Roger Ebert's voice: companion, pointer to vistas on my own journey

Roger Ebert was my teacher. That is, his voice was, and by his voice I mean his writing (and TV as well). When I was a kid, that voice pointed me to what felt like a secret door opening onto whole new continents of film. Sometimes after we watched a film on home video I’d reemerge with one of his books and read aloud his review to my family and we’d consider the picture in that light. Not that I always agreed. But he did that uncanny thing that our favorite critics are somehow able to do: somehow he put into words something I felt but couldn't express.

That voice never really left me. Years and years later, his journal ("The London Perambulator" article, one of my favorites) guided me on my very first walk around London. Funny, his voice almost came to mean more to me after he lost the use of it in the literal sense. On my first first visit to Venice, I kept in the back of my mind the name of his favorite trattoria. One morning I was out exploring and I suddenly looked up and there it was. What’s more, through the window I saw who I thought must surely be the character he’d described so vividly in his journal: Lino, the lively proprietor, busily preparing for the day. Though graying now, I recognized him from Ebert’s description.

I took the liberty of taking a picture. When I returned home I e-mailed Roger the photo, letting him know that I’d stumbled across his favorite trattoria, though I didn’t get to eat there because it was too early. I told him I hoped that this was his old friend Lino, still at it. I didn’t really think I’d hear back. He must get massive amounts of e-mail every day, I thought. Then the response came. He couldn't open the picture and asked me to re-send to his personal e-mail address. I did so, and shortly thereafter came the reply: “Ah, yes! The very place! The beloved man! Now you must go back someday.” There followed an extremely enjoyable e-mail exchange that still feels a bit surreal. Amongst other things, he told me about how beautiful Venice is in the winter, how that was his favorite time to be there.

This only begins to say how much I’ll miss his voice. On Thursday when I first heard the news I sat at my desk and wept.

Jon Langford rocks the Art Institute

  

Karolyn and I burrowed deep into the bowels of the Art Institute to attend a lecture by one of Chicago's great rockers and all-around creative guys, Jon Langford.  He appeared in a subterranean auditorium as part of the Institute's “Artists Connect” series, billed as “where local artists talk about how their work connects with artists of the past.”  Langford’s connection is with Goya, whose devilish eye held a twisted mirror to society that showed its true soul.  In a society still run by fear, Langford noted, Goya couldn’t be more relevant.   

I have a personal experience with Goya myself.  In 2012 I explored the Prado, something I've wanted to do for 20 years, and saw three flights of his stuff, from the pastel cartoons of leaping lords and ladies that he made as a young court painter, to his “black paintings,” when he had a freak-out and smeared the walls of his house with his nightmares.  (He "had a freak-out."  Way to put it in social and historical context, Pfeiffer!) 

Of course, since it was Langford, he appeared with guitar in hand.  He turned the talk into a concert, jamming out on songs like “The Country is Young,” “Sputnik 57” and “To The Last Dead Cowboy.”  The music passed my litmus test for proper music, by which I mean to say it could have been played by the guys sitting around that circle in the Elvis Presley ’68 comeback.  (Okay, that’s one of my litmus tests for proper music.)  His lyrics, of course, are quite another matter indeed.  Those could have only come from the surrealistic imagination of Jon Langford.  Langford always plays with a fiery rock ‘n’ roll attack, even if he’s playing acoustic, even if he’s singing country or folk songs.  

He'd made a slide show to go with his talk, toggling back and forth between Goya’s images and his. Many of his works are illustrations of song lyrics.  Motifs include skulls, cowboys, cowgirls, and country music greats, sometimes blindfolded or X-ed out as though in a Stalinist wipe-out.  There were slides from his life as well, and the lecture became a personal story about the rather twisty road that brought Jon to country music. 

He was a boy from Wales born in the late 50s.  In the 70s he was excited about punk rock and art school.  During his art school days in Leeds, he co-founded the Mekons, the seminal second-wave punk band.  They dealt in small ‘p’ politics, he said: the everyday things that were around them.  He brought up a slide of the Three Johns, one of his innumerable side projects, looking like art-school pranksters togged out in djellabas, or like the jawas from "Star Wars" (an admitted big influence). 

He told the story of how the Mekons got into country music back when no one in their circle was into it.  (It'd be interesting to know if Elvis Costello's "Almost Blue" was an influence.  I think that record was way ahead of its time in turning people on to the beauty and strength of country songs). 

He talked about moving to Chicago and hanging with the Sundowners, the legendary Chicago honky-tonkers.  Later he went looking for the roots of American music, a pilgrimage many of us take.  (Karolyn and I are about to take a similar journey into the roots (routes?) of American music, to Memphis, Nashville and New Orleans.)  He talked about discovering Tootsies Orchid Lounge in Nashville, a “beautiful graveyard” with walls covered in amber, shellacked playbills of C&W stars.    

He pasted the people who run the American country music business as “Stalinists,” and he meant something quite specific: the way they consigned the country greats he loves to non-person status and shot them down the memory hole.  He pointed out that Nashville radio isn’t playing much Hank Williams or Bob Wills and Texas swing these days.  He is fascinated by the moment when an artist becomes an employee: that is, the moment when the pen hovers about the contract.  In the music business, people are food for machine. 

(Much to his bemusement, some industry people came to one of his shows and liked the images enough to commission him to do a record cover.  Everyone has his price, Langford admitted to audience laughter, and that day mine was $6,000.)

He performed “Hank Williams Must Die”:  It seems Hank Williams actually mentioned Stalin by name in a song and Stalin heard the song, apparently enraging the dictator.  The song is Stalin's imagined response.

Even though he made no mention of it, all of this put me in mind of the Mekons' urgent song “Amnesia,” which fascinates me.  History and memory is what it’s all about.  (“I forgot to forget to remember.”)  As the song begins, “it was a dark and stormy night" and we’re on a storm-tossed slave ship “taking rock & roll to America,” that is, bringing Africans to America, where they invent the music that then goes back across the Atlantic to turn on English kids.  It’s about two different British Invasions: the musical one in the 1960s that brought the Beatles, the Stones, the Animals to these shores, and which reawakened America to its own musical roots.  Also the one in 1812 where the Brits burned down the White House. 

It all swirls around until it finally explodes, riding in on a strumming dulcimer straight out of “Battle of Evermore,” a hurricane that is the harvest of all the forces the song’s unleashed so far.  There’s a rousing battle cry of “truth, justice, and Led Zeppelin!” but you don’t know whether it’s rallying you to join the rock & roll battle or the political battle, or both, or to what end.

There's a lot more in it (Mardi Gras Indians, segregation, the Shining Path, the drug trade), but that’s a few things I hear in this roiling maelstrom of race and  America and England, and cross-Atlantic trade and cultural give-and-take. 

So.  Back to the talk.  It was dense with references, musical and artistic.  He mentioned Otto Dix, the German painter and printmaker, and how Goya influenced his own ruthless depictions of war.

Langford was particularly shaken by Goya’s “Caprices” (Los Caprichos), the sheave of etchings that lacerated 18^th-century Spain.  Goya published it in 1799 but withdrew it due to fears of the Spanish Inquisition.  Likewise, Langford was hard hit by the "Disasters of War," Goya's etchings about the Peninsular War (1808-1814) that found Spain at war with France, pulled into the maelstrom of Napolean’s post-French Revolution conquests.  He showed us “This is what you were born for,” plate twelve from Disasters of War, showing a man puking over a pile of bodies.  (Goya kept it real.)   

Langford was knocked out by “The Dummy,” which he called one of the great images of humanity being tossed about.  

There’s something very moving, very hopeful and unbowed, about Jon Langford.  For one thing, he's still a believer in the socialist project, and though it wasn't a topic of his talk, he's as acidic about those who betrayed true socialism as he is about those who betrayed "true" country music.  (I think of "This Funeral is For The Wrong Corpse," the Mekons song about how the reports of socialism's death were wildly exaggerated: "How can something be dead when it hasn't really happened?") 

And he loves his adopted home, the United States of America, with a fierce, embattled love.  He ended with “Lost in America,” a song that always moved me.  We can still turn things around.  Let's keep the flame burning, and let's fight those who would snuff it out.  Langford made it sound as if the project of keeping America's flame burning and keeping our music's flame burning is one and the same.  Which of course it is.  As Goya showed him, the best art is about what’s going on immediately around you.

A Sunday afternoon with Roy Lichtenstein and Karolyn

 

Last Sunday, Karolyn and I popped down to check out the special Roy Lichtenstein exhibit at the Art Institute.  It’s been getting written up all over the country.  

I think it would please Lichtenstein to know that was this was the only art exhibit I’ve ever seen where the children dragged in weren’t screaming to go home.  In fact, the kids' imaginations seemed captured by the show.  Making up stories and asking questions about the pictures, the kids seemed to "get" instinctually how he played with painting and its language, codes, rules.

I confess that all I knew of his work were the iconic comic book panels, the ones about "loud sounds, energy, action, release," as the print on the wall commented.  POP! WHAMMO!!  I kept thinking of that Pop Art landmark, the Batman TV show of the 1960s.   

   

The cry for the show, though, had been that it would explode your preconceptions of what Lichtenstein did. 

We ducked in through the Modern Wing to get out of the rain.  I’m glad we did, because we stumbled across a permanent installation of the only film Lichtenstein ever made.  I didn't take any photos at the dark end of the hall, so I'll try to describe the film: a triptych of screens showed images that gently bobbed and rolled upon them, making us feel like we were on the deck of a ship.  Half of each screen was a window on nature (rippling water, fish swimming in a tank, a seabird pasted to the sky), the other half filled with striking diagonals or his trademark dots.  We sat and watched for awhile.  Karolyn remarked that she didn't think much of the plot. 

Trying to find our sea legs, we emerged blinking from the darkened space and headed for the special exhibit.  The film made a good intro; it created a harmony with concerns we'd see in some of the paintings: the flux of waves against geometric, man-made shapes, dots and diagonals.     

  

  

The most startling and hypnotic moiré "paintings" we saw looked like they were shaped out of shiny, bulbous plastic.  They seemed to swirl and undulate before your eyes.  

Here's Lichtenstein's comic take on the famous Laocoon sculpture.  I saw the sculpture last year in the Vatican Museums in Rome.  It tells a little story from Homer: Laocoon thought the idea of the Trojan horse was a crap idea and dug in his heels firmly against the whole project.  But since this was the plan which would enable the escape of Aeneas--crucial to the founding of Rome--the Gods couldn't allow Laocoon's "nolle prosequi" to muck up the plot.  So they sent two serpents to strangle him and his unfortunate sons. 

   

Postmodern art is always about the history of art on some level, but it was starting to look like Lichtenstein's project was nothing less than to reimagine that history completely, remake it in his own image. 

   

This one looked to me like his take on something Gaugin might do.

Something tells me my insight about this sculpture wasn’t too original: I proclaimed, “It’s very Art Deco.”  A moment or two later, a couple women stopped behind me to have a look.  “Very Art Deco, isn’t it?” one said to the other.  A had a little look at the wall description.  It said: here we have Lichtenstein's take on Art Deco. 

I like the velvet movie theater rope.

The drawings and sketches on this wall were actually I think my favorites.

 

Here's his take on Japanese landscape painting.

 

  On the spur of the moment Karolyn made up narratives for the women in "the naked pictures" room.  Her stories gave me in-depth character studies in just a few strokes, complete with psycho-sexual profiles of each woman.  Her stories pulled together all the pictures in the room.  I proclaimed that the Art Institute should take her on as a docent so she could pass these stories along. 

 

The Lichtenstein retrospective was an invigorating afternoon of boldness and ideas, an overview of a working life of prodigious creative work.  It was fun seeing it with Karolyn, who, woman of the world though she is, has never lost her ability to see with the wonder of a child.

  

Alexander Cockburn and a young American

In her beautiful remembrance of the great radical journalist Alexander Cockburn, who died on July 21, 2012, Joann Wypijewski, writing about the rapier wit with which Cockburn slashed the powerful, wrote, "But, oh, how much more he was the sum of all he loved."  His death the other week hit me hard, and in the weeks since I've been mulling over the reasons.  His words meant so much to me.  Some of my favorites were the ones penned about the things he loved. 

As an American from southeast Ohio, not born until 1971, it would be impossible for me to overstate how unlike anything else I'd ever encountered he was, coming out of the European polemical tradition as he did.  That said, as I get older it occurs to me that maybe one reason I admired him was because he reminded me a bit of my father.  Though they would have had many areas where they disagreed, as a moderate Republican of the old school my dad and the far-left Cockburn would have actually had some bit of overlap.  I've theorized that this was one reason that Cockburn's attacks on the Democratic Party never really scandalized me as much as they did some liberals, and why I always enjoyed his provocateur style.  Sometimes my father would challenge my views, largely, I think, to sharpen my mind and to prepare me for the fact that not everyone out in the big world was going to agree with me.  If he liked my argument, he'd say, that's quite a well-made point.   

Anyway, as I say, I'm an American not born until 1971.  This means I was a fish in water where the Democratic/Republican parties were the spectrum of political thought.  All through high school in the mid-to-late 80s, for a young person of social conscience this meant aligning with the Democratic Party (I remember canvassing for the unsavory Michael Dukakis--"unsavory," I think that's a word I got from Cockburn), and opposing Reaganism and Young Republicans at every turn--even (or especially) the ones who were your friends.  After all, they were the ones it was the most fun arguing with. 

Alex's writing, when I encountered it in my early 20s after moving to Chicago, blew through my mind, exploding that whole political spectrum, showing me there were more possibilities than I had imagined.  Along with other important people in my life, he and his writing introduced me to the proper Left: the whole culture of working-class solidarity, Marxism, a whole intellectual tradition of thought and culture.  He made the point on the spectrum to the left of the Democratic Party not only possible, but attractive.

That said, he wasn't a bit like the vulgar sectarians I'd run into from time to time, hawking the Revolutionary Communist Party paper.  I liked some of these people as individuals, yet they were much more enamored of groupthink than seemed wholesome to me.  I remember stopping into the Socialist Workers' Party bookshop back in the 90s.  I asked the nice old lady behind the counter about some personage--the great C.L.R James, I think it was.  I'll never forget the way she turned to her comrade and asked, "What do we think about him?"  Yeesh.

Cockburn was all about independent thought.  During my fighting days in the 90's, the days when I ran in radical activist circles of all stripes, from communist to anarchist, Cockburn's polemical style was bracing.  It inspired and scandalized us by turns.  Whenever the Nation arrived, the first thing you'd do was page through to his "Beat the Devil" column.  How exciting it was to pluck "CounterPunch" or "The Anderson Valley Advertiser" from the mailbox.  You always knew there was going be trouble.      

Of course I wanted to be him.  This persona was--is--impossibly attractive.  The elegant Oxford-trained voice, the style, wit and erudition, all worn so lightly.  He had such a nice sense of irony.  I remember once he wrote how tiresome it could be with some lefties, always going about rigorously denouncing this and ruthlessly criticizing that.  

He was a great fighter, but the real lesson for me, bent over "The Golden Age Is In Us" (still my favorite) and "Corruptions of Empire," was how he had so many, many interests other than just fighting.  I cherished the introduction he wrote to P.G. Wodehouse's "The Code of the Woosters," my favorite book by my favorite writer.  If I'm not too far wrong, I believe it was Cockburn who introduced me to Wodehouse in the first place.  

I only interviewed him once, in the mid 90s, after a dinner preparatory to his address to a church-based peace 'n' justice group in Evanston.  He sat down with myself and my then wife.  As thrilled as I was to sit down with my hero, I had to tell him I was a bit cross with him.  He'd made some critical remarks in "Beat the Devil" about the U.S. "Labor Party" which was then going through birthing pains.  I'd been attending meetings, hoping it'd get off the ground as a real U.S. alternative political party.  Many in my circle had been doing the same, and his column had pissed off a lot of us off.  He gently reminded me that the remarks in question were actually reported by Joann Wypijewski (albeit, he conceded, printed in his column).  As for the Labor Party, "I just don't think it's going anywhere," he said.  "I hope it does."  And you know, he turned out to be quite right. 

I met him once more after that, at a reading for the book he co-authored on the CIA and cocaine, "Whiteout," and spoke to him on the phone one other time.  I always found him to be just as one would hope: generous with his time, polite, unpretentious, erudite, serious but with a sense of fun and enjoyment taken in the pleasures of life--talking to a pretty girl, for example.  (After his audience with myself and my then wife, she remarked--beaming slightly, I noticed--that she'd detected a slight twinkle in his eye when he addressed her.)

I think it was the dawning in me that I was actually more interested in the side of his writing that was about the things he loved that led to my realization that I didn't really have the instinct myself to write about politics.  That said, my thirst to understand how the real world works remained unabated, and I would often turn to CounterPunch down the years to slake it, or at least to get a point of view that was unlike anybody else's.  And though I've voted for Democrats in recent years, it's always with Cockburn's voice in the back of my mind, telling me it won't do to settle for the lesser of two evils.

I admit I rather lost my taste for fighting over the years.  These days, though, I feel the appetite whetted again.  God knows there are battles to be joined.  If I learned anything from his writing and the example of his life, it's that you never avert your eyes from injustice, and that you do something about it.

I mainly write about film now.  And yet my voice, if I have one, is always somehow informed by Cockburn's, though I could only hope to be anywhere near that funny and sharp.  One of my favorite things he did was something he probably tossed off in a few minutes: the list he wrote for CounterPunch of the 10 films he loved the most.  The bit about how much he loved "Homeward Bound," and wept when the Golden Retriever came over the hill, never fails to amuse me.  I can picture that "tough A.R. chick" staring at his tear-stained cheeks in disgust.  There have been weeks when, in the midst of trying to compose an article about some movie, I'd glance at his list every day: to reset my mind, to keep myself from becoming tiresome, to remind me what movies are really all about at the end of the day.  When I think of him--and I know I always will--that list will be one of the many things I'll think of.

Getting heady with The Hold Steady

On a lovely warm evening in the West Loop I reaffirmed my rock & roll vows.  The occasion was the Hold Steady show last night down at Taste of Randolph.  May I just say that I absolutely love seeing a 40-something, short, balding, bespectacled guy like Craig Finn getting rock-star love?  

He's so unconcerned with being cool, pogoing, grinning, flailing, unabashed to be giddily and dorkily in love with what's "only" rock & roll, unashamed about how upped he is by his hot band's intense Thin Lizzy twin-guitar attack.  Musically the band is irresistible, at least according to my aesthetic: the underground meeting the beating heart of rock, a smokin', funky, punk-"Exile" landscape of Springsteen, Dylan, and Husker Du, over which rides Finn's honest, literate, witty, affectionate chronicling of the teenage wasteland.  

 

The audience was extraordinary, the most mixed in age I’ve seen at any show.  Sure, a lot of 'em are my peeps: middle-aged guys who look like Craig Finn.  (Women are really into him, too, I might add).  But the kids!  The kids were amazing.  That’s why I was glad I got to see this band at an outdoor festival: you’d lose the kids at a 21-and-over show.  Some of the most hardcore looked to be less than half my age.  I guess they must have come out from surrounding high schools or something, and they were right up in front.  They're the boys and girls Finn sings about on the records. 

I mean, these kids are singing every word, and these are really wordy songs.  And as hard as Finn’s singing the words at them, they’re throwing them back in his face just as hard, flinging their arms in the air and stabbing each word emphatically.

And getting the humor, too.  I love the way Finn makes these little off-mic asides to the crowd in between lines, gassed by his own lines and the audience's reactions.  “There are nights that I think Sal Paradise was right,” he declares, and when the kids in front cheer, he throws up his hands and mouths off-mic in their direction, “I know, right??,” before kicking into the next line: “Boys and girls in America, they have such a sad time together.”   

That's when I know I'm seeing rock & roll doing what it's meant to do: when the singer is telling the audience's story.