Imitation Modernism

by Perry Meisel

The aesthetic of difficulty lingers on, though it belongs to another age

"Why don't you write sensible books that people can understand?" Nora Joyce complained to her husband, James, when he was composing Finnegans Wake, in 1927. Joyce's indirect reply (for he seldom discussed literature with his wife) came in a confession to his publisher, Harriet Weaver, to whom he had been explaining the new book for weeks: "Now, patience: and remember patience is the great thing . . . . I want to teach everybody how to do everything properly so as to be in the fashion."

By "the fashion," Joyce meant the intricate difficulties of Finnegans Wake and how a reader was to negotiate them. Neither the book nor the advice was meretricious. They expressed the conscious, deliberate condition of Joyce's art - an art of intentional obscurity, ellipsis, and allusion, one designed to put the reader to school rather than to sleep.

The contemporary reader is accustomed to these Joycean demands on one's concentration. Indeed, they have become the values by which we assess and bestow literary reputation in an age still dominated by the achievement of Joyce's Ulysses, Eliot's The Waste Land, and Pound's Cantos. Thick with learning and dense in surface texture, the novels, poems, and critical self-pronouncements of the great moderns more than set a period standard. These works have convinced us that the criteria of difficulty and inaccessibility by which they demand to be judged are universal ones for the judgment of literary art.

Chief among the priests of modernism, Eliot summed up the period aesthetic in 1921, giving it the implicit authority of an "objective" theory of poetry. The italics are Eliot's own:

We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.

This description of what a work of literature should do has become an aesthetic tenet. It tends to be the starting point for the young poet or novelist with serious literary ambitions. It has acquired the character of reflex rather than reflection, of instinct rather than reason. It is something that ought to make us suspicious. Despite our hesitation to quarrel with it for fear of exposing our intellectual inadequacies, we balk at its demands, consciously or not, even as we acquiesce. We assume too easily that we should at least appreciate what we cannot enjoy.

This assumption has its influential proponents. George Steiner's 1978 essay "On Difficulty," probably our most notorious defense of the aesthetic of obfuscation, insists that difficulty is paradigmatic of all literary experience. Steiner argues that an "ecumenicism of receptivity" towards past literature is "spurious," and goes on:

The authentic poet cannot make do with the infinitely shop-worn inventory of speech, with the necessarily devalued or counterfeit currency of the every-day. He must literally create new words and syntactic modes: this was the argument and practice of the first Dada, of Surrealists, of the Russian "Futuro-Cubist" Klebnikov and his "star-speech." If the reader would follow the poet into the terra incognita of revelation, he must learn the language . . . . We are not meant to understand easily and quickly. Immediate purchase is denied us. The text yields its force and singularity of being only gradually.

Steiner's position represents an exact reversal of what used to be the prevailing attitude. "Trash," wrote the anonymous reviewer for The New Monthly on the publication of Browning's Sordello in 1840. "If Mr. Browning will write, we wish he would write something comprehensible. Sordello is full of hard names, and nonsense." Less than a century later, however, in 1932, an anonymous reviewer of W.H. Auden's The Orators declared Auden's verse "exceedingly difficult to understand, but in spite of this extraordinarily stimulating." By 1979, Hugh Kenner, Pound's most authoritative critic, hailed Gilbert Sorrentino's almost incomprehensible Mulligan Stew as a primer in avant-garde aesthetics, and did it in a style almost as gnomic as his mentor's.

Complicit with this appreciation of unintelligibility is another familiar trait of modern art: its maker's plea that he is "misunderstood," that the meaning he's after - even if it augurs the end or the endless plurality of meaning - is, by its very nature and quality, impossible to fix in any authorized way. That our greatest writers cannot be understood is the whole point, Steiner insists, for no understanding is possible in world driven mad by the events of the twentieth century: "At certain levels, we are not meant to understand at all, and our interpretation, indeed our reading itself, is an intrusion."

Difficulty, then, can even become a strategy intended to disarm all readers, whatever their inclinations, by a sort of trap or double bind. If a work is impenetrable or elusive, there must be something to it. If a work is unreadable, it must be a moving illustration of modernist angst. And a good writer, it goes without saying, is one who cannot be readily understood.

As our distance from the moderns begins to widen, it becomes clear that the literary criteria of difficulty and "being misunderstood" add up to little more than the defensive, self-sustaining myth of a period of literature now past. The historical record alone shows how isolated, even embattled, Eliot's requirement is. The college freshman who thinks Shakespeare is difficult soon finds him the soul of lucidity. It is a question of catching on - of learning the idioms of Elizabethan English and spotting the literary and mythological allusions.

By the time of Romanticism, poets themselves were in revolt against classical poetic diction, and went about a housecleaning so thorough that it produced a century whose virtues and vices alike reflected a determined clarity bred by a determined security. The Victorians, after all, were Romantics in action, and the public strength of their literature reflects it. Except for the Decadence, what we consider great Victorian writing today - Dickens, Trollope, Tennyson, George Eliot, Hardy - was mass-market stuff.

By contrast to what preceded it, then, modernism looks more and more like a special, and specialized, condition of literary culture. Its aesthetic - and its motivations - are far more programmatic in their influence than its protestations of revolt would suggest. Our "post-modern" aesthetic of difficulty takes as its authority the texts of High Modernism - and with no small irony, since modernism's ineluctable agenda is to be direct and original, to "make it new," in Pound's famous words. "The late-comer," asserted Virginia Woolf, "improves upon the pioneer."

It was not until well after the Decadence of the nineties had spent itself that the cult of modernist difficulty began to dominate the literary scene in a serious way. The annus mirabilis of modernism was 1922. It marked the publication of Ulysses, The Waste Land, and Virginia's Woolf's Jacob's Room, the first of her post-realist novels. All three works, it should be added, were published by private presses - the latter two by the Woolfs' Hogarth Press (Virginia set type for Eliot's poem with her own hands), Ulysses by Sylvia Beach's Paris bookstore and printing establishment, Shakespeare & Co.

That they were privately published is symptomatic of the kinds of difficulty posed by all three works, for they deal, in both form and meaning, with the response of the private soul to the encroachment upon it of mass or public civilization. This sense of crisis provided modern literature with a poetics of difficulty that it could claim was a necessity. Hence the traditional - and by no means false - defense of modern fiction and poetry as a literature whose difficulty replicates on the level of style the modernist's specific and programmatic intent to represent a world in pieces, devoid of meaning. The reader of Conrad or Kafka experiences the vertigo characteristic of the world they depict in his very attempt to read about it; the reader of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier even discovers that the book's narrator has been wrong throughout, and that he has heard nothing but lies for hundreds of pages.

In some instances, an elaborate style is simply the reflection of a subject that resists clarity. Henry James is difficult because what he describes - the circuitry of mind and heart - is complicated. Freud is difficult not only because what he sets out to map - the unconscious mind - is complicated but because it is in our very nature to resist understanding it. And, of course, T.S. Eliot is difficult because one must share the poet's assumptions about symbols and what they mean if one expects him to cohere. Without Eliot's own rather mocking notes to The Waste Land, the poem will not only not read right: it will barely read at all.

But what in the early part of the century was a genuinely radical attempt to renovate literary language has devolved into the irony of an institutionalized, even classical kind of post-modernism. While Eliot's reappraisal of Donne and his heirs depended on the criterion of difficulty or "toughness of mind," there is no such payoff in the case of our post-moderns. With William H. Gass, we come to the heart of the problem. Considered by many the most accomplished stylist in America, Gass won fame in 1966 with his novel Omensetter's Luck. Gass's prose, like Faulkner's, seemed to be poised between realism and the diction of a modern literature that could elevate regional life, as Joyce had done, to the level of myth. But its real affinities were more literary than vernacular. The novel imitated Faulkner and Ulysses - and Samuel Beckett - far better than it captured the spoken idioms of the Midwest. Its highly metaphoric, insistently literary language outstripped its subject, despite Gass's effort to reproduce the rhythms of American speech. Gass's short stories (collected under the title of his most famous, "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country") turned out to have the same problem: they showed that Gass was more interested in technique than in talk, and had forgotten Joyce's injunction to realize a world as well as to celebrate the word.

Gass's writing represents a trend. Among our principal "post-moderns," it is John Barth who remains our most honored veteran, though just how much he has accomplished would be hard to say. Barth's career largely rehearses the development of the English novel itself. His early books - The Floating Opera and The End of the Road - were exercises in discipleship on the order of Keats's imitation of Spenser or Milton's Latin sonnets, although the models here were modernist: absurdist drama and existentialism. With The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy, Barth became a historian of the English novel - and the English language - as well as a practitioner of it. But despite his greedy inventiveness, he was destined to grow more willfully imitative in the years to come. To be sure, Chimera signals a considerable progress in the understanding of language and how it functions, especially compared with the undigested, rather vulgar modernism of Lost in the Funhouse. But it wasn't long before his exuberant inventions gave way to an impulse to instruct us in the nature of narrative instead of simply getting on with it. Of course, we already know how narrative functions - not only from the experiments of modernism but, in a far plainer style, from structural linguistics, psychoanalysis, and French criticism and historiography. And then there is Barth's Letters, full of punnish wisdom about the quest for meaning and its ultimate elusiveness. Even George Steiner had to complain, in a New Yorker review of December 31, 1979: "Alas, Pirandello was here first, and with mastery. . . Barth is out of luck. Titans have been there before him, and on his exact ground."

Another veteran experimentalist, Gilbert Sorrentino - a more generous, and more genuinely experimental, writer than Barth - found himself, with the publication of Mulligan Stew, in 1979, canonized in literary circles virtually overnight. Interviews, dissertations, a three-pound issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction examining him from every angle: it's as though a new "difficultist" hero were required every now and then by the contemporary machinery of taste and arbitration. Sorrentino has too often been associated with those infinitely inferior obscurantists labeled by Hugh Kenner the "schlock avant-garde." It is, however, precisely Sorrentino's ability to provide us with an aerial view of avant-garde writing as a whole that has brought him to prominence; and it is his determination to both mock and emulate the aesthetic of difficulty that makes Mulligan Stew such an irritating yet endearing document.

As usual, it is the allusions to modern classics that give the tale away. Like Gide's The Counterfeiters, Mulligan Stew contains a novel within a novel, and aspires to mirror in its narrative design the incessant revisions we impose on our lives. Like The Waste Land, it purports to imitate the chaos of life by presenting us with a puzzle of random pieces, a bric-a-brac of the common and the patrician, the ignorant and the overeducated, held loosely together by the tendrils of innumerable literary modes. And like Ulysses, Sorrentino's novel mixes popular and classical forms by having the author's novelist-hero, who is called Ned Beaumont (also the name of one of Dashiell Hammet's creations), write a detective novel that develops into a parody of a "difficult" avant-garde novel. This is surely a step beyond institutionalized avant-gardism, since Sorrentino raises - even if he does not resolve - a question that Barth and Gass overlook entirely: the clash between the popular and the recondite, between the detective novel and the "art novel," between public and private forms. It is the divorce between mass and minority culture, between society and letters, between life and art, that the modernist credo insists upon, and Sorrentino is right to identify it as both the cause and the effect of the aesthetic of difficulty.

The critic's great fear, of course, is that he may be missing the point. Yet ours is a very different period from the genuinely revolutionary era in which the classics of modernism were produced. The difference is that our "post-moderns" tell us what we already know. False to its own demand for originality by virtue of its discipleship to an earlier canon, post-modern difficulty is a contradiction. How indeed can you make something new by copying something old?

If we must still look to the moderns for our answers (the post-moderns surely won't provide any), let us at least choose Joyce's vision instead of Eliot's. The Joycean spirit of openness to society that is evident in Leopold Bloom's gregarious sociability is, of course, inimical to a view of the modern world as a wasteland. And it remains the only sensible - and civilized - vision of modernity. The intricate texture of Joyce's language, unlike the texture of Eliot's, is derived from a loving attentiveness to the world of everyday life - a world modernism too often disdains. The adventure of difficult style grows hollow when it represents a retreat from the quotidian, and exposes the failure of the modern imagination rather than of the modern world.

Originally published in The Atlantic, Volume 219 No. 3, March 1982

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The Raybeats' Tight Return

by Perry Meisel

It took three songs before the Raybeats' cherubic workhorse Pat Irwin looked up from his trashy Ace Tone organ and smiled at the crowd two Saturdays ago at Maxwell's. The Raybeats had been relaxing maybe a little too much. Jody Harris's meandering guitar and the almost farcical smokeshow that brought the band onstage had bordered dangerously near Quicksilver, the Dead ethos of an organic and expressionist rock and roll nauseating to postauthenticist p--k.

But once the boomeranging chords began - drilled into formation by the commanding crack of Dan Christensen's snare and Danny Amis's picky bass - the Raybeats nestled into their customary fleecy twang, slinging vectors of reverb through your brain and heart right down to your pointy shoes. Poised between arrogance and dread, ferocity and cool, Harris and Amis nuzzled their axes with tender fingers while Irwin booped, chortled, and grunted on organ and saxophone, later joining Harris on guitar.

Formed in 1979 with late and legendary George Scott on bass, the Raybeats transistorized rock history even from the start: Harris and Christensen had worked with James Chance; Irwin and Scott had played with Lydia Lunch. Early actors in the polymorphous adventure called p--k f--k, they've come to represent its slaphappy or up side, the reverse of the down or anxious alternative of neo-funk proper. The Raybeats' key difference from orthodox p--k and conservative p--k f--k is the lighter, airier sound of guitars that snap as well as sing, a sweeter sound that the now-homogenized Ramones strut precludes even in clonebands as rhythmically powerful as Black Flag. At Maxwell's, Irwin had actually switched to a Stratocaster from the Les Paul I saw him wield at the Pep - from a denser, metal-inclined ax to a bluesier, chewier one.

After numerous listenings, I'm also convinced that the band's first album, PVC's Guitar Beat, is no toss-off. Irwin's grinding alto riffs on "Tight Turn" - the album's opener and the band's anthem along with "Searching," the opener at Maxwell's - is almost the sole vestige of the Contortions in a sound infinitely less derivative (and certainly less nostalgic) than you might think on first hearing. If at one extreme the band can sound like Bay psychedelia ("Tone Zone"), at the other it can sound like L.A. studio funk ("Cocktails"). But between the extremes - the general rule, exemplified by the luxuriant grandeur of "Searching" - the sound is wittingly (but not anxiously) sedimented with allusions to earlier rock and roll, especially the ubiquitous Ventures (overtly on "B-Gas-Rickshaw," more reconditely on "The Calhoun Surf"). Miraculously, such references ground the band in precedent without stifling it. Who five years ago would've thought a relaxed Mississippi thing like "The Backstroke" was possible from a Manhattan art band? Even what may sound like a plain old sixth-chorus heart-breaker ballad ("Guitar Beat," for example) turns out to have just enough slight chordal variation on the formula to open unlyrical combinations it never seemed to possess before.

So much is at work in this scholarly band that the absence of a singer is something you hardly notice. Especially with Irwin replacing the fuhrer figure by constantly switching instruments and attitudes, the apparent lack suggests that the band has surmounted the quaint category of personality altogether. Billed as a "combo" rather than a "band," they come together as a locus of thoughts in a highly controlled form of jamming, not as a monolith of conceptual intent signed with the kiss of a star.

Despite the band's "Secret Agent Man" edge/tone/feel/luster - even despite the skinny ties and gold-lamé uniform they seem to be dropping - the Raybeats aren't putting anybody on, least of all themselves. Though they know that you put on your values like you put on your clothes, their music suggests that p--k has now moved beyond the conversion of rock and roll into rock and role. They oversee the happy transparency of genre rather than the endless need to parody or deflect it. Even extraneous evidence confirms this: the band's 1980 EP (Roping Wild Bears, Don't Fall Off the Mountain Records) was recorded in Austin, while their current promo (like Joan Jett's) hypes them as Americans rather than New Wavers. Even my desire to compare the Raybeats with classic bands like Traffic or Booker T. & the M.G.s is a symptom of the tight (re)turn to tradition they symbolize. The Raybeats have called everybody's bluff and actually delivered.

Do they signal the end of p--k? Will p--k f--k fold back into the genres from which it came, no longer kicking and screaming? Tom Smucker's reminder to Joan Jett that she's entered history might be addressed to the Raybeats, too, and with almost as little worry. Rock and roll has grown up all over again. Just enough.

Originally published in The Village Voice, January 20 - 26, 1982

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Marcus Agonistes

An Open Letter of Recommendation to the Heisman Committee

by Perry Meisel

Joe Theismann changed the pronunciation of his name to try to get it in 1970, but this year - despite sophomore Herschel Walker's durable Georgia magic - the Heisman Trophy for best college football player of 1981 will almost certainly go to the University of Southern California senior, Marcus Allen, the first running back in the history of collegiate play to rush for more than 2000 yards in a single season. There is little reason for doubt short of mass amnesia among those casting the ballots (1050 sportswriters, editors, and broadcasters), plus a few other factors presumably mild under the circumstances: a sentimental slant toward the youngster Herschel (last year's third-place entry behind Pitts Hugh Green and Saintly winner George Rogers from South Carolina); the typical mouthing that USC wins it too often (Mike Garnett in 1966, O.J. Simpson in 1968, Charles White in 1979); and, most genuinely problematic, dazzling quarterback performances by Brigham Young senior Jim McMahon and Pitt junior Dan Marino.

Despite Walker's improvement over last year's unparalleled freshman display (1666 yards so far for 1981, with one game to go, compared to 1616 in 1980), even these legendary stats pale next to Allen's almost inconceivable total of 2342 yards. Last year, Marcus (or M.A., as he's called, even without his B.A.) piled up 1563 yards and 14 touchdowns (second in the nation), but didn't even place in the top 10. Compared to Walker, he was still a virtual unknown this September. But with 2123 yards even before USC's final game against UCLA two Saturdays ago. Allen had already surpassed Tony Dorsett's record of 1948 yards at Pitt in 1976.

Whether the difference between Allen and Walker is the difference between a sophomore and a senior or between Shaw and Shakespeare is probably impossible to tell before they reach the pro ranks. What is predictable when the award is announced on December 5, however, is that (1) the Heisman will, as (almost) always, go to a running back or a quarterback (the only exceptions were receivers in 1936 and 1949); and that (2) sportspeople across the country will ritually apologize for the purported - and in fact real - bias among the voters against those players who do not handle the ball.

The list of past winners is enough to convince anyone that the bias is quite deliberate among the numerous achievements of Coach John W. Heisman - including a 220-0 Georgia Tech victory over Cumberland - was the legalization of the forward pass in 1906. Besides, there are equally deliberate compensations. Case in point: Hugh Green finished a historically significant second in last year's voting, then went on to receive the Vince Lombardi trophy for collegiate defensive player of the year. To be sure, the record shows other prophetic high-ranking Heisman finishes by defensive players (Dick Butkus in 1964, Ted Hendricks in 1967, Brad Van Pelt in 1972), but history also proves the Heisman to be no particular guarantee for prostardom at all - witness double winner Archie Griffin (1974-75) or the beleaguered Charles White today at Cleveland.

It's also clear why the bias toward backs exists on an ideological level. Linemen and even defensive players simply perform too technical and, to the nonexpert, too invisible a task for the amateur eye to delight in (add to this the inherent bias of the camera). After all, the price of pleasure in any art, or the enjoyment of any commodity, lies in the successful erasure of the way what you see gets made. Even if the line and the blocking backs open the holes, the game's most obvious thrill lies in spotting the men who handle the ball. Add to this obvious line of argument that Vietnamization of the tactile senses necessary simply to watch without getting a headache, and boom! the Heisman comes to represent a virtually institutionalized repression of football's interior means of production.

The following brief portraits of some key Heisman candidates (and some early prospects fading rather faster than anticipated) are, however, productions of a different sort, due largely to the growing availability of college football on cable television (especially the new 24-hour rivalry between the USA Network and ESPN).

Along with Lady Di's tiara, the space shuttle, and replays of the Sadat assassination, Marcus Allen has been this fall's greatest visible sensation (for opposing defenses he has also been - like inflation or herpes - among its greatest invisible ones, too). To compare any back with Herschel struck me as a mad occupation when Georgia opened its season against Tennessee and Walker ran 30 times for 161 yards, toppling people down like dominoes (more Vietnamization). But only two weeks later - watching a replay of USC against Indiana - my throat grew dry when I realized that Marcus had almost jumped the 100 yard mark before the close of the first quarter (he went on to average almost 213 yards a game for the season).

Though he plays for the Trojans and not Arkansas, Allen is a razorback in the true sense of the word, cutting through gaps sometimes as tiny as those cajoled into seams by the Giants' offensive line at the start of the year. Of course, Allen's uncanny slicing ability is heightened by an outstanding USC offensive line and by his superb blocking fullback, Todd Spencer. If you could make a single athlete out of Bruce Harper and Dave Winfield, you'd come up with Marcus Allen.

If not Marcus Agonistes, then Herschel Walker. My gut prediction - and, frankly, my advice - is that Herschel will go pro next year. As a freshman, he reminded me most of Earl Campbell - he'd run you down even if he didn't see you standing there. If Marcus squirts by you like O.J. Simpson, Herschel mauls you the way the Oil of Campbell does. Walker also has the added advantage of the picky stutter-step of a Franco Harris and (last year more than this) the vision to accelerate through a seam once the opportunity is there. Still, Herschel doesn't seem to have what Howard Cosell has called the "gears" of a sleeker runner like Dorsett. Indeed, the affinities to Campbell include not just an equivalent symmetry of frame (big up and down, not just leg-strong like the Pruitts, or headstrong like the Muncies). They also include a faint but creeping kind of danger; you can see it in the minuscule loss of instant blastoff power behind the line of scrimmage at decision time. And yet the same evidence may also suggest a more confident Walker, a patient and masterful student of downfield opportunities.

To sum up the classic differences between Allen and Walker: Herschel features quickness and Marcus speed, a difference nonexistent in only one runner I've ever seen - Jim Brown. Herschel runs at and over you, Marcus by you or (even scarier) through you, as though he were some kind of spirit or goblin. If Herschel is brawny brains, Marcus is brainy brawn (each stands at six foot two inches, though Walker has a weight advantage of 18 pounds). Not, mind you, that either is in any way lacking in what predominates in the other. Far from it - it's just a matter of accent or inflection. Marcus can cut too (and Herschel can fly in the open field), though it's perhaps Allen's better vision that makes up for his propensity to move straight ahead rather than to pick his spots.

Though not a factor in this year's Heisman due to an injury that caused him to miss four-plus games, University of North Carolina junior tailback Kelvin Bryant was easily en route to smashing the NCAA season TD record of 29 (held by Lydell Mitchell) with 15 in his first four games. He is arguably more awesome than either Allen or Walker because of what looks like an even greater efficiency in the use of his physical assets.

With the exception of Dan Marino and Jim McMahon, the season's early quarterback contenders for the Heisman, chief among them Ohio State's Art Schlicter and Stanford's John Elway, have, as one cable commentator recently put it, "simply fizzled out."

Ohio State's starting quarterback for 47 consecutive games and sixth in the 1980 Heisman voting as a junior, Schlicter is doubtless an irritating enigma to many pro scouts. Theatrically jockish in that nonchalant, Bert-Jonesy, pigeon-toed kind of way, Schlicter can look both too slick and too sloppy. His staggered, and staggering, run to save the season's concluding game against Michigan (it kept the Wolverines out of the Rose Bowl even if it didn't put OSU in) declared his strengths and quality more eloquently than his accurate but wobbly way of throwing the ball. Like Herschel, he actually had the chutzpah to stop in his tracks and think about it behind a wall of blockers, near enough to the goal line to turn what looked like indecision into choice and judgment.

It is, however, passing that is both his signature and his weakness (172 for 324, 2392 yards, 21 TDs, nine interceptions). If, mercifully, he is no Nolan Ryan, he may perhaps err too far the other way by putting too much touch on the ball. If the difference between speed and quickness is hard to see in a runner, the difference between touch and plain old lobbing is only a hair easier to discriminate in a quarterback; Schlicter seems "too touchy" as a passer, a bit of a (s)lob about it.

I have not seen Jim McMahon at all. McMahon himself complained about BYU's underexposure before the start of the season. Answer: if Utah interests Norman Mailer, it's good enough for the rest of us. Here are some of the fundamental stats for a senior year in which he's broken (at last count) no less than 47 NCAA records: 272 for 423, 3555 yards, 30 TDs, seven interceptions. McMahon may be the sleeper candidate.

Dan Marino I've seen aplenty, and I wonder if maybe he isn't as good as you can get, especially as a junior. This guy is cool - like an NFL veteran, he backpedals away from the center at least as often as he drops straight back (after all, he grew up in Pittsburgh watching Terry Bradshaw). Nor is his arm anything but perfectly adopted to the throwing circumstances, whether they require the placement bullet, the lob arc, the low shot, or the touchy sideline cruise-out. No wonder Pitt has held the number one ranking longer than any other team in this year of big-college parity. And with an offensive line of unfair size and power, the question of Marino's mobility is hardly even an issue (including last Saturday's surprise debacle, he finished with 200 for 339, 265 yards, 36 TDs, and, alas, 36 interceptions).

Stanford's Jim Plunkett won the trinket back in 1970, so there is even less reason to believe Stanford senior John Elway will get it this year. Elway's most characteristic - and most touted - faculty is his rifle throwing arm (no wonder George Steinbrenner has already bought him and assigned him to Nashville for next summer; my hunch is he'll end up a pitcher or shortstop). But a rifle arm is an ambiguous virtue in a young quarterback; it's a potent resource but it can also become a thoughtless habit (no matter that Elway's dad Jack is a respected head coach at San Jose State). Along with his admittedly impressive stats (214 for 366, 2674 yards, 21 TDs, 13 interceptions), the gunslinging habit is too central to his reputation. Firing redhots to his receivers, Elway is like the power hitter who refuses to go to the opposite field with an outside pitch. Of course, if he puts his mind to it, he can lob or float the ball out to a release back - as he did on an exemplary scramble late in the second quarter against Oregon - but the result, alas, was an interception. With 13 on the year, even the rifle is liable to backfire.

Let me conclude this anthological appreciation by rashly impaling myself on the following predictions: Allen will win, going away, unless sleeper McMahon has gotten into enough bonnets (and video screens) to turn the tide; Walker will place third behind Allen and McMahon unless McMahon wins; Marino, as a junior, will do better than Schlicter's junior year sixth place, coming in fourth or fifth behind the first four. After that, your guess is as good as mine.

Originally published in The Village Voice, December 2, 1981

Medium Medium's Certain Ratio

by Perry Meisel

They shot the sheriff, and now Nottingham's got some brand new Hoods. Rob(b)in(g) from the rich traditions of both funk and the power trio, Medium Medium shows up during an otherwise anxious few months in which p--k f--k looked to be dying the moment it was getting born. One proponent of an English new wave sporting recent hits like schizofunk Pigbag's "Papa's Got a Brand New Pigbag" (ragged, gutty horns cutting belches over the Godfather's groove), Medium Medium is also part of a more widespread bicontinental p--k f--k crossover. True to its name, it occupies a middle position between the far right of neo-funk proper (e.g., discoid American groups like Slave and Brownbagged, Manhattan bands like the Funktionaries), and the art-left of, say, Liquid Liquid and (especially) A Certain Ratio, Britkins who are Medium Medium's most exact superficial counterpart.

Whether or not Medium Medium's visionary potential equals its visionary inclination, its appearance at the Ritz last Tuesday, like its new LP on Cacholot, The Glitterhouse, evidenced a band that is cinemascopic rather than kaleidoscopic - it's new new wave because it stretches away from sources rather than contracts toward them. It is synthetic, even radically conservative, despite the luxuriant (and of course deliberate) anarchy and arrogance of frontman John Lewis. And while the band's big-sky dimension in a good-sized room like the Ritz gives way on disc to a more concentrated, vertical sound, the results are almost equally unhinging.

The name first. Clever like Liquid Liquid: Medium Medium uses the same word as both adjective and noun, and thereby contaminates the difference between quiddity and characteristic, essence and attribute. And like a A Certain Ratio it also points to our confusion about whether we calculate things or signs (a certain ratio, after all, is both a definite and an unspecifiable one). Plus reverberations along other brainwaves: rock and roll is a middling medium, or an average medium, and what's the ratio or relation between those interpretations? Or Medium Medium as a fair communicator with the dead, with influence and tradition.

Downfunk is probably the best way to characterize the band's sound, an ironic combination of street strut and a modernist self-destructiveness that wants to spit up whatever resources may yet satisfy its enduring desire to rock out plain and simple (hence the title "Further than Funk Dream"). Such self-imposed tension risks the usual minimalism bent on self-strangulation (witness innumerable local bands afloat in a similar program), but in practice it is, for Medium Medium at least, largely successful (note especially the climax sections of "Guru Maharj Ji" and "Hungry So Angry").

If the band has an anthem, it's "Hungry So Angry." With the title a punning assertion (sometimes sounds like "supposed to be hungry," as if the boho/artiste ideal is itself no better than a prescribed role), Medium Medium can hide its writing strategy behind a facade of existential ambivalence and indecision. "We don't know what to do/Whether to stand or to move." Then they go right ahead and sacrifice melody to rhythm. The interest is almost entirely in the backbeat and its embellishments, though not with the overkill of Liquid Liquid or (especially) A Certain Ratio. Central is Allan Turton's rootsy bass and drummer Steve Harvey's popping, percolating trapkit. The band's decisive signature, though, is Andy Ryder's guitar - a decisively rhythm guitar - poised between two of the most distinct styles there are: roadhouse funk and metal. Usually, hardrock guitarists simulate r&b by playing real funk licks, but with the turbo-tone of Les Paul; Ryder reverses it all by playing a twanging, hollow-bodied axe with a hard-rock hand. The result: a sweet, woody ring articulated mallet-style, although he can also cut across the backbeat with the indulgent roar of straight metal. What melody there is is largely modulation ("Guru" is an exception), little more than doublings of the odd chromatic shifts that provide what few chords there are ("Mice or Monsters" and even "Hungry So Angry"); in the low-threshold context, though, the effect is often drastic. Thus vocals are best (especially given Lewis's questionable competence) when they're just a part of the bigger instrumental design: echoey choral riffs redounding like falling shale off the (apparent) bedrock of Graham Spink's synthesizer glide and the bass/guitar thwack and twang.

The band's downfunk dramatizes a conflict between the liberationist mythology of funk/blues playing and the felt oppression of copying the traditional model. After all, the expected mesh of the exile of youth with the expressive/liberationist aesthetic of rock and roll - of hip genre as such - never does come off as comfortably as it should. To resolve the issue, it should simply be erased - we must resist fetishizing what is merely social, conventional association between race and aesthetic form. Add to this the additional factor of second-generation London blacks playing almost mainline funk (Linx, Funkapolitan), and you have surrendered to a situation in which no one is certain what qualities are proper to the sum of his characteristics.

By suspending themselves quite intentionally on the resulting paradox - one of necessary disbelief in everything one believes in - Medium Medium manages to pull off a potentially visionary New Rock well beyond p--k f--k proper, although it's tenuous more than tenacious, tentative rather than fully authoritative. Maybe it's the very precariousness of it all that gives Medium Medium an epic promise in the first place. They aren't funktionaries, even though they tempt you to think so. Sure - and Hendrix played rhythm and blues, and Bird was nothing but a bluesman.

Originally published in The Village Voice, November 18 - 24, 1981

Program Note for Stan Salfas' Direction of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Thirteenth Street Theatre, New York

A Note on the Production

Stan Salfas' boisterous direction of THE TAMING OF THE SHREW magnifies both the slapstick zaniness and the latent allegory of Shakespeare's comedy of "upward nobility." Setting the play in the sixties - and in the suburbs - Salfas is faithful to Shakespeare's own concern for rising in the world by virtue of the power of one's mouth, and also faithful to Shakespeare's quite intentional identification of sexual rise and fall with the erection of personality and the indelicacies of spending. Salfas has also achieved a remarkable linguistic ease from his actors, translating Renaissance roles into their modern American equivalents, accents and all. Salfas heightens Shakespeare's racy language in a way that shows how the play links its sexual comedy with its comedy of manners, producing in the process a profoundly contemporary view of sexuality as an economy of desire, strictly analogous to the formation of social desire in its literal lust for the good fortune of a proper match.

Perry Meisel

New York University

July, 1981

A P--k F--k Glossary

by Perry Meisel

Could there be life after the Ramones? Exemplary suicide on the altar of imitation: Manhattan's Stimulators (the best, ripeness is all), El Lay's Circle Jerks (the worst, regurgitation). The decline of Western sieve: an inability to digest. Beyond the Clash and Costello: neo-psychedelia and New Romanticism. The problem: a refusal to re-fuse. The solution: a p--k romance with funk as inevitable as the rhyme.

P--k f--k has had its harbingers ever since the release of Blondie's "Heart of Glass" coincided with the ascendancy of Hurrah in the winter of '79. The New Wave actually wanted a backbeat less subtle than the Ramones'! People wanted to dance while they thought. Head and body were already the same. Even David Byrne was turning Motown. Then the B-52s' sudden epiphany. They grafted - maybe just matched - the extended pauses of classic rhythm and blues with the de rigeur sparseness of p--k itself. The result: a loose, slappy sound, as if drums could twang, too; an approach to the beat with a lineage today in Polyrock and the Raybeats.

Add to these already convergent designs the rise of horn bands on the old Graham Bond/Air Force model (Noise R Us, Major Thinkers) plus Material's overt re-fusion in jazz over the last year or two (in-fused by James Blood Ulmer's harmelodix). A more genuine crossover than the Cobham/Corea style, since it takes p--k's lessons seriously (minimize, transistorize, assume) rather than laughing at rock and roll as a sly hype, as '70s jazzmen did. And add to pop p--k and jazz the third dimension of an all-synthesizer band like Our Daughter's Wedding slamming those machines into dance, Material at the Ritz this spring, and you can be sure something that transcends both technology and genre is afoot.

The formal announcement still belongs, of course, to James Chance and the Contortions, a/k/a James White and the Blacks. Grinding horns in collision with overdrive p--k guitar, James screams on top and yelps below and suddenly Papa's got a brand new boy. The discipleship was intentional enough, even though it reeked more of lame Jagger than the hommage to James Brown might suggest. But the key to its peculiarity lay in figuring out the confusing shift of names involved (Contortionist personnel shifted, too). Undecided, the Chance/White oscillation reads: "He's White by Chance." Thus Chance/White solves the old '60s "authenticity" problem by lifting the genetic (and generic) injunction: You can be some kind of James Brown even if you're white because, white or black, rock or soul, it's all arbitrary anyway - not biology but sociology assigns meaning to bag and color alike. If the Ramones ever had a conceptual rival, here he was, blurring the line between affect and affectation by making the color line a fiction too. A Major Thinker no matter the depth of his chops.

Chance is off on a European tour after increasingly lukewarm local response; his newest produkt is an hour-long compilation of live appearances, available on cassette from Reachout International Records (611 Broadway, Suite 214, NY, NY 10012). But Chance/White blew open a space for the new guys, almost too many to count with any accuracy. Narrative breaks down once you hit today, or at least two Sundays ago at Tompkins Square Park, where 99 Records (as in 99 MacDougal) sponsored a post-nostalgia festival featuring this stuff.

Needed: a synchronic glossary, a post-White whose who of local rock and role (some jazz, too) in the p--k f--k vein. Let the punny names do the talking. We've lost our heads anyway. Besides, it's fun(k). Choices are somewhat random, as they should be. All of the following groups have either played recently, released a record recently, and/or will be playing locally soon.

As in: Defunkt. By turns a spirited and sluggish brass/strut band with a revvy backbeat. The name gives the problem away: is funk defunct? The band would like to think so, but it stays too close to formula funk to pull the trick off with grace. Despite Joe Bowie's lineage as an "out" 'bonist (Lester's his big brother), the band as a whole sounds too much like a mellowed version of Tower of Power or Kool and the Gang to convince you that more than mindless dance music is their aim. Is playing strictly within genre a mode of ideological capture, self-erasure? Is that why funk may be defunct? How can you play rhythm and blues and not feel like a clown/clone playing just a groove thing? Answer: unless you've got the charms of an oldfashioned frontman - Joe Bowie definitely has 'em - you can't. Solution here: go ahead and play generic if you feel like it. Jeans, after all, aren't genes. If it's okay by Chance, it's okay by Bowie, too, whom Chance joined onstage during a late set last month at Interferon in a moving dis-play of good intentions. Gigs and record (De-funkt, on Hannibal) both exacerbate and occasionally relieve the anxiety.

As in: Liquid Liquid. Hottest thing on Sunday besides the weather. Representatives of the slaphappy school of p--k f--k: no contorted horns, no churning guitar overdrive; instead, slapping snares and toms, choral counterchords blowing open huge horizons of a sound we heard first on "Blue Jay Way" (co-opted with faint glimmers of intelligence recently even by Spandau). Is the name redundant? Hardly. It splays the signifier like a knife cuts brains: here "liquid" is both adjective and noun at the same time. What is the difference between the quality and the thing itself (e.g., between black and being black)? Answer: nothing. A thing is the mere play of its attributions. Jeans, not genes. Post p--k rock and role. You can get the record at 99 MacDougal, though it's hardly representative.

As in: Essential Bop. Young Brit whirlybirders in town for Sunday's Tompkins Park gala, slapping and clapping, sometimes missing. When their Raybeaty guitars and croony vocals fit the monkeytime drums, a fragile but real projectile; otherwise hazy, unripe. Dangerous word, "essential." Intimates unawareness of "end of essentialism" - the "essence" of p--k - asserted by Liquid Liquid.

As in: Julius Hemphill and Bob Moses's Punk Funk Octet. Blame the band for the moniker, not me. More "out" jazzies making the turn last month at Seventh Avenue South in line with Material, Ulmer & Co. The manic overdrive of two guitars challenged Hemphill's insinuating tenor as it negotiated drummer Moses's uncynical backbeat with caution; Hemphill kept his splattering Shorter/Wane Marsh runs sleek and sharp despite his appearance of indistinctness. But no genuinely dominant single melody or solo instrument; "coherence" emerged only occasionally as the band flexed between nerves and relaxation, often building to classic dramatic climaxes even as it eschewed teleology. So the real story is like Material's or Liquid Liquid's: rhythm is melody, so the melody instrumentals are . . . ?

As in: Konk. No joke here, and that's the problem. Konk! Are you knocked out yet? Another Sunday offering, this powerful polybrass conga/percussion affair, legato trumpets and sax accompany the rhythms rather than crack against them. An intentional refusal to force tension into the sound - theoretically interesting, but dreary in practice, especially with so fine a drummer and conga player.

As in: Funktionaries. Contortionistic-plus: tight though fuller horn lines punching the killing rhythmic floor, but fonder than Chance of "out" reed harmonies even on stompers like "Kiss My Funk . . . " and the signatory "Funktionary." Tom Ward (a/k/a Mal Funktion) may be the real James Chance. Not without flecks of neo-psychedelia, vestige of a decade in the Bay Area till a year ago. Defunkt at a more exact level of praxis. Is generic funk the music of a mere functionary? Someone who carries out orders, works in a tradition without questioning or reflecting? The pun situates the functionaries where every "artist" should be: within the necessities of an ideology but also outside them. You can be in two places at the same time. Watch out tonight, Wednesday, August 19, at the Playroom, formerly Trude Heller's.

Originally published in The Village Voice, August 19 - 25, 1981

S(t)imulating

by Perry Meisel

Discerning teens will have told you a year ago or more that the s(t)eamiest p--k band in town is the Stimulators, a (naturally) Ramones-dented nuke/trash riot quartet guaranteed to make you feel nuts even on a lousy night. Singer Patrick Mack has to peel his flesh off the equipment after every gig - just last Saturday at Irving Plaza it melted into the machinery along with his voice. Meanwhile Harley Flanagan, legendary 14-year-old drummer, drove 'em through endless recrossings from five-chords to tonics, pounding your brains till they splattered against the nearest wall or person (the greatest tunes were "Run, Run, Run," "Crazy House Rock," and "Loud Fast Rules"). Some reggae/ska stompers intimated relief ("Blind Ambition," "Sick of George"), but picked up to curdling p--k excoriation before you could straighten your tie.

If the Ramones reduced rock and roll to three chords, the Stims go one better - they transistorize three down to two, minimalizing the minimal (rather than repeating it, like co-billed El Lay Circle Jerks). Almost another rhythm instrument, Pat Mack white-wines down from the five-chord to the one in virtual unison with guitarist Denise Mercedes - not (as in most bands) against it. That leaves skinhead Harley as the real solo presence, his heavy counterrhythms the sole/soul projectile in this post-Auschwitz vortex of a band. And if the Ramones affect affect (see "I'm Affected") - intentionally confusing the difference between feeling and affectation - the S(t)imulators simulate simulation. Not as farce (no sterile formalism here), but as a critical act of intemperate power - real rock and role. Like Mondrian or Gertrude Stein, it may look dumb, but it ain't.

Originally published in The Village Voice, June 17 - 23, 1981