E. Lee on a horse shows General Robert E. Lee on a horse. You can get offended by it because you know who you are supposed to think of when you look at it. One could argue a monument that’s too abstract might even be worse, because it doesn’t even let you get angry.

One such monument exists in DC. It is little known, though hundreds of thousands of people drive past it every year. Most of them hardly get a glance of it, and even fewer know that it is legally in DC, despite being on the right bank of the Potomac (in case you didn’t know, Columbia Island, that strip of land next to the Pentagon is part of DC). It is near another monument which people might recognize, but it is a hundred times better than this one. That competent monument is the Navy – Merchant Marine Memorial. The bad one? It’s called the Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove on the Potomac.

A monument to Idaho

Just the length of the name should tip you off that something isn’t right. A good memorial is succinct and named for one person, group, or event. Think the Lincoln Memorial or the Washington Monument. The Emancipation Memorial is another one, so long as we’re talking names here and not set-up. The Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove on the Potomac is the opposite of all that. It contains too much, which the same might be said for old LBJ. I doubt that was the intention though. Instead we have a confusing mess that tells us what kind of memorial it is and the river it is on. Off the top of my head I don’t think any other monument in DC has that designation.

It's not the easiest memorial to get to either. You have to drive onto the island, park, and walk a bit until you hit the right grove. But that could be said of plenty of landmarks in the city, and I won’t count that against it. The memorial to Teddy Roosevelt requires quite a hike to the middle of his eponymous island. It doesn’t detract from the way it is set up and the possible educational value of the site. I know it’s not a textbook (what monument is?), but one can at least clearly meditate on and contemplate the subject.

This is not the case with the Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove on the Potomac. There is little in the design or the artwork chosen that conveys anything about LBJ and his achievements. Approaching the memorial, all one can see through the pine trees is a large hunk of pinkish granite. No, it isn’t a statue of our 36th President, as much of a hunk he was. The granite is simply a large rock, stuck in the ground. A prurient mind might say it’s a memorial to Johnson’s Johnson, the infamous “Jumbo.” How could they know any better? The rock is not shaped, cut, etched, or hewn into anything with a recognizable pattern. It isn’t even a menhir.

Johnson's Johnson, the Jumbo of the Capitol Hill Zoo

The area around the megalith isn’t any more informative or inspiring. There’s a small sign that gives a basic outline of the memorial and its function, along with a recording of Lady Bird Johnson that doesn’t work. When I pressed one of the buttons for it, I hoped that instead I would get to hear LBJ ordering pants from his tailor. It’s more Taylor though, but it doesn’t matter anyway. The device is broken, along with many of the paving stones near the central rock.

Adjacent to it are a handful of slabs of granite, made of the same exact shade as the central stone. On each of them are selections from speeches LBJ gave during his life. None of the selections are particularly memorable or illuminating. They say little about the man himself, his times, or the issues he was championing. I know the man wasn’t the most gifted speaker, but the designers could’ve chosen something more inspiring. He had Bill Moyers to work with. Something he said after JFK was shot perhaps? Or his speeches to Congress on Civil Rights? There’s another issue with the slabs too. They are difficult to read, thanks to using that foreskin-colored granite.

At the right angle, one can get a nice view of the Potomac and the other monuments that dot the skyline of DC. It only serves to remind the unlucky visitor, of how much worse Johnson’s memorial is compared to the ones for Lincoln, Jefferson, and Washington. It makes one wonder if this is actually a site dedicated to Andrew Johnson, and that this is all a sick joke to embarrass our 17th president for botching Reconstruction and buying Alaska.

Not pictured: wasp nests

In the same park is a monument that is much better and more interesting, the Navy – Merchant Marine Memorial. It honors those who have died at sea and rare for a war memorial, it doesn’t show the people lost. No names are etched on it and no human figures are depicted. There are waves and seagulls (along with wasp nests tucked inside the waves, but those are a later addition) made of metal, sitting on a small plinth. They depict the watery resting place of those lost, and remind us that many are gone forever with no recovered remains. It also has bubbles.

Perhaps the Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove on the Potomac represents the conclusion of the memorial as traditionally understood. Our presidents are too big and contain too many multitudes of contradictions to be reduced to a statue. Constant revision of their legacy and shifts in historical opinion also make it difficult to come to any final consensus about them. In that sense the giant rocks is fitting, as the reputation of LBJ has waxed and waned over the decades. Now it appears to be waxing, in part because we are nostalgic for a time Congress and the President could work together to pass major pieces of legislation. But it will wane again, when we reconsider the costs of Empire.

History Doesn't Repeat, It Rhymes (Unlike this Poem)

Hello one and all. One last post for the last day of February 2018. I have a poem for you all to read in Weatherbeaten Lit's President's Day issue.

I Wrote a Spoof

To the tune of "I Pity the Poor Immigrant"

I pity the poor president

Who wishes he would've stayed home

Who uses all his power to do evil

But in the end is always left so alone

That man whose tiny fingers cheats

And who lies with every breath

Who passionately hates his wife

And likewise, loves immigrants’ death

I pity the poor president

Who does nothing but complain

Whose chief enemy is poor ratings

Whose tweets are insane

Who rules but is not satisfied

Who fears and is never free

Who goes to fight with truth itself

And breaks the law with glee

I pity the poor president

Who drags us through the mud

Who steals and golfs while laughing

And who covers other lands in blood

Whose rule in the final end

Must shatter like the glass

I pity the poor president

When our judgment comes to pass

To Lisbon via Adelaide

Adelaide, a publication based out of New York and Lisbon, Portugal, has published five of my poems. Read them here, perhaps while listening to the song "Adelaide" by John Cale.

Heroes and Villains and Characters

The release of Selma has recently kicked off a minor controversy about the role of LBJ in the events surrounding the historic Civil Rights march. According to the movie, President Johnson is presented as something of a foil for the demonstrators, using the powers of his office to stymie, if not thwart it. In response, several historians, along with former officials in the Johnson administration have registered their objection to this portrayal. One in particular, Joseph Califano, even claims the march was largely Johnson’s idea. Normally such controversies can be reduced to the “truth being somewhere in the middle” synthesis. In this case however, we have two completely different portraits of LBJ which cannot be easily reconciled. On one hand he wants to prevent the Selma March.  On the other, he is actively instigating it, the pinnacle of the “outside agitator,” often blamed by Southern officials for stirring up African-Americans against Jim Crow.

I will leave it to the professional historians who have access to the record to settle the debate. Since I have not seen the film yet, I will also pass judgment on the cinematic qualities of LBJ’s role with the movie. For me, there is one idea I feel as qualified as anyone to tackle, the question of how accurate cultural depictions of history need to be. What responsibility, if any, is there towards figures from the past? Even if it were proved conclusively that LBJ assisted with the march, many critics might defend the portrayal of the president as an artistic license, or that historical films can shuffle the deck of established facts to their liking. I think this is a dangerous defense. Plenty of bad history has occurred because of bad history in art, music, literature, and film. One cannot imagine defending the biased portrayal of the South in Gone With the Wind on such grounds.

Of course, every artist has the right to depict the past as they wish, and of course they can also be criticized for the way they choose to do so. Perhaps it is an unfair burden, but the way the past is portrayed in art and popular culture does shape the way we look at history. Often it can even affect the way we see the present. Churchill is said to have once remarked that he learned his English history through Shakespeare’s plays and not textbooks. One might say that Selma is a special case, and that showing LBJ as an antagonist is a small price to pay for having a movie with Black actors and a director released to a wide audience.

In many cases this might be true. 12 Years a Slave was criticized by some for not showing a “good master.” Putting aside Benedict Cumberbatch’s character, who represents about as good a master could realistically be within the confines of the peculiar institution, I don’t think the film or its audience lost anything by not having this figure portrayed. The alleged good master has in fact had his day in the literature of the post-Bellum South. Plus, by showing up in 12 Years a Slave, it would have only weakened the message of the film, creating a distraction. At the end of the day, the good master still owned human beings and participated in their bondage, oppression, and exchange.  They were not the ones who brought an end to chattel slavery in America. Therefore, they do not deserve to be resurrected for the present.

However, Lyndon Baines Johnson is a much different case. He was not simply a president uninterested in the Civil Rights movement, or actively working to derail it. Johnson was, for all his complications and problems, a believer in equal rights between black and white Americans. His positions before becoming president aside, by the time of the film he was as firm a supporter of dismantling segregation as anyone in the White House before him. Depicting him as an antagonist of the march does him a disservice and ignores the political cost he was willing to pay for being pro-Civil Rights.

Does Slema need to be a hagiography of Johnson? No. For one very obvious reason, doing so would distract from the march and the bravery associated with it. A Selma dedicated to Johnson would depict him as a white knight coming to save the day, even if it is from those other white knights of the Ku Klux Klan. But turning him into a critic of the march and a foil for Dr. King is irresponsible for two main reasons.  The first is that it supports the canard of right-wing revisionists who want to paint the Democratic Party as uniform opponents of Civil Rights in order to promote their idea that because of what Lincoln did, black voters ought to vote Republican (an analysis that ignores the whole Lily White Movement under Taft.). The second is that is robs the viewer of seeing a politician putting principle over politics, which every movement for greater equality needs at some point. LBJ supported the work of King and others and helped pushed the Voting Rights Act through Congress in spite of the possibility of losing the Solid South (a possibility which later became true after the Reagan Revolution).

As I previously stated, Selma does not need to show LBJ as the secret hero of the march. I would further argue it does not need to show or mention LBJ at all. There are enough villains to depict among the local police, CCC, and Klan. I doubt a viewer watching the scenes of carnage on the Edmund Pettus Bridge is wondering where, oh where President Johnson is and what he is doing. Omitting an historical character can be a legitimate move and many historical films and books have used it to reasonable effect, since not every single person involved in an event can be portrayed. Cutting is always required. If accuracy has to be sacrificed to include someone, then it may be better to leave them out rather than engage in contortions of the historical record.

Historical fiction needs to take pains to make sure it does not become a fictional history, especially if doing so serves to provide ammunition for those who seek to do harm in the present. If the facts must be butchered for the sake of producing a work of art, then so be it, yet most films about historical events do not strive for such lofty goals.  More often than not, they wish to be educational, at the very least it guarantees a film a permanent shelf life for high school classes when the teacher needs time to catch up on grading. It is important then to try and clarify the kind of responsibility those movies situated between art and documentary have towards figures in the past.

The first principle is this: you do not have to include everybody as a character. Both the very powerful and very ordinary may need to be culled away.  For those who are included, not all of them need to be treated as either heroes or villains. Some can simply be characters who help the plot along, like most of us who find themselves in the course of world events. Of those included in the work, if one was a hero in real life, then try to show it in some way. If they cannot be a hero, let them be a character. Do not make them into a villain. In fact, do not make anyone who was not a villain, a villain. At the worst, let them be the comic relief.  If someone was a villain, try not to show them as anything else. Certainly do not make them a hero and if their villainy was an especially banal or standard form of evil, then perhaps it is best to leave them out altogether. Even evil deserves an interesting representation.

On the Rusk and Poets Fighting Poets

Since I'm tired and trying to write another novel, I haven't been doing much submitting to anything. Occasionally something slips through though. I'm in Issue Four of On the Rusk. Click around and you'll find me. Oh, and here's an account of a brawl between poets by Charles Simic. Everybody was fighting everybody in '68! One time I tried to stop a fight like Ginsberg did in this piece. More Franciscan and less Buddhist though. I ended up getting maced by Irish Catholic cops.

In Bed with Gore Vidal: A Book Review

In Bed with Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood, and the Private World of an American Master

296 pages

Riverdale Avenue Books

Thanks to the Simpsons, Gore Vidal is one of the first public figures I ever knew was gay. In one episode, Lisa and marge have this exchange:

Marge: Well, did you call one of your friends?

Lisa: Hah! These are my only friends: grown up nerds like Gore Vidal, and even he's kissed more boys than I ever will.

Marge: Girls, Lisa. Boys kiss girls.

            Fans of the show know that John Waters played a gay character who befriended Homer, while Jay Sherman spilled the sexual orientation beans about Harvey Fierstein in another episode. But the reference to Gore Vidal stood out more to me. Strange how such a remark can make an impact. Perhaps because Lisa’s comment touched on a physical aspect of male same-sex relations, or maybe it was the shot of Gore’s yellow cartoon face on one of his books, looking masculine, marvelous, and tough. The show’s use of Gore Vidal brought home two points to my young mind. Of course, I knew gay men existed but seeing Vidal meant that gay men could be famous authors and that his gray hair meant they had been around long before I was born.

            However, reading Tim Teeman’s book one wonders if Gore Vidal actually did kiss that many boys. In Teeman’s portrait, it seems Gore would have preferred mouths to be used for other functions, and that they do so quickly. Through this exhaustive and thorough sexual biography, we learn that Vidal often readily embraced physical intimacy, but had trouble opening himself up emotionally with anyone, including his partner of over fifty-plus years, Howard Austen.

            Yet, Gore Vidal would have approved of the way the Simpsons identified him, by the act of kissing boys rather than by an orientation towards them. One of the surprising revelations of the biography is that Vidal never identified himself as gay, despite the general public’s willingness to categorize and accept him as such. In his view, there were no homosexual people, just homosexual acts. Therefore, everyone was bisexual, perfectly capable of same-sex and opposite-sex attraction. This position, widespread before the nineteenth century, put him outside the mainstream of both American society and the Gay community. Unlike a writer such as Burroughs, Vidal did not even embrace a label such as “queer” and while rejected attempts to be labeled a “faggot.”

            But there was a downside to this self-declared independence from sexual categories, which Teeman thoroughly documents. Because Gore refused to identify as a homosexual, he did not lend his fame to the cause of gay rights. Occasionally he would donate to certain organization and fought against sexual puritanism in his essays. But he remained largely absent from the fight, which grew more noticeable once the AIDS epidemic hit America and claimed the life of one of his nephews. While Gore was attentive to his family members’ needs in private, in public he was weary to find a common case with such controversial figures as Larry Kramer and his ACT UP organization.

               There was an emotional cost to this attitude as well. Despite being out in a physical sense, when it came to his feelings, Gore was still deeply closeted.  Sex for him was about dominance and superiority (and of course orgasm) more than any expression of a deeper commitment. While he didn’t care if people knew he had sex with men, he took great pains to let everyone know he was the one doing the fucking. Gore was always a top, never a bottom, and stressed this.  As a result, he missed out on the potential for genuine emotional intimacy and this affected his relationship with Howard Austen, who the book depicts as a long suffering companion, a victim of Gore’s withholding. They were partners but had a largely sexless relationship during that time. As the book explains, Gore felt that he could live together with a friend but not a lover, only to realize how dear Austen was to him before it was too late. In heartbreaking detail, Teeman relates how Vidal broke down at his partner’s death in 2003 and subsequently never recovered from the loss.

            One aspect of Gore’s sexuality the biography investigates is his assertions of bisexuality. He did not claim it as an identity or orientation, but rather a description of his sexual life. It only made since to describe himself as such, since he did not identify as either gay or straight and wanted people to believe he was perfectly open to sex with men and women. Yet nothing in Teeman’s research suggests he was as flexible as he claims. While there may have been a sexual encounter or two with women early on in his life, after the publication of his novel The City and the Pillar, Gore seems to have only had same-sex relationships. Despite ample opportunity to sleep with women, including several Hollywood starlets, Vidal instead sought after the company of men, particularly male hustlers in Italy, whose willingness to sleep with him for money while dating women only further reinforced his views about the inherent bisexuality of all people.

            Of course, one cannot blame Gore for the position he took. As those who are interviewed in the biography stress, he was a product of his time and his class. Homosexuality was illegal when he was born and gays were viewed as weaklings in every sense of the word. Gore came from an aristocratic background and was expected to take a leading role in the country’s politics as his grandfather, a senator from Oklahoma, had done. However, Gore’s sexuality stood in the way. There were other factors as well, but he would bitterly claim to the end of his days he would have become president if it was not for the issue of who he slept with. It makes sense he would try to downplay any notion of orientation and was in full control of who he was attracted to. But his extensive experience with prostitution and his penchant for Latin male pornography reveal otherwise.

            Much of his reaction to the sexual politics of his era can also be traced to Jimmy Trimble. Jimmy was a classmate  who Gore claimed was the love of his life to the very end. According to Gore, the two of them fooled around physically and shared a deep bond which was shattered when Jimmy was killed in World War II, an event which probably shaped his anti-Imperialist stance as much as his sexuality. The first part of the biography delves into the mystique of their relationship and contrasts Gore’s claims of intimacy with denials from Trimble’s family. Gore’s continuing attachment to Jimmy is no mere speculation. He was always willing to talk about his attraction to him and  how he could never love anyone else. Unfortunately, he did so around Howard, who was both pained and annoyed by the mention of the young man’s name.  He would make a jerk off motion behind Gore’s head whenever his partner brought it up and often brought Gore’s discussions to an end with a repeated refrain “Oh Gore, basta basta with the Jimmie Trimble!”

            While depicting Gore’s struggles in a sympathetic light, Teeman’s book does not shy away from the dark side of his character and the cost his emotional denial took on him. Vidal extrapolated his own desire to be sexually flexible and saw bisexual and homosexual romances behind every relationship between two men in literature and history. At the same time, Vidal internalized certain aspects of homophobia. His family hatred against a certain kind of effeminate gay man made him enemies with anyone who embodied those traits, such as Truman Capote. Thetwo famously feuded on and off for close to thirty years.  Besides these mental gymnastics, projections, and compartmentalizing, there were also years of heavy drinking and a mounting paranoia which led Gore to reverse his will at the end of his life. Convinced his family was out to get him, he revised the terms so Harvard University, which he never attended, would get the bulk of his estate.

            There is also the issue of how old Gore’s sexual partners were. While it is certain he enjoyed encounters with males in their late teens, there were rumors he slept with adolescents who were much younger. Gore was particularly worried that his arch nemesis William F. Buckley had information related to these encounters. However, Teeman can only guess about what he knew, since Christopher Buckley found his father’s file on Gore after his death and promptly threw it away without giving the content inside even so much as a curious glance. Complicating the picture was Gore’s early involvement with a fundraiser for an organization , part of which evolved to become NAMBLA. Gore defended his presence there years later by pointing out that he was unaware of what the group would become and that at the time he was giving money to help a cause devoted to liberalizing laws between teenagers and older men, though not children. Others claim the meeting was directly responsible for founding the group, despite what Gore contested.

            This back and forth between the sources and Gore Vidal himself is one of the more frustrating aspects of the book.  Since the subject is the sex life of Vidal, a lot of outrageous claims can be made because the acts occurred in private. Some of the most notorious statements do not involve Gore at all, but rather allegedly gay actors in 1950s Hollywood. They come from Scotty Bowers, who wrote about his time supplying closeted stars young men and women in his memoir Full Service. Unfortunately the veracity of his claims is often suspect and he has a history of retracting them.  Gore Vidal approved of his writing, but I doubt Katherine Hepburn, Tyrone Power, and Charles Laughton would.

            Besides the issue of contradicting sources, the book can be confusing at times, since there are dozens of characters who come and go through the text and one forgets their relationship to Gore, particularly those in his family.  His mother remarried and through this union, he gains a set of half and step-siblings. A glossary of names might have been helpful. In addition, the chronology of the biography becomes warped in several sections since Teeman tried to order the book thematically.  A great deal of context is lost this way.  However, In Bed with Gore Vidal remains a fascinating read, in no small part because of the complex personality at the center of it, a man who had wealth and fame, and yet was never satisfied in his private life. 

1001 Albums I’m Trying to Hear Before I Get Bored, Part 2

Well, I have finally finished my aural Odyssey (but alas, it involved no Oracle). In case you are new to the blog and missed my last post on the topic, I have been making my way through the collection 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, which was made possible due to the wonderful folks over at Radio 3 Net, probably the best thing to come out of Romania since Vampires and Nadia Comaneci. They have been kind enough to post the albums up on the Internet as streaming audio. Gentlemen and ladies, Mulţumesc! I am much obliged to you, without your disregard for copyright law, my knowledge of popular music would be seriously stunted.

This has been a project that I began seriously in the fall of 2009. Ah, how far have I come since then (from Arlington to Montclair, New Jersey), but farther still has come music. The first album on the list (the original 2005 edition) is Frank Sinatra's In the Wee Small Hours, released in 1955. The last album on the list is the White Stripes' Get Behind Me Satan, which came out in 2005. In between was the rise of rock and roll, the British Invasion, psychedelia, funk, glam rock, the coming of the Nashville Sound, heavy metal, disco, punk and post-punk, rap, hip-hop, alternative, grunge, house, nu metal, electronica, and a hundred other smaller movements in music, some lasting no longer than a single year, band, or album.

This has been a real learning experience for me, listening to not just songs, but whole albums, and doing so chronologically. It really helps to put different bands and their work in perspective. One comes to understand the why of a specific genre of music and not just the what and when. Except for a few music lovers, I don't think there are many people out there who have listened to more than a hundred or two hundred complete albums. They may know thousands of songs by heart and understand their nuances, but knowledge of albums (i.e. LPs), especially in this age of downloads, probably leaves much to be desired. Go ahead, try and make a list of every album you have listen through completely.

I was the same way. I knew plenty of songs that I had picked up through burned CDs that mixed them together, or that I had downloaded through various channels. But when it came to whole albums, there were gaps in my knowledge. I had listened to most of the Beatles' work, and I had a few of the other greats like Dark Side of the Moon and Led Zeppelin IV, along with various "best of" collections. I also had plenty of disco and old funk to listen to as well, but this was also in the form of single songs and compilations. So I had only scratched the surface of popular music, even for those acts that I claimed to love (except for the Beatles). I also had a good store of classical music, but this is not a form that lends itself to the album age particularly well. It exists beyond the limmits of all discs, tapes, cylinders, and files. It was paper and ink that constrained Mozart and Mahler.

Not only were there deficiencies in my knowledge when it came to the classical period of rock and roll, but I knew very little of music from the 1950s and the music that came out from the late 1970s to the current time. I still don't know enough about world music as a whole, but at least through this project I became a little bit better acquainted with Sinatra, Fitzgerald, Buddy Holly, Elvis, and Miles Davis and at the same time came to know the Sex Pistols, NWA, Radiohead, and the White Stripes for the first or second time. Before listening to these albums, many genres had not been explored at all by me. My knowledge of the punk era was largely limited to the Clash, rap and hip-hop were represented by Blackalicious, who I now realize probably should have been on the list, and a few scattered singles from the Sugar Hill Gang to Jay-Z. My exposure to the various forms of synthetic/electronic/mixed/remixed music was also less than I desired.

Since September, I have been listening to music that came out after 1980. Having been born in 1985, this is music that arguably I should have known better than the classic rock I had made the staple listening of my teenage years. However, this was not the case. When it comes to music made between 1980 and 2004 (roughly when the list ends) I was largely in the dark. After 2004, I went to college and was exposed directly to what was coming out. Before then, I was in a bit of a cocoon. The advantage of this isolation is that I do not have a stack of CDs that I regret purchasing or dozens of songs that I wish I had never downloaded. Nor did I waste time going to concerts for acts I find repugnant now in my more mature years. I went for quality over quantity, classic over contemporary, and I was content with what I listened to.

When I began to really start listening to music, in the later half of the 1990s, what I heard on the radio or saw on MTV (fun fact kids: the M used to stand for music!) did not appeal to me. It was either too slick or too in my face and offered nothing substantial to me. Since my parents did not have much music around the house and I had no older sibling to guide me, I had to educate myself about music, the same as I did about philosophy, eastern religions, poetry, writing, radical politics, and world history. This resulted in a knowledge that was incomplete, but nevertheless treasured because I had come to it on my own terms. So when I realized I had an opportunity to try and fill the gaps of what I had listened to, the audio autodidact in me eagerly jumped at it.

So listening to this quarter century, 1980 to 2005, of music has been educational because I came to it knowing so little. When I listened to those albums that were released between 1955 and 1980, it was less of an ear opening experience. I did find out about many new bands and artists I had never heard of, but I could place these within a familiar context of those albums I had already listened to. I could not do that with this era. Almost everything I heard was a discovery and was new to me. I supposed this puts me in a unique position to be a music critic, as I did not grow up with an immediate connection to either early rock n'roll, classic rock, old school hip-hop, punk, grunge, techno, or alternative music. Until 2004, there was nothing that I liked to listen to that I could defend by saying, "you had to be there."

It was interesting to see the same sort of peaks and valleys in music after 1980 that existed before it. What I mean by that is how a spate of really good albums would be released together in one or two years, and then nothing substantial would come out the next. For instance, the mid-1970s were bracketed by two very productive periods of music, but it produced less that was memorable. I found that the middle of the 1980s was the same way. I admit I once held the stubborn view that little good came out after 1980, or that the music somehow did not speak to me, this I realize now was a wrong opinion for me to hold. However, most of what I uncovered that I liked was not in circulation on the radio or television and without the Internet, how was I going to be exposed to any of the music?

Overall, I think the list of albums was too heavily weighted towards this period, a reaction against over-emphasizing the sixties and seventies in music history, no doubt. Older Baby Boomer critics are being replaced by younger ones who grew up in the eighties and nineties. They want to makes the case that these eras are just as glorious and revolutionary and have tried to elevate bands like Nirvana to the pantheon with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. A reaction against this reaction is probably going to be needed in the future, perhaps lead by members of the Internet generation, who have grown up with all music simultaneously streaming into their ears. The accolades given to many artists for supplying raw presence and shock value may disappear, to be replaced by more of an appreciation for craft and skill.

But, who knows which bands and musicians will see their star rise or fall? Who could have predicted Nick Drake would be rescued from near-oblivion? The Internet will only make these cases all the more common. This is why I feel the list of 1001 albums should have refrained from passing judgement on the music released in the last ten years or so. It is still too fresh and recent to be given proper critical consideration. Contemporary music rests in that odd middle ground between being new and in need of immediate comment, and being old enough to be savored because of its age. It is hard to write about music that is five or six years old. A critic can do it, of course, but the task is difficult. Debating whether or not it belongs in the canon seems premature.

Yes, I found music in this period that I liked. No, none of it was by Yes. Here were some of my favorites:

Dexys Midnight Runners – Searching for the Young Soul Rebels

Talking Heads – Remain in Light

Brian Eno & David Byrne – My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Tom Tom Club – Tom Tom Club

Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five – The Message

Orange Juice – Rip it Up

U2 – War

Cocteau Twins – Treasure

Billy Bragg – Talking with the Taxman About Poetry

Paul Simon – Graceland

U2 – Joshua Tree

Nirvana – Nevermind

U2 – Achtung Baby

Wu Tang Clan – Enter the Wu Tang

Morrissey – Vauxhall & I

Jeff Buckley – Grace

Oasis – (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?

Wilco – Being There

Radiohead – OK Computer

Smith, Elliott – Either/Or

Manu Chao – Clandestino

Lauryn Hill – Miseducation of…

Sigur Rós – Ágætis Byrjun

Air – Virgin Suicides: Original Motion Picture Score

Le Tigre – Le Tigre

Coldplay – Parachutes

Strokes – Is This It

Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Gillian Welch – Time

Gorillaz – Gorillaz

Ugh, writing this list out and trying to find space for everything is difficult. That's how much enjoyable music came out of this era which I had previously written off, although there were a lot of albums that I sort of passed over without remembering at all. There are probably twenty or thirty more albums I could add to the list. This is just what immediately comes to me. I am a pretty eclectic guy as you can see from the artists above.

Were there any albums that I didn't think belonged? Sure. There were plenty of them. A hundred or so probably could have been cut out from this period and the spots given to music from before 1980. I still have a lingering feeling, though unsupported, that the fifties could have used more love from the critics. On the whole there were too many electronic albums on the list. Each time one came on I had a Pavlovian reaction, the taste of an overpriced martini suddenly filling my mouth. There is plenty of good electronic music out there, the genre has really evolved from just being dance music in the past couple of years, but the albums the editors chose all blend together. I also would not have put Britney Spears, Limp Bizkit, or A Grand Don’t Come for Free by Streets. Those are the only ones I can recall by name right now.

A few acts from this period could have been added and I am sure in future editions of the book (there is already a second edition with Ys by Joanna Newsom in it) they will find a way in. Besides her and the above mentioned Blackalicious, some possible inclusions are: Philip Glass (if the Virgin Suicides soundtrack can make it, why not one of the ones he wrote?), Rilo Kiley, Sufjan Stevens, Ratatat, Of Montreal, and Dr. Dog. Yes, the list is biased in favor of recent artists, but only because I know these are missing and I have listened to them. I can't think of anyone from the 1980s who deserves to be on the list or a missing album, since my knowledge of the period has largely come from the list itself.

Well, now I need a new project. Perhaps finding a job?

1001 Albums I’m Trying to Hear Before I Get Bored

So, the past couple of months I have been on this Romanian site, listening to their collection of the 1001 Albums one is supposed to listen to before they die. One could listen to them alphabetically by band or by album name as well, which would produce some interesting juxtapositions, no doubt. But I decided on a chronological approach. This way, I can listen to them in the context of their times. It lets me compare and contrast and see how certain albums truly broke from their peers, or were the perfect embodiment of a particular musical zeitgeist. Or, I would be able to judge for myself if an album was overrated and did not deserve a place on the list.

Now, with any list, there are going to be problems. A list of the greatest movies or greatest books, as well as greatest albums will always be open to subjective interpretation. However, having a list of 1001 albums does offer the advantage of a wide net being cast, allowing many more artists and styles to be included. Those who compiled the list clearly are diverse in their interests, there have been inclusions of not just British and American albums, but Brazilian, French, and German ones as well. Of course, more international work could be included, but it was not fully excluded from the list.

Anyone looking over who was include and who wasn’t will see the three major limitations of the writers’ approach. The first is that the list is only for albums. Why this is a problem may not seem apparent, until one realizes how many musicians and artists are missing from the list because all they released were singles. Indeed, music released before the 1960s is at a disadvantage because the single was the primary vehicle for music sales. Consequently, the list underrepresents many African-American musicians and genres such as soul, R&B, and funk. It is not a question of these artists producing good music, but spending their careers focusing mainly on singles instead. This is why, for instance Chuck Berry, without whom most of the music on this listed would never have been recorded, is not present.

Another problem is that the list is biased in favor of Pop music, of course this makes sense, the list is part of a book series that has to appeal to a wide audience to be sold. Most of the albums, or at least the bands that made them, need to be familiar to readers, even if they never listened to them. This slant does mean that certain works are left out if they do not fall within the parameters of popular music. Jazz, along with Indian and Brazilian music seem to be the main exceptions to this rule. Some of the music might be called experimental, but much is missing from post1950 classical music and folk. Two figures I wished the list included are Philip Glass and John Fahey. Even though Glass is part of the list of classical albums to listen to, much of his early work is in the same vein as someone like Brian Eno (whom he later collaborated with) and his album “Songs for Liquid Days” involved figures from pop music such as Paul Simon. The more publicity Koyanisqaatsi gets, the better. I think Fahey deserved to be added to showcase his unique approach to the American folk tradition.

The final issue is the time frame. I am not scholar of early 20th century music, but I wonder if influential albums were missed from the pre-World War II era, especially those for swing, jazz, and bluegrass. I cannot think of any off the top of my head, but they might be out there and I think the arbitrary start for the list unfairly disqualifies them. Right now, I have not yet listened to the whole list. These are only my thoughts having listened up to early 1980. Only the fifties, sixties, and seventies have been completely listened to. Despite this, I know enough to be able to point out the above mentioned problems. I am not sure the exact number album I am on, but I have roughly completed and heard half the list. Strange that there is still so much more to go despite having experienced the birth of rock, the British Invasion, psychedelia and the Summer of Love, the rise of glam rock, the folk revival, the eruption of punk, the disco era, and electronic music’s genesis. Hip-Hop has yet to take off, as does techno music, grunge, and a host of hybrids between punk, hard rock, and rap, but I will be surprised if I find myself liking the next 500 or so albums as much as the first.

Let’s get down to the albums themselves. Do they belong? Most, yes, though there are some real curious inclusions and serious omissions. However, there are also some gems by people I had either not heard of before, or were only vaguely familiar with. What works did I find to be less than stellar? Well, (and I know this will raise my Aunt Donna’s ire) I wasn’t that impressed with Elvis’ work. I understand his value as an entertainer who acted as a point of transmission for Black culture into White, as well as a figure who tapped into the repressed libidos of White teenagers. That said, his works does not hold up well, even compared with his contemporaries, let alone the musicians that came after him. Buddy Holly is a better songwriter, while Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard could perform just as well as him.

“Beach Samba” by Astrud Gilberto was also not a strong work. Captain Beefheart was no special attraction despite his perennial high rankings. Blue Cheer’s Vincebus Eruptum hardly made an impression. I like Dr. John but “Gris Gris” was uneven. Tim Buckley was good, but he only needed one album on the list. “Space Ritual” by Hawkwind was too campy and maudlin. Joan Armatrading self-titled debut lacked any stand-out material. “Slayed?” and “New Boots & Panties!!” were too amateurish. “DOA: Third & Final Report” was dull and pretentious. “Stardust” by Willie Nelson, as much as I like the guy, doesn’t belong here. “GI” by the Germs just sucks as an album. My test for evaluating the work the late 1970s has been, if I could have done it, it’s not that good.

What albums should have been included? I can think of a few. There are some by Bob Dylan, especially “The Times They Are a-Changin.” I really don’t understand why this album was not included, since it has some of his most famous work and is pretty solid all around. More work from The Who needed to be included. The Beatles deserved more mention. I imagine there was probably a fear of the editors in letting these bands dominate the list for 60s and 70s, but the truth is, they did and for a very good reason. “Help!” “Magical Mystery Tour,” and “Let it Be” should have been included. Heck, I would even make a case for the first half of “Yellow Submarine,” but that energy is better spent elsewhere on this blog. Seriously though, give them a listen.

But, a list of the greatest albums is only as good as those works which it introduces to the listener for the first time and that the listener enjoys thoroughly. The purpose of these lists is not just to be an intellectual exercise, but to also expand the musical horizons of people who are not music critics and have listened to every album under the sun. The music of the 1960s and 1970s is probably my favorite, so I went into this era with a strong footing, yet there were new albums that I really enjoyed, in many cases by artists I never heard before. There were also many artists I had heard of and liked, but I received a deeper understanding of through the list. These included Nick Drake, the Velvet Underground, Parliament, T. Rex, The Beach Boys, Frank Zappa, Bob Marley, Stevie Wonder, and the Kinks (though Lola vs. Powerman should have been on the list).

The following were gems I found exclusively through the list, that is they were new to me:

Spector, Phil & Various Artists – A Christmas Gift for You (Worth it alone for Phil Spector coming on at the end wishing everyone a Merry Christmas)

Monks – Black Monk Time (If there ever was a band before its time)

Mothers of Invention – Freak Out!

Incredible String Band – Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter

Nyro, Laura – Eli & the Thirteenth Confession

United States of America – United States of America

Small Faces – Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake (You either love or hate the second half, if you like the way they speak in A Clockwork Orange, then you may enjoy it)

Fairport Convention – Unhalfbricking

Derek & the Dominos – Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs (The only song my father cares about)

Shankar, Ananda – Ananda Shankar (1970)

Gainsbourg, Serge – Histoire de Melody Nelson (Boy did I feel hip when I recognized it in the movie Greenberg!)

Nilsson, Harry – Nilsson Schmilsson (More than just "Coconut")

Flamin' Groovies - Teenage Head

Ackles, David – American Gothic

Newman, Randy – Sail Away

Big Star – # 1 Record (Who doesn't wish they had listened to “Thirteen” when I was thirteen)

Faust – IV

Cale, John – Paris 1919 (The title track makes the album all by itself)

Sparks – Kimono My House (Declaring this a guilty pleasure)

Dion – Born to Be With You (If you took the sound of the late 50s/early60s and added a crippling heroin addiction, this is what you would get)

Penguin Café Orchestra – Music from the Penguin Café (If this can make the list, why not Songs from Liquid Days?)

Television – Marquee Moon

Eno, Brian – Ambient 1: Music for Airports (All his albums from the list are good)

Numan, Gary – Pleasure Principle (He actually knew how to use a synthesizer)