by Camden Joy
LOST JOY
OTHER BOOKS BY CAMDEN JOY
The Last Rock Star Book, or: Liz Phair, a Rant
Boy Island
3 Novellas
© 2002, 2015 Camden Joy
Introduction © 2015 Jonathan Lethem
Foreword ©2002 Dennis Cooper
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
These stories are works of make-believe. With the exception of those persons appearing under their own names, albeit in fictitious circumstances and for the purposes of parody, all other characters are imaginary and any resemblance to actual persons, either living or dead, is purely coincidental.
“Dum Dum Boys” first appeared in Little Engines; “The Launch of the MJ-97” in Mommy and I Are One; “Total Systems Failure” and “Call Off the Fatwa” in the Village Voice; “Rattled by the Rush” in the Chicago Reader; “Surviving Sinatra” on This American Life; “Observing Murder” in McSweeney’s; “My Life in Eighteen Songs” in Greatest Hits; and “The Greatest Record Album Band That Ever Was” in Puncture.
“The Greatest Record Album Ever Told” first appeared as Lost Pamphlet #1; “The Greatest Record Album Singer Ever” as Lost Pamphlet #2; “Them Lost Manifestoes” as The Lost Manifestoes of Camden Joy; “This Poster Will Change Your Life” as This Poster Will Change Your Life; “Dear cmj…” as Dear CMJ: We Left the Coliseum Discouraged: Posters of Protest from the CMJOY Gang; and “Thirty-Seven Posters About Souled American” (including excerpts of an interview conducted with Steve Connell) as Make Me Laugh, Make Me Cry.
Cover by Mark Lerner / Rag & Bone Shop
Country of manufacture as stated on the last page of this book
ISBN 978-1-891241-76-5 (e-book)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015935686
Verse Chorus Press
PO Box 14806, Portland OR 97293
www.versechorus.com
CONTENTS
Introduction by Jonathan Lethem
Foreword to the First Edition by Dennis Cooper
Acknowledgments
Dum Dum Boys
The Almost Revolution
The Greatest Record Album Ever Told
Them Lost Manifestoes
The Launch of the MJ-97
The Greatest Record Album Singer Ever
This Poster Will Change Your Life
Total Systems Failure
Rattled by the Rush
Dear CMJ…
Surviving Sinatra
Observing Murder
Thirty-Seven Posters About Souled American
Amazing Disgrace
My Life in Eighteen Songs
Call Off the Fatwa
The Greatest Record Album Band That Ever Was
SEVEN POSTERS ABOUT LOST JOY
JONATHAN LETHEM
1.
In the last century in Brooklyn there were a few of us who’d meet regularly in a bar on the corner of Bergen and Hoyt – this was for me personally at a sort of hinge moment, large only at that instant, while we were living inside it, in fact hurtling into the past with an awesome unforgivingness – when the Brooklyn where as a child I’d been beaten and robbed – stripped of cheap wristwatches given me by uncles – on the same street corner was still legible, not only to me, but to others; it was still tangible on the ground. So the fact that we convened there in jubilant defiant self-invention, at that particular axis, held a rich strange intensity; we were, now I see, a few of us, claiming that world even as we helped wreck it through mythology and romance at the same time that others wrecked it through real estate dollars. Nobody could be blamed now for seeing us as part of the problem. We were drunk on enthusiasm, at least, as well as pints.
It was there that I came to know Camden Joy. I had that luck. Before The Last Rock Star Book, or: Liz Phair, a Rant, well before Boy Island, let alone the nice solid baseball books as Tom Adelman (I’ll never understand why he assumed that obviously false civilian name, but whatever). He was the author of pamphlets bound so beautifully they evoked boutique chocolate bars, and of some pieces in the Village Voice, and, yes, posters. The writing in here is the first writing of Joy’s I knew, and I was around for some of its making. In fact, I was enlisted into the Posters for Souled American project, and wrote one (not one collected here, these here are Joy’s alone) which I suppose was wheat-pasted onto some New York street-corner as part of the project. I don’t know for sure, I never saw it on a wall. But I wrote it. We read them aloud at the KGB Bar, I think, too. It was a time, what a time it was. And then it was gone. I haven’t known Joy since. I understand that under the “Tom Adelman” name he’s gone and made a family, in some remote state. Under my own name I’ve gone and done the same. But we don’t know one another. It strikes me now that we met, Joy and I, on a boy island, or anyway an island where we could still do more than glimpse boyhood; we could be fed by it – by our own, I mean – as I for one no longer can be, and that’s likely for the better. We were in the same band, for about five minutes.
2.
The critic Manny Farber made a famous distinction, between “White Elephant Art” and “Termite Art”. The implicit suggestion, to pursue the path of the termite, has meant a tremendous amount to so many of us who feel the burden of capital-A Art on our shoulders, and try to work from under that prospect, who dodge sideways into vernacular and genre gestures, who come at the problem of putting the 8-ball in the corner pocket only by means, as Howard Hawks was prone to say, of the three-corner shot. Of course it is only vanity to declare oneself a termite, and in fact to care at all may be to have failed the test. It isn’t clear that Farber, who was trying to praise underrated Hollywood movies, meant it as a prescription anyhow, or as something you could achieve intentionally. But: Camden Joy, in the work in this book, and needless to say above all in the postering projects, exemplified termite-artist behavior. He worked the floorboards, he bored holes in the house of standing assumptions around how the intelligent writer was meant to position him or herself in regard to the objects of their pop culture desires, using his delight to shine the light and his aversions as teeth. And like the best termites, he got lost in his own holes. They began to interconnect and form a design capable of fascination. Camden Joy’s negotiation with his own self-fascination, even as he prostrates himself in self-mockery before the objects of his veneration – the “record albums” which have seemed to give him his life, his key to himself – is the generator of his amazed reader’s Joy. Throughout this book Joy is hiding, and failing to hide at the same time, and in so doing he flushes our own yearning and sadness and joy out into the open.
3.
But the Joy termite wasn’t only boring holes in the monolith of how pop culture regards itself. He was a student, like many of us, at the college of which Robert Christgau is the Dean – the body of pop culture criticism which had, in fanzines like Crawdaddy and then increasingly professionally, in Rolling Stone and elsewhere, constructed a discourse out of whole cloth, or perhaps even out of scraps of cloth. A termite discourse itself, when it began – for who could consider that pop music deserved a criticism, at the outset? It seemed ludicrous. Nonetheless, by the time Joy came along, such connoisseurship had become institutional, even to some degree self-assessing and self-enshrining, pointing the way towards institutions yet to come: the Experience Music Project, the voting body of “experts” for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and so forth. Even the quick and slippery commodification of “college rock”, and subcategories of taste like “Americana”, which produced
an enfolding conformity that could neutralize the weirdness of an outsider artifact like Joy’s beloved Souled American – these encroached on the private and eccentric fan-to-music connection that had galvanized this form of writing in the first place. So, by inventing himself as a dissident, as a semi-autistic protest voice, kicking against even many things that he himself was capable of liking (cf. Freedy Johnston), Joy-as-termite bored holes in the consensus that music criticism had “grown up” or “come into its own”.
4.
What this reminds me of is how a Spanish-language writer like Roberto Bolaño, and others in his age cohort, had to work themselves out from under the canonical “Magic Realists” of the Latin American “boom” generation: Marquez & Co. And that’s the writer Camden Joy actually calls to mind for me the most: Roberto Bolaño. The slippery method by which he inserts himself everywhere and nowhere in his writing, his obsessed-fan awe but also the devouring contempt he feels for the artworks he loves, the cataclysms he feels preying inside his devotion. Actually, I’d say Camden Joy reminds me of a character in a Bolaño novel even more than he does Bolaño himself: if The Savage Detectives had included a young American pop critic, it would have been Camden Joy. Of course, such a character would have had to be fated to vanish or die, and in fact that is what Camden Joy (I mean the character now, and not the writer; this is confusing, yes) eventually was fated to do. And then to come back and haunt us.
5.
Another, much simpler claim: Camden Joy is the Dean of something himself, now, much as he might be chagrined to admit it. He is the Dean of a crucial (albeit still distaff) style of music writing now found, sporadically, in the 33 1/3 series, whenever the authors go off the research track, into fiction or memoir or some other kind of unholy meditation: John Darnielle’s on Master of Reality, Kate Schatz’s on Rid of Me, Joe Pernice’s on Meat Is Murder, and John Niven’s on Music from Big Pink. Another example is Nicholas Rombes’ A Cultural Dictionary of Punk, which resorts to sideways fictions and leftfield comparisons to surround its subject.
6.
Three brief personal asides (here’s the part to skip if you’ve had enough of me): First: the poster I wrote for the Souled American project was partly incorporated into the first personal essay I ever wrote, “Defending The Searchers”, which inaugurated the sequence that became The Disappointment Artist. So, Camden Joy’s DNA is in that book, and in my surprise fate to be any kind of essayist at all – I’d never intended it. Second: within “Dear CMJ…” is a poster calling for the discovery of a “lost” band called Memorial Garage. At the time I read this poster Camden Joy had still never succeeded in hearing that band – but it happened that not only was Memorial Garage the brainchild of my old friend Philip Price (later of the Maggies, now of Winterpills), but I’d even written a few lyrics for the band. So I was able to give Joy a couple of their self-released tapes. Third: I based Perkus Tooth, in Chronic City, in part on Joy. I gave him the posters, for one thing.
7.
I’ve got a book on my shelves the title of which I’ve always found peculiar to contemplate: The Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner. The title is self-disproving, since the stories were collected the moment it was published. Lost Joy is the same sort of thing, isn’t it? How can Joy be lost? Joy is right here.
FOREWORD TO THE FIRST EDITION
DENNIS COOPER
RECENTLY A FRENCH JOURNALIST with a thing for American rock criticism asked me why the new generation of critics in the United States weren’t artists. He couldn’t understand why there weren’t young auteurs in the mode of Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer—or, if they did in fact exist, why he didn’t know about them. When I couldn’t name a current writer who satisfied his criteria, I argued that there must be young artist-critics on a par with the maestros. Readers would have a hard time finding them, however, since no prominent American music magazine gives much of a shit about prose. I explained how the old writer-friendly publications like Rolling Stone and Spin had grown tone-deaf, filling their pages with variations on a kind of young, hip, middlebrow voice whose only edge lay in the area of opinion. Even the smaller magazines devoted to intelligent, artful rock seemed too concerned with getting the word out to nurture the word itself. So, my argument went, it’s not that there aren’t terrific rock critics per se, they just aren’t necessarily into writing literature anymore.
I hope that French guy reads this book, because Camden Joy turns out to be the perfect answer to his question. I’ve been an awestruck reader of Joy’s fiction for years. I knew he also wrote what might be called ‘rock criticism’, but, seeing as how he’s a very sporadic contributor to the print media, and famously likes to express his opinions in hard-to-find chapbooks and posters that he plasters around New York City, where I don’t happen to live, this amazing collection comes as a surprise to me, and probably to most of you. If you’ve read Joy’s novels and novellas, you already know that he’s one of the best writers on the subject of rock music and its attendant culture. He’s sort of the Irvine Welsh of American rock, setting music to narrative with a knowingness and grace that elucidates what it means to be a rock star and/or fan more persuasively than any other contemporary novelist. His almost religious belief in music and his brilliance as a wordsmith combine to create works of fiction that are so fresh that they qualify as innovative.
If that weren’t impressive enough, it turns out Camden Joy might just be our finest younger rock critic as well. I can’t think of another writer who writes so resonantly about the emotional and intellectual consequences of being a discriminating devotee of popular music du jour. Just as the hyper, hallucinatory rants of Bangs and Meltzer seemed to have an almost psychic connection to the aggressively heady rock artists of earlier decades, Joy’s discursive, romantic, volatile, and super-intuitive essays translate the complex, introverted sensibilities of contemporaries like Frank Black, Pavement, and Yo La Tengo, and reignite the works of elder figures like Al Green and the Kinks. He’s the kind of writer you pray will love and ruminate on your own favorites, not just because his passionate, exquisitely written tomes could convert the masses. Camden Joy isn’t just a seductive critic with admirably good taste. He’s as great an artist as the musicians he addresses, and you’d have go back to a time when rock criticism was the medium of geniuses to find another American writer whose output so clearly and thrillingly justifies that claim.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With gratitude to all who gave me floors on which to sleep and drove me places (1995-1997), including but not limited to: the Adelmans, SE Barnet, Dani Bedau, Nancy Braver, Megan Cash, Iumari Castillo, Bill Carmean, Mark Donato, Ben Donenberg, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, the Fryers, Piper Gray, George and Beverly Grider, Phillip Hollahan, Nancy Lynn Howell, Steve Itano, Laura Kaminker, Mike King, Lyuba Konopasek, Jim and Ernie Lafky, Mark Lerner, Jennifer India Scott and Kerin Lifland, Jane Littman, Kent Matricardi, Jamie Mayer, Kelly Meech, Jim and Sally Oldham, Karen Parrott, Meg Richman, the Rosses, Mady Schutzman, Stewart Schwartz, Benjamin Shykind, Janet Steen, Heidi Swedberg, Jim Taylor, Cathy Vibert, Hope Windle, Cintra Wilson, Allan Wood; also Amanda, Ella, Smuj, Zachary, and Zinky.
Thanks to my editors and friends: Richard Abate, Tobin Anderson and Vincent Standley of 3rd Bed, Matt Ashare, Caeri Bertrand, Matthew Berube, Paul Coleman and Jef Czekaj of Sinkcharmer, Steve Connell and Katherine Spielmann of Verse Chorus Press, Andee Connors, Tom Devlin of Highwater Books, Chuck Eddy, Jon Garelick, Richard Gehr, Ira Glass, Carter Hasegawa, Stephen Heuser, Erik Huber, Andrew Hulktrans, Jessica Hundley, Jonathan Lethem, Michaelangelo Matos, Sia Michel, Natalie Nichols, Heidi-Anne Noel, Matt Poitras of Buch Spieler, Pamela Polston, Jay Ruttenberg of the Lowbrow Reader, Steve Salardino and Garret Scullin of Skylight Books, Ben Schafer, Geoff Shandler, Jill Stauffer of H2SO4, Alison True, Adam and Joy Voith, Eric Weisbard.
I love you, Hannah.
LOST JOY
If you start thinking in a moment like that, you’re lost.
—Marcus Allen
, after scoring on a 74-yard run, Super Bowl XVIII
DUM DUM BOYS
THE THING I REMEMBER about Cameron—he would start smiling as soon as you’d start talking to him. Can’t remember a single conversation we ever had, just remember him smiling. Don’t think he knew he was smiling, it just happened, he couldn’t help it, couldn’t help but trust you, couldn’t help but smile at you just for talking to him, watching you with his perfectly round blue-grey eyes, eyes the color of the Civil War, and when you got mid-sentence those eyes would open wider, momentarily surprised, then go back to watching, patiently waiting out your sarcasm with a disarming smile, slim good looks, a little stoned, leaning back, waiting on you to make him laugh, to earn that smile of his, to send his mouth open with laughter, his mouth with those perfect teeth.
Cameron and I first met when we were thirteen, and he alone remained as my comrade from junior high into high school, whereas my other pals of that time were lost along the way to the marching band or the swim team or the yearbook committee or the drama club. Together Cameron and I avoided the lure of school-sponsored activities. “You’re running,” we’d smirk at some former friend whom we’d catch training for a track and field event. They’d glance up dazed, their expression flushed, looking near death, sweat-covered, short of breath, their bodies ruddy, almost naked in those trim jerseys and gym shorts. Cameron and I would be warmly dressed as usual, long pants, trench coats preserving a pasty pallor. “What are you running from?” He and I distrusted the sudden crop of boring new pals one found following such pursuits. We were the only guys who by ninth grade had advanced to spray painting punk rock graffiti, gouging “Flipper” or “Nervous Gender” into the lacquered tops of school desks while our former buddies were still carving nonsense like “REO Speedwagon” or “Boston” or “The Wall.” Eventually we met others who sympathized with our graffiti, who also lacked affiliations with any extra-curricular projects, and these became our new friends.