by Dave Hickey
By this time, the room was very mellow and autumnal. Ruby light angled through the windows, glowing in the drifting strata of second-hand ganja as Ron counted off the song. He and Julius started alone, insinuating the Duke’s sneaky, cosmopolitan shuffle. Then Magda laid down the rhythm signature, Butch and my dad came in, and they played the song straight, flat out. Then they relaxed the tempo, moved back to the top and let Diego croon his way through the sublime economy of Johnny Mercer’s lyrics—calling up for all of us (even me) the ease and sweet sophistication of the Duke’s utopian Harlem, wherein we all dwelt at that moment:
Cigarette holder,
Which wigs me,
Over her shoulder,
She digs me,
Out cattin’
That satin doll.
As it turned out, that satin doll was that. There were no more jam sessions, due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, and, within three years, my dad was dead. After that, our life remained improvisational, but it was never as much fun. So I kept that musical afternoon as a talisman of memory. I handled it carefully, so as not to knock the edges off, keeping it as plain and unembellished as I could, so I could test the world against it, because it was the best, concrete emblem I had of America as a successful society and remains so. My dad is a part of it, of course, but I see him differently now—not as my dad, so much, but as this guy who would collect all these incongruous people around him and make sure that everybody got their solos.
So, I have always wanted to tell this story, because it is a true story that I have carefully remembered, but frankly, it is a sentimental story, too—as all stories of successful human society must be—and we don’t cherish that flavor of democracy anymore. Today, we do blood, money, and sex—race, class, and gender. We don’t do communities of desire (people united in loving something as we loved jazz). We do statistical demographics, age groups, and target audiences. We do ritual celebrations of white family values, unctuous celebrations of marginal cultural identity, multiethnic kick-boxer movies, and yuppie sit-coms. With the possible exception of Roseanne, we don’t even do ordinary eccentricity anymore. In an increasingly diffuse and customized post-industrial world, we cling to the last vestige of industrial thinking: the presumption of mass-produced identity and ready-made experience—a presumption that makes the expression, appreciation, or even the perception of our everyday distinctions next to impossible.
When I wrote the narrative that introduces this essay, I wanted to do one thing: I wanted to tell you a little story about ordinary, eccentric citizens coming together to play some extraordinary music in a little house on the edge of town—to communicate some sense of my own simple wonder—to have you appreciate its majesty. When my wife read what I had written, however, she immediately (and quite correctly) pointed out that my narrative would not be read this way. Most likely, she suggested wryly, it would be read as an allegory of ethnic federalism in which two African-Americans, a Latino, four Irish-Americans, and a German Jewess seek refuge from the dominant culture in order to affirm their solidarity with the international underclass.
But it was not that way at all! I squealed. My dad and his friends were musical people in postwar Texas, in the nineteen forties, and that was really special in its quiet way. Imposing the cookie-cutter of difference onto their society not only suppressed their commonality, it suppressed their differences, as well—and these people were very different people. All of the people I had known in my life had been very different people, I argued. I had just assumed. . . . Assuming, my wife explained, never won the pony.
So having failed in my portrayal, I began wondering who could have portrayed that scene. Who could have captured that room in ruby light—the benign whimsy of Butch’s glance at Magda’s sturdy bottom bouncing on the piano bench—my dad and I in our jazz-dude threads—Magda turning in the front seat, good-naturedly shaking her finger at Diego? And to my own surprise, I came up with Norman Rockwell of the Saturday Evening Post. For worse or for glory, I realized, he was the dude to do it—that, in fact, he probably had done it—had painted that scene in my head, because when I was eight years old, Johnny Mercer was teaching me how to listen, and Norman Rockwell was teaching me how to see. I was a student of their work, and they were good teachers. Years before I heard of John Donne, I learned about the intricate atmospherics of “metaphysical conceits” just by walking down the sidewalk singing: Fools rush in / Where wise men fear to tread. / And so I come to you my love, / My heart above my head.
Moreover, I have no doubt that Rockwell taught me how to remember that jam session, because I could never polish it. I clung to the ordinary eccentricity, the clothes, the good-heartedness, the names of things, the comic incongruities, and the oddities of arrangement and light. So, it has always seemed to me that Rockwell and Mercer must certainly be important artists, not so much because people love them (although that is a part of it) but because I had learned so much from them—and because they both denied it so strenuously. Still, for a long time, I really didn’t know what kind of art they made, or what it did. I only knew that it wasn’t high art, which is defined by its context and its exclusivity—and is always, in some sense, about that context and that exclusivity.
I decided that, if high art is always about context and exclusivity, the art of Rockwell and Mercer, which denies both with a vengeance, must be about that denial. To put it simply: Norman Rockwell’s painting, like Johnny Mercer’s music, has no special venue. It lives in the quotidian world with us amidst a million other things, so it must define itself as we experience it, embody itself and be remembered to survive. So it must rhyme, must live in pattern, which is the mother of remembering. Moreover, since this kind of art lacks any institutional guarantee of our attention, it must be selected by us—and since it aspires to be selected by all of us, it must accept and forgive us too—and speak the language of acceptance and forgiveness. And since it can only flourish in an atmosphere of generosity and agreement, it must somehow, in some way, promote that atmosphere.
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.
The wicked norm, like the name of a vindictive God, is never spoken or shown, not by human beings, whose acts are necessarily willful, who only speak and show to qualify that norm, to distinguish themselves from it, to recruit more dissenters, to confirm some area of mutual dissent from its hegemony. So if, for no apparent reason, I tell you “The sky is blue,” you will not believe I am telling you that. You will read for the subtext of dissent, for the edge of qualification. You will suspect that I am indulging in lyrical effusion, perhaps, trying to awaken your dulled senses to the “blueness” of the sky at this moment. Or, if you are more suspicious, you will suspect that by saying “The sky is blue,” I am inferring that whatever you have just said is too fucking obvious to qualify as human utterance. If, on the other hand, you receive a memorandum from the government officially stating that the sky is blue, you will shrug, but you will believe it, since the government labels things, then counts them, and averages them out. Defining the norm is its instrument of control over idiosyncrasy.
So here is my point again: Human art and language (as opposed to institutional art and language) always cite the exception, and it was Norman Rockwel
l’s great gift to see that life in twentieth-century America, though far from perfect, has been exceptional in the extreme. This is what he celebrates and insists upon: that “normal” life, in this country, is not normal at all—that we all exist in a general state of social and physical equanimity that is unparalleled in the history of humans. (Why else would we alert the media every time we feel a little bit blue?) Yet, we apparently spend so many days and hours in this state of attentive painlessness that we now consider it normal—when, in fact, normal for human creatures is, and always has been a condition of inarticulate, hopeless, never-ending pain, patriarchal oppression, boredom, and violence—while all our vocal anguish is necessarily grounded in an ongoing bodily equanimity, a physical certainty that we are safe enough and strong enough to be as articulately unpleasant as we wish to be.
Most artists understand this, I think, and consequently, most of the artists I have known actually like Norman Rockwell and understand what he is doing. De Kooning loved Rockwell’s pictures and admired his paint-handling. Warhol reverently stole from him, extending the franchise of Rockwell’s face-to-face domestic set-ups by copping them for paintings and Factory films. My pal Jeffrey Vallance actually lent me the Rockwell book I am looking at now. The people who hate Rockwell, however—the preachers, professors, social critics, and radical sectarians—inevitably mistake the artist’s profession for their own. They accuse him of imposing norms and passing judgments, which he never does. Nor could he ever, since far from being a fascist manipulator, Rockwell is always giving as much as he can to the world he sees. He portrays those aspects of the embodied social world that exist within the realm of civility, that do not hurt too terribly. But it is not utopia.
People are regularly out of sync with the world in Rockwell’s pictures, but it is not the end of the world. People get sick and go to the doctor. (Remember that!) Little girls get into fights. Puppies are lost, and jobs too. People struggle with their taxes. Salesmen languish in hotel rooms. Prom dresses don’t fit. Tires go flat. Hearts are broken. People gossip. Mom and Dad argue about politics. Traffic snarls, and bankers are confused by Jackson Pollock. But the pictures always rhyme—and the faces rhyme and the bodies rhyme as well, in compositions so exquisitely tuned they seem to have always been there—as a good song seems to have been written forever. The implication, of course, is that these domestic disasters are redeemed by the internal rhymes of civil society and signify the privilege of living in it, which they most certainly do.
You are not supposed to forget this, or forget the pictures either, which you do not. I can remember three Post covers from my childhood well enough to tell you exactly what they meant to me at the time. One is a painting of a grandmother and her grandson saying grace in a bus-station restaurant while a crowd of secular travelers look on. The second depicts an American Dad, in his pajamas, sitting in a modern chair in a suburban living room on a snowy Sunday morning. He is smoking a cigarette and reading the Sunday Times while Mom and the kids, dressed up in their Sunday best, march sternly across the room behind him on their way to church. The third depicts a couple of college co-eds changing a tire on their “woody” while a hillbilly, relaxing on the porch of his shack, watches them with bemused interest. The moral of these pictures: Hey! People are different. Get used to it.
So let me insist that however strenuously ideologues strive to “normalize” popular art, popular artists like Rockwell do not create normality. Governments, religions, and network statisticians create normality, articulate it, and try to impose it. Artists like Rockwell celebrate ordinary equanimity for the eccentric gift that it is—no less than the bodily condition of social justice in a society informed by forgiving rhyme and illuminated by the occasional shining hour. Because if social justice is a statistical norm, everybody at that jam session fell short of it—Magda, Butch, Ron, Julius, Mary, Diego, Dad, myself, all of us. Nor did we believe in statistical norms. We believed that social justice resides in the privilege of gathering about whatever hearth gives warmth, of living in a society where everyone, at least once, might see themselves in a Norman Rockwell, might feel themselves rhyming with Johnny Mercer as he sings:
This will be my shining hour,
Calm and happy and bright,
In my dreams your face will flower,
Through the darkness of the night,
Like the lights of home before me,
Or an angel watching o’er me,
This will be my shining hour,
Till I’m with you again.
PONTORMO'S RAINBOW
This could never happen today, so you’ll have to believe me when I tell you that I made it all the way into sixth grade before a bunch of people whom I did not know, who weren’t my family and weren’t the government, tried to deprive me of something I really wanted—for my own good. Up until that time, my parents had routinely deprived me of things I wanted, but they always deprived me for their own good, not mine (“No, you can’t go out. I’m too tired to worry about what you’re doing while you’re out there.”), and this tactic was annoying enough. For years, I attributed it to my folks’ bohemian narcissism. Now I suspect they were shrewder than I thought, because, finally, since my parents were always more concerned with my thoughtfulness than with my goodness, I grew up well assured that I could decide what was good for me—and maybe get it—if I could get away with it.
So I was shocked by my first encounter with communitarian righteousness—all the more shocked because, at that point in the life of our family, things were really looking up. We had just escaped air-conditioned custody in this lily-white, cookie-cutter suburb of North Dallas and moved to Santa Monica, to a house right under the Palisades, between the Pacific Coast Highway and the beach. The house was the quintessence of coolness. There was a big deck on the second floor where we could sit and gaze off across the Pacific toward China. There was a white brick wall around the house, low in front and high in back, covered with bougainvillea. There were hydrangea bushes and hardy hibiscus in the front yard, honeysuckles along the side wall where a small yard ran, a mimosa tree in the front and a wisteria in the back—and, because of the wall and the breeze off the ocean, we could crank the windows open and let the house fill up with colored light, cool air, and the smell of flowers.
Died and gone to heaven. That’s the only way to describe it. After creepy, prissy Dallas, the escalation of sensory and social information was so overwhelming that I would lie in bed at night, in the sweet darkness, listening to the trucks rumbling on the PCH and the murmur of the surf on the sand, and literally giggle! There was just so much, and it was all so cool! I had black friends at school, like my dad’s jazz buddies. I got to be the only gentile in this kooky B’nai B’rith Boy Scout troop down in Venice (Reformed). Whenever I wanted, I could just walk out the glass front door with my dog, Darwin the Beagle, and slog through the sand down to the ocean. Or we could turn left and stroll down to the Santa Monica Pier where there was a dark pool hall with surfer criminals in residence. Or we could wander past the pier to Muscle Beach where multitudes of semi-naked women loved to pet Herr Darwin.
About once a month, on Sunday afternoon, we would pile in the car and tool down to Hermosa or Redondo to listen to jazz music, and every Saturday morning my brother and sister and I would climb the concrete stairs up the Palisades (or scramble up, commando style, through the ice plant), and make our way over to the Criterion for the Kiddie Cartoon Carnival. There we would sit for three hours, happy as clams, communing with Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, the Road Runner, and Tom and Jerry, just fucking blown away; and this, it turned out, is what the three ladies wanted to talk to us about. They showed up at Santa Monica Elementary about four months after we got there and set up shop in the lunch room. There was a crackly announcement on the speaker in home room that said if we wanted to talk to them, we would be excused from class to do it. So, naturellement, everybody did.
When my time came, I was marched down the hall to the lunch room and ushered to a se
at across from this lady wearing a blue suit and pearls, just like June Cleaver. She had a three-ring binder and a bunch of papers on the table in front of her, and, since the table was kid-sized, she looked really big, looming behind it like a Charlie Ray lady. When I was seated, she looked up with a big smile, called me Davey, and asked me if I liked animated cartoons. I knew then I had made a terrible mistake. But what could I do? I said yes, I liked cartoons, a lot—and that my name was Dave. She smiled again, not meaning it this time, and persevered. And what about Donald Duck? she asked. Did I like Donald Duck? Yes, I liked Donald Duck, I told her, although I withheld my opinion that the Duck was the only Disney character who had any soul, any edge, that he was sort of the Dizzy Gillespie of Disney characters. This was not the sort of insight one shared with June Cleaver.
Well then, she said, what did I think about Donald’s relationship with his nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie? Did it bother me that he screamed at them all the time? Did this frighten me? Did it, perhaps, remind me of . . . my mom or dad!? She looked at me solemnly, expectantly. I wanted to tell her that, first, Donald Duck was a cartoon. Second, he was an animal, a duck, and, finally, he was only about this tall. But I couldn’t. I could tell from the penetration of her gaze that she wasn’t really interested in ducks, and I felt my face getting hot. My inquisitor smiled faintly, triumphantly, taking this blush as a tell-tale sign of guilt, which it wasn’t. I felt like a downed American pilot in the clutches of the Gestapo, determined to protect the secrets of his freedom.
Clearly, this lady wanted to know stuff about my parents, and since, in all my peregrinations through five states and thirteen grammar schools, I had never met any other adults who were even remotely like my mom and dad, I was dedicated to concealing their eccentricity. Because it had its perks. I had seen enough of my friends’ home lives to know this. According to their parents, my parents let me run wild. I got to do things that my friends never could, because my parents were weird. But they were not like Donald Duck! My dad was cool and poetic—like me, I thought (wrongly!). And my mom was not cool at all. She was serious, high-strung, and fiercely ironic, like Joan Crawford, always bustling around: painting bad paintings in the back bedroom and reading books while she cooked dinner (setting the occasional paperback aflame)—always starting up little businesses, and telling me stuff about Maynard Keynes or Karl Marx when she gave me my allowance. (Keynes and Marx, I should note, marked the poles between which my mom’s sensibility flickered on a daily, nay hourly, basis, for reasons that were not always apparent. This made things exciting, since you never quite knew if you were dealing with the sky-walking entrepreneur or the hard-eyed revolutionary. My dad was more reliable in the realm of fiscal theory. He thought money was something you turned into music, and that music, ideally, was something you turned into money. It rarely worked out that way, but, in this at least, we were of one mind.)