Just got my first JG Ballard. Kept it to his short fiction (Vermillion Sands) because my bad ADD brain can't deal with finishing Master and Margarita, even though it's an easy read and relatively okay.  Just not particularly engaged with that guys style.

I'm currently working through a couple of books.

Finally getting to Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures, his account of the independent film movement of the '90s.  I had intended to read another Biskind book first, Seeing Is Believing, his take on '50s American films, but I pulled out early on.  I don't really like that it's set up as a series of essays on specific films, rather than a chronological overview, and in the first essay I read, on 12 Angry Men, exposed some of Biskind's personal biases, describing Henry Fonda's Juror as an epitome of the "corporatist" and "centrist", both terms which he associates with a standard Democratic liberal.  (Although Biskind mostly neglected his personal politics in his Raging Bulls and Easy Riders, there was that one point later on where he bemoaned the decline of Maoist influence among the New Hollywood elite.)

No evidence of such politics in Down and Dirty, which is mostly focused on two institutions, Sundance and Miramax.  And the basic takeaways are not surprising for anyone already familiar with the era, namely that the Weinstein brothers are brutal abusers and manipulators and that the only reason why their suffering employees stuck around was out of the sheer love of the films they were working with; and that Robert Redford was paradoxically too aloof and too interferring with the filmmakers he worked with for the Sundance labs to be very successful at producing quality films.  At least we can finally get a conclusion which I think we've all suspected, which is that most of the films produced in their labs were not very good, with the filmmakers frequently confusing "homegrown" with "banality", and even the most talented filmmakers who went through the labs would go on to make their best work elsewhere.  However, Sundance's film festival and, a little later, their cable channel still provided admirable promotion for the ethos of independent film.

..........

But my deeper dive has been on Sticky Fingers, the Tom Hogan biography of Jann Wenner.  For background, in 2017, the 50th anniversary of Rolling Stone magazine, Wenner had planned a number of self-congratulatory pageants to his success, including this intended book and a feature documentary.  Because of Jann's ungodly confidence and utter lack of introspection, he naturally gave Hogan total freedom and final cut, only to act surprised when the result was less than flattering.  The fired Tom Hogan then took his manuscript to get published elsewhere. 

Again, anyone even moderately familiar with Wenner and his magazine will not be surprised to learn that he's a fairly awful cuntbag, and while this book, as more of a personal biography of Wenner than a chronicle of Rolling Stone itself, has far fewer details concerning Stone's legendary writers and creative contributors, the book does feature a lot more detail on the extent of bagged cunts within Jann Wenner himself.  The obvious comparison point is with the 1990 Robert Draper's "Uncensored History" which has been the definitive account of Rolling Stone to date, and is still best for covering all of the creative voices involved (appropriately, its first chapter is dedicated to establishing Ralph J. Gleason rather than Wenner as the true godfather of the publication), but in 1990, Wenner was not yet out-of-the-closet, and this new book has about a metric ton of extra material on Wenner's relationships, and the toll of his pansexual predations on his various intimates including his wife Jane, which simply would not have been acceptable to publish at that time.

The overall consensus - that Jann Wenner is a transactional selfish prick bastard - is still essentially the same, only with a lot more specific corroboration.  Wenner was one of those Boomers who was always more of a Yuppie than a Hippie, and (born the same year as Donald Trump) more of an animal of the 1980s than anywhere else.  The history of Rolling Stone is a consistent series of bridge-burning and back-stabbing from its editor in chief, and there doesn't appear to be anyone close to Wenner who didn't inevitably harbor some bad blood and lawsuits.  Even long-loyal photographer Annie Lebowitz, almost single-handedly responsible for RS's many iconic covers, had to resort to stealing her negatives out of the offices late one night after she learned that Wenner had lied to her over who owned the rights to them.  The book has lots of quotes which begin to get redundant: "He had real trouble with interpersonal relationships", "The closer that people got to Jann, the more likely they were to get fired"; "He was a master at going after people's insecurities"; "People around Jann were people who could do something for him".  Hunter Thompson, who not incorrectly felt that he had helped give the magazine some serious journalistic clout, would describe Wenner as "the rotten little dwarf", which maybe was kinder than Joe Eszterhas' "fascist insect".  Tom Wolfe, who thankfully never needed to rely on Wenner for employment, observed that "He seems immune to guilt", to explain how little shame Jann had in treating people as NPCs in his own grand saga, for his perpetual lying and duplicity.  "It would be nice to think that he would die in the gutter", says Rolling Stone's first film critic, Grover Lewis.

But the book's best trick was in its framing, using a prologue to illustrate Wenner's relationship with his hero, John Lennon.  Wenner is fundamentally a starfucker supreme, and he's admitted that his motive in starting Rolling Stone was to meet his rock and roll idols.  (Incidentally, true music journalists like Greil Marcus and Jon Landeau were never less than astonished by Jann's ignorance of actual rock music.)  And in 1967, when Wenner put his face on the very first cover of Rolling Stone, there was no bigger idol to Jann than John Beatle Lennon.  Soon, Lennon would be allowing Wenner to use the back of the notorious Two Virgins LP as a cover (its best selling at that point) and giving exclusive interviews.  Not least of which was his "Remembers" two-issue marathon of bile and resentment, released to coincide with his "Primal" album, his first true solo release.  Lennon was notably nervous and vulnerable at this time.  Hogan recalls the account of Lennon bursting into tears with Wenner watching the rooftop performance at the end of Let It Be at a theater showing.  Lennon would give Wenner his exclusive interview with one condition: that it would never be reprinted elsewhere.  Wenner would republish the interview as a best-selling standalone paperback within the year, owing Lennon no royalties.  Wenner fucked over the man whom he had claimed to have been the most important hero that he had ever had.  The prologue ends, "The two never spoke again".  So even after Lennon's murder, with Wenner glomming on about "my dear friend" and once again exploiting him with a self-serving magazine cover (albeit with an excellent, iconic Lebowitz photograph), there's little denying Jann's ultimate corruption as a human being.  The more hagiographic Rolling Stone documentary released that 50th anniversary in 2017 would feature a scene with Jann Wenner staring at this iconic cover, with no mention of how he screwed over both Lennon and its photographer Lebowitz, and allows the camera to stay on him for a pregnant minute as he forces himself to cry.
 

Last edited by Jinnistan (2/28/2025 8:58 pm)

A new book this year outlining the 250-year struggle for Native American civil rights and citizenship.  Not quite yet finished it, but can preemptively recommend it based on its thorough research and insight, including a fat 50-page appendix of end notes which should ideally become a basis for its own academic curriculum.

The tale is not new.  But it is immediately striking how close the country was to granting various tribes, who had fought the British in the Revolution, due citizenship at the outset of the nation's founding.  The Delaware are especially honored.  The assumption being that the Native Americans had taken America at its word from the intentions defined in our founding documents - the stuff about "inalienable rights" and freedom of expression and association.  But the hypocrisy was set in motion very quickly.  Even many of those colonists most sympathetic and admiring of the Native people were chronically indifferent from one audience to the next.  This similarity to the founders' attitudes about slavery was not the only parallel, as we see "states' rights" being invoked to justify violent local militia raids on Native properties, with George Washinton having to send an early version of the National Guard to Virginia to quell some of it.

The hypocrisy though was as well defined as its constitutional contradictions.  From the outset, assimilation was based on core government requirements, including the strict renunciation and repression of Native American culture, religion, language, way of life, etc, all under the assumption that these "savages" ("children of the forest" is the more quaint euphemism) could not be civilized without wholly adopting European - and specifically Christian - culture and practices, in clear violation of 1st Amendment principles.  Obviously no other immigrant group in the nation's history had to abide by such cultural oppression.  And the initial enthusiasm for Natives to join the "white brother" in building this promising new nation, to be actually based on the sincere sentiments of equality, were slowly and painfully eroded over decades, and by the end of the 19th century, the number of Natives who were by now militantly resistant to citizenship, reflecting all of the bad faith and infantilization, had swollen to majorities in many tribes.  By the early 20th century, we see the tribes still attempting to reconcile these differences as some actual and substantial (relatively of course) civil rights were born out of the FDR "Indian New Deal", the Indian Rights Act, and a quiet champion in FDR's Indian Affairs secretary, John Collier.

Luckily, the one citizenship requirement which many Natives did take advantage of was literacy, and, despite the draconian and genocidal cultural policies of their forced boarding schools.  Many Natives did learn eloquent English, studied the law well enough to acutely reveal the core constitutional hypocrisies of their civic treatment.  Unfortunately, their efforts were mostly fruitless, but - illustrated by this book which relies heavily on this small library of Native political theory sourced from Native newspapers, court filings, speeches, political conventions, and assorted declarations and manifestos - the words themselves remain the most damning in how easily they were ignored by the American mainstream.

As one 4th-grader wrote in an essay from the 1930s: "We can worship God any way in which we fell he wants us to", which is about as profoundly succint an expression of personal religious sovereignty as exists in American letters.

I wanted to highlight the contrast these books provide for how a well-made music biography should be.  To be exact, only the former - Burning Down The House by Jonathan Gould - qualifies as a well-made biography, and it is exceptional.  The Velvet Underground book is trash, written by some Mojo asshole, and provides all of the negative contours of this contrast.  But what's convenient, in that I just happened to pick these books up together, is in how specifically we can draw this contrast using compatible subject matter.  For example, Gould's book, being a robust 450-page overview, is expansive enough to include sufficient musical background of Talking Heads' environment and influences to spend a couple of pages devoted to a brief summary of the Velvet Underground, and tellingly this summary, by itself, provides a more illuminating (not to mention more accurate) portrait of the group than the entire 250-page Seeing The Light.  It isn't just that Jonathan Gould is a much better writer (and researcher) than Light's Rob Jovanovic, although he clearly is, but it's worth looking at certain tendencies which weigh down Jovanovic, which also happen to be endemic in so much modern cultural journalism to its detriment.

This is similar to the criticisms over the Questlove documentary on Sly Stone, where we see a tendency to overemphasize an underdog sense of perseverance which ends up obscuring or outright denying chunks of cultural context surrounding the subject.  So with Sly, his band's ethnic integration is elevated as revelation, as if in a vacuum, ignoring such then-mainstream integrated acts as Booker T & The MGs, Paul Butterfield Blues Band/Electric Flag, Chambers Brothers, Jimi Hendrix Experience.  Is it necessary for Sly/Family Stone to be the only, or even the very first, band to present integrated musicians for this to constitute a significant and innovative attribute?  The need to present precedent via omission shows an insecurity which shouldn't exist.  The same with Sly's role as a black pride champion, which is presented by omitting names like Curtis Mayfield, Nina Simone and James Brown.  Again, it shouldn't dilute Sly Stone's especial contributions and genius to acknowledge that he was a participant in a particular cultural wave, rather than an anomaly of the times. 

Jovanovic's VU book starts in with these kinds of false cultural premises immediately, again in an ultimate attempt to portray the band as above and beyond their cultural climes.  With the Velvets.  This is superficially simple enough, because the band was so deliberately contrarian to begin with, but there remains a lot of connective tissue with their contemporaries, direct influences even in opposition, which Jovanovic chooses to ignore for his own partisan preferences.  Pick your binary: East/West, straight/queer, leather/denim, monochrome/kaleidoscope, soft drugs/hard drugs.  Jovanovic needs to assure that the Velvets were on the right side of things, disparaging all-things-60s to make his point.  This is a narrative which many Velvet fans have fostered but it isn't really accurate.

By establishing a more expansive cultural environment, Gould's book indulges in these deeper layers of connectivity, even when, as with the Velvets, it doesn't involve the central subject of the book itself.  For example, just in his two-page summary of the Velvets, Gould points to two specific correlations which offer intrigue - the bald coincidence that both the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead had once simultaneously peformed under the name The Warlocks in 1965, given both bands' inclination to open-ended drug-fueled jamming; and that the Velvets were simultaneosly recording their debut album with the same label and producer of the Mothers of Invention.  The point is not which of these artists were better, but that they came from the same cultural impulse.  Both Zappa and the Velvets wanted to exhibit a "freak out", a countercultural response to "straight" society, and for motivated music historians it's in the fascination of the multipliciy in which these ambitions manifested.  Jonathan Gould, writing a book focused on a decade later, manages to squeeze this insight early on, in his own accounting for the multiplicity of the manifestation of "punk" which could inhabit both Ramones and Talking Heads comfortably.  Contrarian binaries aside, we don't have to choose sides here.

There are a lot of other irritations with Jovanovic's book and writing which are more petty.  He credits Lou Reed's lyrical sensitivity to an "adult maturity".  As opposed to some other form or maturity, perhaps?  These are little things which test me.  I'll set this book aside as inessential or at best introductory-level myth-making.

My praise for Gould's book goes beyond that contrast - in fact the effortlessness of the contrast is refreshing, like taking for granted that these books should be grounded fundamentally in research and context as a given.  I like that Gould also takes an early digression on the pretense of the "art school" aspect of Talking Heads, whose connection with the Rhode Island School of Design was a prominent aspect of the band's early press coverage.  The premise of an art school-trained rock group seemed to capture the imagination of those NY critics, a designation used to set Talkng Heads apart from their CBGB peers.  Gould could have used this narrative in a similar manner, to construct a false uniquity, in a vacuum, to amplify the band's demonstrable innovations.  Gould instead takes the reader aside and provides a succinct account of the post-war British public art schools, noting that such alums of these schools (John Lennon, Pete Townshend, Keith Richards, Syd Barrett, David Bowie) shows the already (by 1975) ingrained "art school-trained" influence in a wide swath of 60s-70s culture.  And he points out that this fact of public cultural investment remains obscure to Americans because America does not have any public art school infrastructure, and therefore "art school" remains a classist restriction.  Talking Heads have had the unique vantage point of transcending the class and commercial transitions of "punk" as the term (devo) evolved.  Gould's book quotes Mary Harron (music journalist-soon-to-be-film director): "I felt that what we had done as a joke in New York had been taken for real in England by a younger and more violent audience."  Goofy Ramones into Scary Sex Pistols.

In a way, I was more interested in reading the background info on the book's subtitle, "the New York scene that transformed rock" than I was in Talkng Heads.  Not that I mind a deep dive bio on them at all.  But I am heartened and inspired to see the kind of music writing, or any cultural writing at all, which navigates the extremities of pop homogeneity and cultish esoterica and finds room for true resonance of appreciation and understanding of the creative impulse.

Another aspect that I appreciate about Jonathon Gould's Burning Down the House is the explicit task he takes to emphasis the role of gospel music in the history of African-American music.  For example, it is conspicuous how gospel is absent in last year's Sinners during Delta Slim's performance sequence which purported to represent the wide swath of black musical tradition.  No doubt much of this comes from the stereotypical dichotomy between "spiritual" and "secular" music within the black community of the early and mid-20th century, but, as Gould notes with examples, this ignores the stylistic influences which existed and mutually informed their developments.  How most of the generation of "soul" artists of the 50s, 60s and 70s were musically rooted in church music (perhaps most pointedly Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Little Richard, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, etc), or how modern (commercial) gospel would conform to contemporary R/B production standards by the 1980s.  Ryan Coogler takes this dichotomy to the extreme of omission.  And this isn't atypical of modern music revisionists.  Similarly, the influence of gospel, or at least gospel affectations and idioms, on the white rock artists inspired by such foundational soul performers tends to be ignored.  Ignores the root of gospel in jazz of the same time, whether Charles Mingus or John Coltrane's explorations into the specific emotional and ecstatic resonance represented by the best of both genres. 

Talking Heads are not an obvious choice for whom to portray this embrace or emulation of gospel by rock musicians of the 80s, but work like "Take Me To The River" and "Road To Nowhere" are excellent counter-examples of Heads' affinity for black religious expression, or at least the spiritual transcendence it has historically aroused.  For a band which has commonly been regarded as an epitome of whiteness, largely due to David Byrne's effective parody of white middle-class spiritual and emotional paralysis (with which, it may be fair to say, Byrne himself struggled in his early adulthood as a mildly autistic intellectual), Talking Heads were always a secretly adept funk band, and as Byrne's spiritual aspirations grew, the lineage of black American music came full circle back to incorporating at least some of these gospel roots.  

Another book, Bill Janovitz's Rocks Off, a series of essays on 50 songs by The Rolling Stones, also exerts a reminder as to the essence of that bands' embrace of gospel tradition.  And I happen to agree with Janovitz that "Let It Loose" is both one of the very best Rolling Stones songs which is no longer talked about, but that gospel in general is a defining influence on all of Exile on Main St.  Unfortunately many commentators still see the genre stylings and formal emotional power of gospel as incompatible with songs about sex and debauchery, and this is probably more likely why the essential association with these roots to the blues, R&B and "soul" (ignoring the fundamental source of the term) has been so commonly dismissed.  Coogler also takes this to an extreme, of gothic monsters, of all things.  Alas, those with ears who cannot hear.....