Air Guitar

Both ages make art that succeeds by failing, but each exploits failure in different ways. Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us—simpatico dudes that we are—while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. At best, we can only be free one or two at a time—while the other dudes hold onto the wire. Which is not to say that no one has tried to dispense with wires. Many have, and sometimes it works—but it doesn't feel like jazz when it does. The music simply drifts away into the stratosphere of formal dialectic, beyond our social concerns.

Rock-and-roll, on the other hand, presumes that the four of us as damaged and anti-social as we are—might possibly get it to-fucking-gether, man, and play this simple song. And play it right, okay? Just this once, in tune and on the beat. But we can't. The song's too simple, and we're too complicated and too excited. We try like hell, but the guitars distort, the intonation bends, and the beat just moves, imperceptibly, against our formal expectations, whether we want it to or not. Just because we're breathing, man. Thus, in the process of trying to play this very simple song together, we create this hurricane of noise, this infinitely com-plicated, fractal filigree of delicate distinctions.

And you can thank the wanking eighties, if you wish, and digital sequencers, too, for proving to everyone that technologically "perfect" rock—like "free" jazz—sucks rockets. Because order sucks. I mean, look at the Stones. Keith Richards is always on top of the beat, and Bill Wyman, until he quit, was always behind it, because Richards is leading the band and Charlie Watts is listening to him and Wyman is listening to Watts. So the beat is sliding on those tiny neural lapses, not so you can tell, of course, but so you can feel it in your stomach. And the intonation is wavering, too, with the pulse in the finger on the amplified string. This is the delicacy of rock-and-roll, the bodily rhetoric of tiny increments, necessary imperfections, and contingent community. And it has its virtues, because jazz only works if we're trying to be free and are, in fact, together. Rock-and-roll works because we're all a bunch of flakes. That's something you can depend on, and a good thing too, because in the twentieth century, that's all there is: jazz and rock-and-roll. The rest is term papers and advertising.

Quoted on August 23, 2015

Clearly, Mr. Warhol was onto something here. It was stupid, but it was miraculous, too. His film had totally recalibrated the perceptions of a roomful of sex-crazed adolescent revolutionaries into a field of tiny increments. It had restored the breath and texture to things and then, with the flip of a Zippo, had given us a little bang in the bargain—and by accident, I have no doubt.

Quoted on August 23, 2015

Thus, there is in Rockwell (as there is in Dickens) this luminous devotion to the possibility of domestic kindness and social accord--along with an effortless proclivity to translate any minor discord into comedy and forgiving tristesse--and this domain of kindness and comedy and tristesse is not the truth, but it is a part of it, and a part that we routinely deny these days, lest we compromise our social agendas. We discourage expressions of these feelings on the grounds that they privilege complacency and celebrate the norm as we struggle to extend the franchise. But that is just the point (and the point of our struggle): Kindness, comedy, and forgiving tristesse are not the norm. They signify our little victories--and working toward democracy consists of nothing more or less than the daily accumulation of little victories whose uncommon loveliness we must somehow, speak or show.

Quoted on August 23, 2015

So here's my suggestion: At this moment, with public patronage receding like the spring tide anyway and democracy supposedly proliferating throughout the art world, why don't all of us art-types summon up the moral courage to admit that what we do has no intrinsic value or virtue--that it has its moments and it has its functions, but otherwise, all things considered, in its ordinary state, unredeemed by courage or talent, it is a bad, silly, frivolous thing to do. We could do this, you know.

Quoted on August 23, 2015