Have you heard of Dave Hickey? I came across him this weekend in the Los Angeles Times' occasional Sunday magazine, LA (why this paper can't manage a Sunday magazine of any consistency or caliber like its pretentious New York competitor is beyond me, but that is a matter for its own diatribe). Inspired by the brief interview, I picked up Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, the 1997 collection of cultural commentary that helped him earn a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 2001, and can assure you after a premliminary perusal -- it's worth a read.
- thoughts, quotes, SPOILERS -
Unbreak My Heart, An Overture (introduction)
"In truth, I have never taken anything printed in a book to heart that was not somehow confirmed in my ordinary experience -- and that did not, to some extent, reform and redeem that experience. nor have I had any experience of high art that was not somehow confirmed in my experience of ordinary culture -- and that did not, to some extent, reform and redeem that. So I have tried to reinstate the connective tissues here, and, in the process, have written an odd sort of memoir: a memoir without tears, without despair or exaltation -- a memoir purged of those time-stopping exclamation points that punctuate all our lives." (italics mine)
I love that description for a collection of cultural essays -- an odd sort of memoir. Isn't that, in effect, what this blogging thing is? What our home librairies and DVD collections and CD stacks truly represent? Going back over old favorites is like looking through old photos; taste, and its evolution, is a form of biography perhaps as meaningful as any other.
Hickey then plunges into a meaningful comparison between two camps of cultural observers, each considering itself to be the true custodian of Culture -- mom-and-pop shop operators (galleries, record stores, jazz clubs, etc), vs. ivory tower academics. It's not hard to see which side Hickey comes out on, and his characterizations are unfairly stark, but the opposition is relevant all the same.
"The problem for me had never been who sold the dumb object, or bought it (it was just a dumb object), but how you acquire the privilege of talking about it -- how you found poeple with whom you could talk about it...That was the best thing about little stores. If you were a nobody like me, and didn't know anything, you could go into one of them and find things out. People would talk to you, not because you were going to buy something, but because they loved the stuff they had to sell. The guy in the Billabong Surf Shop, I can assure you, wants to talk about his boards. Even if you want to buy one, right now, he still wants to talk about them, will talk you out into the street, you with the board under your ar, if he is a true child of the high water."
Notice, too, how Hickey freely files surf boards under Cultural Objects right along with vinyl. They are crafted and loved and collected like any other cultural passion.
"And I love that kind of talk, have lived on it and lived by it, writing that kind of talk for magazines. To me, it has always been the heart of the mystery, the heart of the heart: the way people talk about loving things, which things, and why."
That could pretty much be the description of this blog. When I worked for a publication's arts section, the great pleasure was coming in and shooting the shit with my colleagues, re-hashing the same points perhaps, feeling my own vehemently expressed opinions crystalize and then shatter. Writing was the chore -- the bread. That banter was the butter.
"Thus it was, after two years on university campuses without hearing anything approximating this kind of talk, I began feeling terrible, physically awful, confused and bereft. I kept trying to start this kind of talk, volunteering my new enthusiasms like a kid pulling frogs and magic rocks out of his pocket, but nothing worked. There was no bounce, just aridity and suspicion. It finally dawned on me that in this place that we had set aside to nurture culture and study its workings, culture didn't work. It couldn't work, in this place, because all the things that I wanted to talk about...belonged to someone. But not to everyone. All the treasures of culture were divvied up and owned by professors, as certainly as millionaires own the beach-fronts of Maine."
Hickey is a wonderfully succinct writer, eschewing technical jargon for plain rhythm and imagery without losing any effectiveness (hey, Chuck Klosterman, take note). Don't get me wrong, he's no saint -- isn't is a bit old to so fervently hate the Establishment by now? -- but he does what the best cultural writers do: he feels his subjects. He loves them.
I'll leave you with a little left-field snippet, a quote that, while mildly out-of-context, demonstrates his comedy as well as his eye:
"[It was a] cool, windy afternoon in the zocalo of a little town on the slopes above Mexico City. I was sitting in a shady arcade with my old friend Brownie, who isn't called that anymore, since he is presently in the Federal Witness Protection Program. We were down in Mexico on a nefarious errand that doubtless contributed to Brownie's uncomfortable accomodation with the Feds, but, on this afternoon, nothing very nefarious was going on. We were just sitting at a little table, shooting nothing but the breeze and enjoying the air. Brownie was drinking a beer. I was drinking coffee. At one point, Brownie reached over and touched my arm, nodding at something in the square behind me. I turned around and beheld a perfect Latin American tableau.On the edge of the curb, on the other side of the square, three people were standing in a row. There was a boy of about seventeen, wearing a cheap black suit, a white shirt, and a narrow black tie. Beside him was a beautiful girl of about the same age, in a white lace dress, and, beside her, a duenna in full balck battle-regalia with a mantilla over her hair. The duenna was a large woman, and looked for all the world like Dick Butkus in drag. The three of them had been about to cross the street into the plaza when they found their way blocked. Now, they were just standing there, at a loss, lined up on te curb with two dirt-brown dogs fucking the street in front of them."
PICK UP THIS BOOK.
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