by Joshua Cohen
FROM THE DIARIES
MEDITATIONS
From my literature professors I learned that conviction can substitute for truth. From my history professors I learned to confuse the details for the spirit. From my parents I learned what debt was. From my employers I learned that honor must be its own reward.
Consider the relationship between depression and taste, or discernment. Both lead to exclusion. Soon you can’t stand any TV or movie or even any book. Soon nothing can satisfy. But while the depressed person encounters everything with a sense of pointlessness, what ultimately alienates the person of taste is the feeling of compromise, or of being compromised.
Art is capable of eliciting—that is “eliciting,” not “expressing”—every emotion but sadness. Because the art with which sadness is expressed is itself the consolation and cure. This is a very basic premise. Sadness.
Act always in accordance with your own contradictions, and in the absence of contradictions, act against yourself.
9/11 BLUE
JUST AS DEMOCRACY MIGHT BE antibiological, blue—democracy’s color, demoted from royalty’s purple—is rarely found in nature. Ultramarine, extracted from the blue stone called lapis lazuli, was once more expensive than silver and gold, and Renaissance artists had to negotiate with their patrons for individual drops of the stuff upon receiving their commissions (ultramarine means, literally, “over the sea,” because most lapis was imported from Afghanistan). Indigo, derived from plants of the Indigofera genus, tended to blacken, and was not lightfast, while azurite, derived from the mineral of the same name, turned green when mixed with water. Smalt, a ground glass colored with cobalt, would fade, and the chemical properties of copper were not yet understood, even as late as the Enlightenment. “Prussian blue” was the palette’s first synthesized color: Fe7(CN)18(H2O)x, where 14 ≤ x ≤ 16….This was the color the Prussian army was uniformed in, on their marches to vanquish Denmark, Austria, France….The sky that September day should not be aestheticized. It should only be remembered. After all, what we intemperate strollers of Broadway might call clear and beautiful is only the result of a daily collision: sunlight crashes into our atmosphere, constantly crashes and shatters the spectrum, of which we perceive only a minuscule portion. Like safety, like security, a clear blue sky is a sensory fact that’s fundamentally an illusion.
FROM THE DIARIES
HAT LESSONS GLEANED FROM ATTENDING A FILM NOIR MARATHON WITH A NONAGENARIAN EX-MILLINER WHO NEVER STOPS TALKING
“Twentieth-century men can be divvied up chronologically into two groups: those who wore hats and those who didn’t. Conventional wisdom has it that hats went out of fashion with JFK, who was the first president not to wear a hat to his inauguration. But the truth is that hats were already on their way out under Ike. This was when you had the creation of the interstate system. When Americans started driving lots of cars. You ever try to wear a hat in a car? I mean a hat-hat? There’s not enough room. It’s like trying to keep a penguin inside your refrigerator.”
“You can tell when a film was made by how its hero handles a hat. The actors from a hat generation tend to take off their hats on the appropriate occasions and if they don’t, there’s usually an implication, like an implication of purpose. Whenever an actor from a hat generation sets his hat on a table or chair, he does so with the crown facing down, so as not to bend the brim. Whenever an actor sets his hat brim-down, crown-up, I can tell he’s from a no-hat generation, I can tell he’s young, and I get depressed. I don’t like being reminded that an actor’s an actor.”
“Guys on the East Coast called the two frontal concavities of a fedora ‘the pinches.’ Guys on the West Coast called them ‘the dents.’ My brother, my eldest brother, who lived in Chicago, he called them ‘dimples.’ ”
“Fedoras for the good guys. Derbies for the bad guys and comedians. Though comedians wore porkpies too. As did blacks. Homburgs were worn by the other ethnics, mafiosi, and Jews. Cowboys for the cowboys.”
“I don’t know anything about women’s hats. All I know is, any woman wearing a fascinator is guilty of the crime of redundancy.”
“The wind would’ve blown that straight off.”
LETTER TO STEPHEN SHORE
© STEVEN SHORE. COURTESY 303 GALLERY, NEW YORK
U.S. 22, Union, New Jersey, April 24, 1974
DEAR STEPHEN SHORE,
My first experience interacting with photographers who weren’t my relatives and who weren’t always yelling at me to “smile”—who weren’t even shooting me at all—was back in the early 2000s, when I was in my early twenties and working as a journalist throughout the former Eastern Bloc. This was also my first experience with the hopeless prospect—rather, with the ideal—of being “unbiased.” The photographers I was working with were older Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles—“photojournalists” is the journalist’s word—who would either follow me around on stories or read my stories after I wrote them and then go to the same locations and/or visit the same people I’d interviewed and shoot them. I knew all too well what was missing from my writing—what I’d had to leave out due to journalism’s stylistic conventions and standards of facticity. I knew all too well the confusions between what I saw and what I thought (not to mention the disjunctions between what I heard from the people I was interviewing and what they thought), just as I knew all too well the difficulties in distinguishing between my private desires to define “the truth” and my professional responsibilities to protect a more public notion of “the verifiable truth,” which was, I was realizing, ultimately too culturally specific to America to be trusted by most of the people I was living among and “reporting on”—the Ukrainians and Russians in particular. To be sure, the photographs that accompanied my writing would leave out many things too, but then, to my mind, they were primarily scrutinized for their aesthetics: An image didn’t always have to be “correct,” it merely had to be “compelling,” which is an artistic type of “accuracy.” Needless to say, I was envious of these photographers—I envied them even after they were forced out of journalism, when the news business went online and started expecting writers to take photos for themselves. A few of these old photographer friends are still in touch, through the very technology that ended their careers.
I’ll return to that technology in a moment, but for now I’m trying to trace a certain growth—a certain education. Writers of your generation generally eschewed writing about the word—about literature—for writing about the image. This shift can be attributed to market forces or just to a bid for relevance in a culture whose imagination was becoming increasingly pictorial. Regardless, this writing was on my shelves (in books), and in my mailbox (in magazines and newspapers), and what struck me the most about reading it (besides the glibness of its popular incarnation in film and TV reviews, and the pretentiousness of its academic incarnation in the field of “media studies”) was the feeling that most of it was already historical, if not already obsolete—the feeling that the philosophical concerns that the writers of your generation had framed around the image had become, for everyone of my generation, all of whom were becoming writers and image-makers, real and actual problems. The debate about whether depictions of things were, or could be considered, or should be considered, things; the debate about whether a reproducible work would ever be capable of critiquing the culture of reproducibility, without becoming complicit in it—what had once been the abstruse or at best theoretical speculations of a minuscule elite were now practical matters online, practical anxieties afflicting everyone with a Facebook account, or everyone who had a friend with a Facebook account. As digital technology diffused faster and wider than even photographic technology had during the century before, there was a sense among millennials that if we didn’t assert our individualities online, we’d be left behind and lost. We’d become the new philosophical concerns—strictly theoretical.
I admit to feeling thi
s way myself, and it was because I felt this way that I wanted to become a writer: I wanted to write books. To identify with the word under the sign of the image was my rebellion. I wasn’t quite sure how to do it, however. I wasn’t quite sure what writing had to be done. None of my reading gave me any guidance or model. None of the writers I was reading, whether in fiction or nonfiction or even in any genre-hybridity, was dealing with digital culture—which was presenting itself as the apotheosis of literary culture—in any way that appeared recognizable, let alone sustainable. All of them were either panicking or complaining or trying to ignore it or just waving the white flag of the page, surrendering, and going under.
That’s when I returned to photography, Stephen—to your photography. I found your work, I admit it, online. In your photographs, and in the photographs of a few of your cohort, I found a “language” or “voice” that seemed both personal and impersonal at once—the sincerest simulation I’ve ever encountered of what it might mean to be “unbiased.” I wondered how you did that, how you seemed to sidestep judgment by standing still—I wondered, to get to the heart of my curiosity, why certain interstates and suburban intersections and diner sandwiches and motor-inn toilets that American literature, along with my own American life, had always instructed me to regard as lonely or bereft, appeared, through the steadiness of your hand and eye, almost noble. Uncowed. Unashamed. Proud and yet serene. The answer (I can hear you saying it under your breath) is “form.” The answer (obviously) is “structure.”
Your work takes the detritus of our American surroundings—our powerlines and telephonepoles and advertising signage and the shadows they all cast—and returns it, through neutral observation, to its fundamental existence as geometry: lines and angles, planes and solids. You look at a curb, a bag, a bed, a plate and cutlery, and, in time, they become what they’ve always been, or what they always might have been if anyone had looked before: a horizon, a vanishing point, a frame. The result, for the viewer, or for this viewer, is paradoxical: Instead of being estranged from my environment, I’m brought closer. Instead of being defamiliarized, I’m empowered. This, then, is the lesson I owe you for: that the mass chaos I perceive all around me is merely a choice of my perception, and that it doesn’t have to be a burden but a challenge, as to whether I myself am able to derive from it its inherent usable form—its inherently humanizing, logical, even beautiful form, which is only to be found through engagement, not reaction.
I thank you for that, Stephen.
Have a happy happy seventieth birthday.
Yours,
Joshua Cohen
DOWNTOWN UNDERGROUND
ON JOHN ZORN
Sheriff Zornson rode into the canyon on a rangy buckskin. A Colt was on his hip and a hot wind was at his back. / “Detective O’Zorn?” The voice came across the office cool and high from a trenchcoated blonde with a mouth as plump and red as the center banquette at the Stardust. / Captain JZ10003 stood on the deck of the IND-Stillwell trying to slow his breath. There, onscreen, out in the circumambient void, spun the last jagged fragment of the planet he’d been sent here to save.
CORNY PARODIES OF POP TROPES might be as close as lowly prose can get to describing, or embodying, the deliriously acquisitive music of John Zorn. The western dime, the detective pulp, the space opera; not to mention their more recent incarnations on TV, in movies, and online—Zorn samples, then reshapes, the equivalent chaos of the musical world, both with the improvisations of his own bands, in which he’s played alto saxophone, and in his formally notated compositions.
But we’ll stick with writing for a moment. In order to reproduce Zorn’s musical process in a piece of criticism about that process, one is thrown back not only on the hoary surface surfeit of postmodernism, especially on the Beat-era cutups of William S. Burroughs, but even further into the ludic realm of surrealist parlor pastimes. To demonstrate, you can take the words of any sentence in this essay, cut them out of the page, and redistribute however you want—“and want you redistribute however”—intending the loss of sense to be literature, not senselessness.
But musical notes do not have meanings like words do. This lack of meaning has allowed Zorn to rewrite Arnold Schoenberg’s Serenade in his own Chimeras for flute, clarinet, piano, violin, cello, soprano, and percussion; it has allowed him to redo Anton Webern’s String Trio in his own string trio, Walpurgisnacht; to redo Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite in his string quartet Memento Mori; and to refashion Pierre Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître for a similar ensemble plus turntables in Elegy. These appropriations cannot be heard, however, because the pitch sequence, the musical equivalent of narrative, has been disrupted, rearranged. One would not know it without studying the scores, but Zorn’s Cat o’Nine Tails scrambles blocks of quotations from quartets by Elliott Carter, Iannis Xenakis, Schoenberg, and Berg; his Aporia for piano and orchestra appropriates, on the most fundamental technical level, the Requiem Canticles of Igor Stravinsky.
The note “C” should not be looked up in the dictionary under “C”; the note itself signifies nothing, functioning only with regard to whatever note comes before it and whatever note comes after. Instead of literary meanings, then, musical notes have relationships. And what’s most important to the reception, to the hearing, of a musical note is that relationship or context. These contexts are resolvable into systems, and these systems dominated Western music for centuries. In the system known as tonality—the system of Mozart, the system of Lou Reed—the scale has seven notes, with seven relationships per octave known as intervals. In the dodecaphony pioneered by Schoenberg, all twelve notes of Western tuning were used, with twelve relationships per octave, in a system described by Schoenberg as being made of “twelve tones related only to one another.”
The primary innovation of American popular music was to transcend such relationships. Within two decades of pop music’s post–WWII ascendancy, the first generation of critics for magazines like Creem and Rolling Stone began naming, if not describing, new genres unconcerned with the interactions of tones: “hard rock,” “glam rock,” “prog rock,” “punk,” “postpunk,” “New Wave,” “No Wave,” “metal,” “heavy metal,” “death metal,” “thrash,” “skronk,” “avant-skronk.” A century after the demise of Western classical tonality, the notated language of music had become a mediated language of styles, of sensibilities—racial, sexual, political. Before the culture of celebrity transcended practice and every recording artist suddenly was also an actor and memoirist with a line of sneakers and perfumes, the ancient technical systems of music would be replicated by a greater system or organizing principle—a music business in which forms of music were related to one another only by genres and anyone who transgressed a given genre was said to be, in the clichés of criticism, “pushing boundaries” or “crossing over.”
* * *
—
THE RECORD-COMPANY BOARDROOMS ARE located floors above the asphalt’s grit and blocks north too, in Midtown: Warner Music Group at Rockefeller Center, EMI at 150 Fifth Avenue, Sony/BMG Music Entertainment at 550 Madison Avenue, Universal Music Group at 1755 Broadway, near Carnegie Hall (these companies are known as the Big Four; the Big Five included an independent BMG, bought by Sony in 2004; the Big Six also included Polygram, bought by Universal in 1998). But Manhattan’s music is south, and began south, where the city itself began—“Downtown,” a subjectively delimited district that spawned the music known even outside of New York as “Downtown Music.”
Accounting for what made Downtown “Downtown” can easily bring us deep into the past, and deep into folly. Suffice to say, Downtown, for our purposes, must be considered a city in itself, which was staged between Union Square’s politics and Wall Street’s money just at the moment that industry was leaving Manhattan and sweatshop factories and port warehouses were being converted into lofts. Zorn’s Downtown, however, can be said to have started with the movement known as Fluxus, a c
oncatenation of plastic artists, poets, and musicians centered around George Maciunas, whose 1963 manifesto announced that his group would “Promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes, and professionals.” Early Fluxus concerts were held at 112 Chambers Street, in a loft occupied by Yoko Ono half a decade before she met John Lennon and, later, moved Uptown to the plush fixtures of the Dakota. (Regular audience members included Marcel Duchamp and the inventor of the silent concert, John Cage.) It was the intermedia and collaborative community spirit of Fluxus—its “living art”—united with its subversively accidental perspectives—“anti-art”—that found its most explicit expression with Zorn, whose interests assimilate a scene of dozens into the praxis of a single musician.
Fluxus performances of the music of La Monte Young (whose composition $50 featured him getting paid $50) and Terry Riley (whose In C featured the note “C” repeated indefinitely) were taken as models by two younger musicians who drove taxis and ran a moving company together: Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Their performances of a minimalist, partially notated, partially improvised music closed the gap between Downtown’s experimentation and classical music culture, which lived at Lincoln Center, an arts complex opened in the mid-1960s, many subway stops Uptown, where the grid, and gridlike decorum, reigns supreme. Glass’s and Reich’s own ensembles—the Philip Glass Ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians, each dedicated to presenting the work of their respective composer-conductor—were influential for Zorn, who would perform his own music live with his bands, Naked City and Masada particularly. As for performance venues, Downtown’s “Lincoln Center” was diffuse: The Kitchen, opened in 1971, was a major Downtown stage—among the first in an unheated, and un-air-conditioned, line that involved the Experimental Intermedia Foundation, Roulette, the Alternative Museum, Dia Art Foundation, and Artists Space, and continued through the opening of the Knitting Factory in 1987, Tonic in 1998, and Zorn’s club, the Stone, in 2005, located on 2nd Street and Avenue C in a former Chinese restaurant.