Art For Non-Art's Sake

10cc were the Howard Jacobsons of pop - intellectual Prestwich Hebrews who exhibited a simultaneous mastery of, and contempt for, the art form and genre in which they worked. Loathed perhaps more than any other band by the punks, they were briefly resurrected and cherished a decade later as being as emblematic of the Seventies as Abba or Queen. Since then, they have slipped away from public consciousness, even their none-more-cynical aural masterpiece "I'm Not In Love" not finding much FM airplay nowadays.

Their reputation presents an interesting contrast with the group that was, conceptually at least, most similar to them - Steely Dan, who are in critical terms much more highly valued. This is despite the Mancunian group's music being more playful and varied, as well as being more commercially successful. Perhaps Godley, Creme and Gouldman's awareness of the disposability of pop was too keen - they may have been undone by their own disdain for what they were doing. This being the paradigm example of their brilliant self-contempt:

Desecration Acts (or, Retromania, Take 2: Y'know...the Version That Sort of Plays Out Like Peter Fonda's Film Career)

Part One: Tanz mit mir, Eva!

It's all a bit dodgey, isn't it, this matter of breaking things down by decade. As if historical or cultural developments so tidily fit into calendrical boxes and whatnot. Yet here we are.

But yeah, it's a common enough way of thinking about things. For instance, the whole matter of Americans during the 1970s looking back and getting nostalgic for the 1950s. And how the 1970s were — for a time, at least — considered a decade not worth talking about, too dismal and inconsequential to bother with. And then there's the matter of the eruptive 1960s, which has its own mixed legacy. That decade that the 1970s backed away from in many respects, the same decade that became the touchstone for the backlashing "cultural wars" that have raged on these shores ever since.

The Sixties had been — by some reckonings — a cultural apex. Which is why, if you take the mythology at face value, the dudes who would eventually become known as The Residents uprooted themselves from Shreveport, Louisiana to move to Haight-Ashbury — to where things were really "happening" — in the latter half of the decade in question. They reputedly moved there looking to be their own network of filmmakers and artists, but eventually wound up being a band, or some "multi-media collective" for whom music was the central component. But initially they arrived in the Bay Area just in time to witness the very thing they were seeking fade into a dismal travesty of its former potential.

This being the Residents, you never know what to take at face value. Maybe the whole backstory part is a load of horseshite, who knows for sure? At any rate, the cover of their 1974 debut album seemed to send a fairly clear signal about how they felt about the matter...

Further driving the message home, they followed in a couple years later with Third Reich 'n Roll. The cover, with its depiction of Dick Clark as a Gestapo commandant, was a first-rate stoke of audacity and provocation; especially seeing how the punk-rock cliché of playing ironic and light with Nazi imagery was still a year or two away. Likewise for the album's opening overture, in which Chubby Checker's exhortations from "The Twist" are barked out in German, sounding for all the world more like a set of drill instructions than an invitation to party. But beyond that, the Third Reich theme puts in few appearances, save for a couple of spates of battlefield sound effects that crop up between songs. The album itself contained a medley of tunes that had been, as the liner notes testified, "shamelessly lifted from their memory of top forty radio of the Sixties" — often rendered in the most creepy or horrendous way possible, if not turned completely inside-out. "96 Tears," "Light My Fire," "Hey, Jude" and about twenty others are all duly massacred, to say nothing of the band's sinister rendition of The Syndicate of Sound's "Little Girl," and the passing nod given to "The Ballad of the Green Berets."







True, this sort of thing wasn't wholly without precedent, since Third Reich 'n Roll chiefly it owed its "pop satire" premise to the "freak-out" excursions of Zappa's Mothers of Invention and Captain Beefheart had pioneered some years previously. But with Zappa and Beefheart, you always had the impression that no matter how loosely they played with established pop genres or formulae — be it Zappa's doo-wop parodies or the Captain's fractured blues — the artists harbored some love for their inspirational sources. With Third Reich 'n Roll, it's a far murkier matter, and the listener has a difficult time gauging how the Residents felt about the songs they chose, let alone the era those songs represented. One detects, at the very least, a deep and darkly-tinged sense of ambivalence. The "atrocities on parade" violence the band does to its source material, the acts of musical dismemberment committed, all seem a little too wanton. Sentiment and nostalgia, the listener might conclude, had absolutely nothing to do with it.

The Residents would have a long, perplexing, cultish career in the decades that followed. But in retrospect, the timing of Third Reich 'n Roll couldn't have been more appropriate. Sure, rock'n'roll had been the soundtrack of the youth culture of the 1960s, the product and the embodiment of a massive cultural and demographic shift. Still, many had figured (or hoped, perhaps) it was passing fad. By the time the '70s had rolled around, the major labels were mobilizing huge amounts of resources into the trend that had proven itself Commercially Viable for the long haul. The music gained a central presence on the FM airwaves — especially as college stations sprouted up in less metropolitan locales, devoting much of their programming to a proto-AOR format. And in 1972, Elektra Records released the original Nuggets compilation, a collection of '60s garage-rock classics sported a number of tunes that would later helped inspire punk's "back-to-basics" musical ethos.



[   Part Two >>>   ]

Look Good in Ruins (or: Twenty-five Tangents about Bowie in "Berlin")

1.

By all accounts, he had to get away from L.A. That much is a matter of undisputed public record. Some claim it was little more than a tax dodge, but others argue it was Bowie's attempt at breaking the maeslstrom of drugs and increasing psychosis that was consuming his life -- the obsession with Aleister Crowley, the traffic, escalating paranoia, the $500-per-diem cocaine habit supplemented by a diet of milk and peppers. Or maybe it was all of the above. But it had to start with leaving, getting out and getting away, extricating oneself from certain endangering circles, breaking with destructive habits and everything that fuels or enables them, and hopefully changing course and salvaging what's left of one's creative energies before it's too late. First to Switzerland, then -- eventually -- to Berlin. Leaving Los Angeles and all of its snares and poisonous associations behind. To hell with it all. Looking back, he would later say of Los Angeles, "The fucking place should be wiped off the face of the planet."


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2.

No big surprise, really, that Bowie would inevitably wind up in Berlin. He'd been enthralled with Germany for some time -- fascinated, as some recent recorded comments and reputed gestures suggested, to a worrisome or problematic degree. He was deeply taken with its art and its music, with the decadent cabaret culture of the Weimar era, and -- more alarmingly -- with a certain sordid chapter of its 20th-century history.

But mainly it seemed like a good place to go to detox and collect one's wits. Bleak, depressed, somewhat coldly (and dingily) modern, furtively wrestling with its own history in the most repressed of ways, physically divided, socially and politically adrift in the throes of its Cold War limbo. That was the impression of the place as it existed at the time, anyway – the picture that the word "Berlin" commonly painted in a person's mind. A "come-down" city if ever there was one. You wander down a given city street, only to come to its sudden and abrupt end, the point of stoppage at which you find yourself facing the Wall. Some histories aren't so easily left behind, some histories leave harsh reminders.


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3.

It was Christopher Isherwood who put the idea of moving to Berlin into Bowie's head. Bowie had long been a fan of Isherwood, whose Goodbye to Berlin had undergone a recent revival in popularity from loosely providing the inspiration for the musical Cabaret. Attending the Los Angeles stop of the Station to Station tour in 1976, Isherwood and artist David Hockney had made their way backstage to converse with the singer afterward. The topic of Berlin came up. Isherwood would later claim that he tried to disabuse Bowie of the notion of going there, going so far as to dismiss the city as "boring." No matter, as it prompted Bowie to decide that a lack of distractions and some anonymity were what he needed to clear his head, and it wasn't much later that he started packing his bags.


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4.

Bowie wasn't the only one fascinated by Berlin in the 1970s. Far from it. A quick survey of the American cultural landscape revealed that a certain number of people in the U.S. shared a similar interest. Lou Reed's Berlin LP might've played some small part in the matter, with the way it sketched its setting in the gloomiest and starkest of tones. And there was also the popularity of the Broadway and film productions of Cabaret. Plus, the novels of Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass sold modestly well, with the films of Herzog and Wertmüller and Fassbinder and Wenders drawing crowds at the cinema in New York and reviews from urbane film critics.

As far as how the idea of Berlin was conceived and held in the American public imagination -- it represented something, must've served as some kind of metaphor. But a metaphor for what? Nobody ever said precisely, and perhaps nobody actually knew. Something having to do with trauma and unthinkable sins, with atonement and the weight of history, about rebuilding from the wreckage without looking back, of not being able to speak of the past, of living in a historical limbo. And about modernity. Because Berlin seemed deeply modern, but in a way that was as hard-won and enburdened as any form of modernity could be.


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Frenzies of Renown

"Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy. And Ethel M. Kennedy shot Judith Birnbaum. And Judith Birnbaum shot Elizabeth Bochnak. And Elizabeth Bochnak shot Andrew Witwer. And Andrew Witwer shot John Burlingham. And John Burlingham shot Edward R. Darlington. And Edward R. Darlington shot Valerie Gerry. And Valerie Gerry shot Olga Giddy. And Olga Giddy shot..."

- J.G. Ballard, “The Generations of America"

"The Andy Warhol prophecy of 15 minutes of fame for any and everyone blew up on our doorstep."

- Lance Loud

Altamont, post-Tet Vietnam, the Manson trail, Attica, skyjackings on an almost daily basis, economic decline. What the hell happened? It wasn't supposed to be like this, living in America in the late twentieth century. The economic affluency and social certainty of the post-War boom, the ascendant "American Way of Life" of a decade prior had pointed to another horizon, to an entirely different future. The outlook of that era couldn't have been more optimistic, more assured.

The artist of that earlier, not-too-distant past had been Andy Warhol. Everyone knows the artist's Greatest Hits -- the parades of soup cans, Brillo boxes, gunslinging Elvises, etcetera. All the flat, emblematic, serialized signifiers and mass-produced objects of a new, modern consumerist society blankly mirrored back to itself. But behind all the sharp and glimmering surfaces of those objects lay a shadow; that shadow being death -- death imported into the fabric of modern life in new and improved ways. There was the enshrinement of the suicided sex symbol, then the first lady in numbed and unimaginable shock on a certain fateful day in Dallas. Death, death and still more death. State-mandated death by electric chair, and self-actualized death from leaping off of a skyscraper. Death in car crashes, in plane crashes, and lurking in tainted tins of tuna fish.

Perhaps one can invoke only so much death and morbidity before fate itself reciprocates by finding a place for you in its Rolodex. For Warhol, death would arrive one June afternoon in 1968 in the form of three slugs from a .32 calibre pistol, the pistol wielded by disgruntled and deranged ex-associate Valerie Solanas. Briefly and officially declared dead by doctors after the shooting, Warhol managed to survive the attack.



Andy's chest.

In his 1975 autobiography, Warhol would write, "In the '60s everybody got interested in everybody. In the '70s everybody started dropping everybody. The '60s were clutter. The '70s are very empty." In the end, he was most likely talking about himself. After the shooting, Warhol began living a more guarded and less accessible existence. Some would argue that the latter part of the statement very much sums up the artists's career during the 1970s. No more art with a grim or ironically critical subtext. The 'seventies for Warhol were the decade in which making art meant making money, and the artist found that he could do this by simply resting on his laurels, settling into a formulaic signature style, and cranking out portraits of celebrities, socialites, and wealthy collectors.¹ He'd also spend the decade toadying to glamorous and powerful patrons (among whom could be counted Empress Farah Dibah Pahlavi and her husband, the Shah of Iran), and hanging out with the likes of Bianca Jagger and Liza Minnelli at Max's KC or Studio 54. And then there was launch of his own show-biz/society magazine Interview, a publication devoted to aimless chit-chat with people who were famous, or angling to become famous.


█ █ █

One good way to become famous in America during the 1970s was to shoot somebody who was famous. Preferably an elected official. You didn't need a political motive. The target didn't have to be someone who was especially beloved by the public. You didn't even need to be a decent enough marksman to properly finish them off. None of that mattered, because it still made for good theater. Ask Arthur H. Bremer. A socially maladjusted and marginally employable young man hailing from Milwaukee, Bremer originally set out to shoot president Richard Nixon (who was running for re-election in 1972), but wound up shooting would-be Democratic contender George Wallace, instead.

Wallace, for those who need a reminder, was the two-term governor of the state of Alabama. In the prior decade, he’d attained notoriety for having opportunistically opposed desegregation. He'd physically blocked enrollment of black students at the University of Alabama in 1963, and had defiantly proclaimed, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." In 1972, he was making his third bid for the presidency, this time running on the Democratic ticket. Regarded as the "Spoiler from the South" by the press, Wallace had proven a formidable contender. He was, by one journalist's description, "a Southern populist of the meanest streak," and in 1972 he posed a considerable threat to both the Democratic ticket and to president Richard Nixon. On the campaign trail, he stumped on a staunch law-and-order plank, and vociferously decried the increased liberalism, civil disorder, and "moral decay" of the 1960s. All of which met with a warm welcome with Nixon’s "silent majority."




Wallace, squaring off with the feds at the University of Alabama in 1963

Wallace's run for the White House was, of course, troubling for some Americans. Even though by 1972 he'd denounced his prior pro-segregationist platform, Wallace proved that he wasn't above exploiting the racial tensions surrounding the federally-mandated school busing program for his own political gain. His campaign speeches were the epitome of unbridled demagoguery -- podium-thumping screeds of anti-federal rhetoric aimed at the intrusive, do-gooder meddling of the "briefcase totting," "pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington," interlaced with mockery of a diffuse and unnamed elite of "hypocrites" and "intellectual snobs" who reputedly shaped the nation’s social and economic policies.

To the alarm of many in the press and public at large, Wallace’s message found a broad and receptive audience, particularly among disenfranchised or alienated blue-collar and middle-class voters. On the campaign trail he met with enthusiastic and overflowing crowds when he appeared at rallies in Wisconsin and Michigan. Covering the Democratic primaries for Rolling Stone magazine, journalist Hunter S. Thompson declared, "George Wallace is one of the worst charlatans in politics," further observing: "But there is no denying his talent for converting frustration into energy. ...The frustration was there, and it was easy enough to convert it -- but what then?" The danger, Thompson recognized, was that Wallace was ultimately "stirring up more anger than he knew how to channel." ²

Not that any of that mattered to Artie Bremer, he was just looking to make a name for himself. He'd first set out with Richard Nixon in mind as his target. For weeks he shadowed Nixon's campaign stops, chronicling his journeys in a diary as he went. Hapless and unfocused in his stalking, there was one aspect of his task that he was deeply attentive to -- his appearance. Bremer wanted to make sure he did the job in style. He didn't want to be taken for some disheveled loser or -- even worse -- some sort of hippie. He put a great deal of thought and effort into his wardrobe and his grooming in order to meet each opportunity to shoot the president looking like a normal, clean-shaven, patriotic citizen.




Bremer, photographed by security at a pair of rallies in the late spring of 1972

At one point, spying Nixon’s car outside the American embassy in Ottawa, Bremer realized that he had been caught by surprise and wasn't properly dressed for the occasion. He dashed back to his hotel room to change and smart himself up, returning to the embassy to find that Nixon had already departed. Furious with himself, he wrote in his diary:

“I wanted to shock the shit out of the [Secret Service] men with my calmness. .... All these things seemed important to me, were important to me, in my room. I will give very little if ANY thought to these things on my future attempts. After all does the world remember if Sirhan’s tie was on straight?”

Yet, attending a Nixon rally a day later, he witnessed the same Secret Service personnel targeting rank-and-file protesters, and noted incredulously, "WOW! If I killed him while wearing a sweatty tee-shirt, some of the fun & Glamore would defionently be worn off [sic x 4]."

But eventually Bremer did draw the attention of Nixon's security detail, which prompted him to quickly change plans. After briefly considering Democratic frontrunner George McGovern, he instead set his sights on Wallace. In his diary, Bremer bemoaned the diminished media coverage his lower-profile target would attract, yet that didn’t dissuade him from contemplating what sort of clever one-liner he'd deliver before pulling the trigger.³ Within a week of trailing Wallace, he shouldered through the crowd in a shopping center parking lot in suburban Laurel, Maryland, approaching the candidate as he shook hands with supporters after a campaign speech. At close range, he emptied his revolver, shooting Wallace four times and critically injuring three bystanders.






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In much the same way that acts of terrorism are efforts to intervene in the machinations of history or global politics by way of the "communicability of images" that surround such events, so too can an attempted assassination -- no matter how botched or incoherently motivated -- be regarded as an effort to disrupt the hierarchy of society’s symbolic order. If political assassinations in the U.S. of the 1960s were unanimously spoken of in terms of martyrdom and "national tragedy," then in the decade that followed they often took on an element of absurdity. Perhaps it comes down to the power of contemporary cultural myths, and the deflation of same that transpired in the 1970s. One such myth being that in a supposedly classless society any citizen could "grow up and become President." If anything, the 1960s and 1970s provided frequent reminders that, instead, it was much easier to be the person who grew up to take a shot at the President.

As with Warhol, George Wallace survived the shooting; although the attack would derail his bid for the presidency and leave him a paraplegic for the remainder of his life. Arthur Bremer would receive his desired 15 minutes of fame, which ended up translating into a 65-year prison term. Upon sentencing, Bremer reportedly told the court, "Looking back on my life I would have liked it if society had protected me from myself."

Shortly thereafter, somewhere on the West Coast, aspiring screenwriter Paul Schrader wasn’t doing so well. Estranged from his wife and living out of his car, Schrader found himself contemplating the emotional effects of loneliness on the male psyche. He had also been reading Bremer's newly published diaries, and from there he got it in mind to write a script about an existentially adrift NYC cab driver. The resulting film, as we all know, would become a huge and controversial success a few years later -- controversial due to its brutally violent content as its use of a former Disney child actress playing the role of a twelve-year-old hooker. The actress was Jodie Foster, who would inspire an amorous fan from Colorado by the name of John Hinckley to begin plotting ways of gaining her attention.

"And Olga Giddy shot Rita Goldstein. And Rita Goldstein shot Bob Monterola. And Bob Monterola shot Barbara H. Nicolosi. And..."

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NOTES:

1. This was, as art critic Matthew Collings has called it, Warhol's "doing uncritical portraits of anyone who could pay period."

2. It's been argued that Wallace was an early pioneer of the contemporary "politics of rage" -- the backlash rhetoric that has been the primary parlance of the culture war waged by American conservative movement over the past 3 decades. It was for this reason that historian Dan T. Carter declared Wallace "the most influential loser in twentieth-century American politics."

3. In keeping with the culture of paranoia at the time, it bears pointing out that this account (diary excerpts in particular) has been contested. There were at the time a number of conspiracy theories surrounding the attempt of Wallace’s life -- theories hailing from both the Left and the Right ends of the political spectrum. Records show that in the hours following the shooting, Nixon and his aides were scrambling to find a way to plant evidence that would tie Bremer to the campaign of Nixon's leading Democratic opponent, Senator George McGovern. For this reason, the American author Gore Vidal would soon assert in the pages of the New York Review of Books that Bremer’s diaries were a fraud, alleging that that had been authored by one of Nixon's henchmen and planted among Bremer's belongings by the C.I.A.

Heroisch

Literal:



Ironic:



Literal: