-I am no fan of hippie culture, but what makes the culture of the Dead truly odious is its cooptation by prep school kids who grow up to be bankers and other major movers of other people’s money. What riles is the readiness with which the Dead atmosphere (more than the actual music, the actual drugs, etc.) gives itself up to the smug, always already nostalgic leisure of this demographic. When I see tie-dye today I see it mainly as a class marker, doing work like an Izod alligator label used to do, but more passive aggressively.
-Songs sung by Bob Weir are mediocre at best (“Truckin’); most are execreble. Weir is also responsible for the band’s most cringy covers (“Dancing in the Street,” “Good Lovin’”), and for introducing a creepy Jimmy Buffet vibe that conflicts with (and is actually much more stupid than) the (to me) more attractive atmosphere of giggly dopiness that Jerry Garcia embodies.
-Nonetheless, the influence of the Dead on some of the greatest “slacker rock” bands of the 90s, particularly Pavement and the various incarnations of Will Oldham, is undeniable. There are several songs in particular that embody this quality, all sung by Jerry Garcia: Tennessee Jed, He’s Gone, Dire Wolf, Brown-Eyed Women, Mission in the Rain, miscellaneous Dylan covers (many of these songs don’t appear on studio albums, only in the now vast collection of authorized live recordings). It’s not hard for me to imagine Stephen Malkmus vamping through the semi-crescendoes and stops of Tennessee Jed, in particular. Indeed, Pavement sometimes sounds like the Dead plus Television, Malkmus like Garcia plus Verlaine.
-This kinship is actually not that surprising when one considers the inextricability of weed from the way Malkmus and Garcia both seem to imagine the effects of their composing, and likely from the composing itself.
-The Dead’s long live jams, which make up the bulk of the live recordings, are the essence of noodle, and sometimes almost astonishing in their monotony. However, there is a certain attraction to the way the band bends from one song to the next without stopping, and to the way these transitions continued to shift (i.e. using different songs) over the years of the band’s performances.
-I admire the Dead’s embrace of bootlegging culture. I’m sure many Deadheads consider it a loss, or irrelevant, that so many bootlegs are now official releases available for download, for money. Pearl Jam also went this route. But I wish a band or performer I really love and is a good live act—Elvis Costello comes prominently to mind—would do something like this, rather than just letting a few live recordings trickle out as he seems to be doing now.
-I’m fine with having never seen the Dead live. For one thing, they were never much to look at. Of all the bands of their vintage and, loosely, genre, the one I’d most like to have seen, by far, is The Band, whose every member was a point of interest—and who were much better looking.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Memorial for a Student
“The elements do not answer in the place where they are interrogated, or more exactly, as soon as they are interrogated somewhere, it is impossible to grasp them in their totality” –Jacques Lacan quoted by Shoshana Felman
I don’t feel as though I knew Scott very well, but there are sometimes paths of relationship between teachers and students that neither side understands completely.
I didn’t know him until his senior year, when I worked with him in a tiny seminar in the first semester and as advisor for his senior thesis project in the second. We spent a lot of time in my office, because the seminar was small enough to meet there and then we held our thesis meetings there. When he got to my office he usually seemed to be holding himself in, restraining an onslaught of thoughts and ideas that would soon overflow after a perfunctory period of listening to me try to frame the issues for our class discussion or conference. When I think of Scott he’s always in motion—striding into my office, yes, usually barefoot, rocking a bit in his chair as he stared at some point unseeable to the rest of us, or at least to me, and unleashed a pack of ideas about sound, music, identity, politics, identity politics, hip hop, Beck, M. I. A., Brittany Spears, Plato’s Phaedrus. Some Buddhists talk about imagining the self not as a container of thoughts, but as a point through which thoughts pass. For some reason when I think about Scott I think of my office as a point through which he passed, through which some, probably not all that many, of his thoughts passed. But it’s an image of movement, of direction, of energy. Of coming from and going to places that I had no access to, before and after glancing and invigorating points of contact.
Here’s something else that thinking about Scott helps me to see. Students recognize their incompleteness. Indeed, ideally, it energizes them. Some teachers teach because of the fantasy that they can offer their students some kind of completion. Others, like me, teach because of an equally phantasmatic identification with the students’ sense of incompletion, and their comfort with it. For me, Scott became a special embodiment of this capacity for being moved and motivated by things one doesn’t completely understand. Everytime Scott came into talk it was about something different. His continually palpable excitement and intelligence were in some ways the only continuous things about his intellectual life, for generally he’d show up wanting to talk--effusively, wondrously, skeptically, angrily--about something new.
As teachers, we have to set assignments for students, with due dates. Working with them on their senior theses, we sometimes have to cajole them into developing their ideas, staying focused, getting their drafts and final version in on time. This didn’t always work so well with Scott. Even as the final deadline approach, each week tended to bring in a new overall argument, a wholly new take on various facets of the phenomenon called pop music, as embodied in a frequently shifting set of figures and texts. He was one of those challenging students who can’t stop—can’t stop thinking, reading, writing, listening, feeling, talking. And here’s the thing: Scott threatened to blow my cover, reveal my secret—that I’m not that interested in making them stop. He knew so well that completion is a convenient fiction. He knew so well that minds don’t stop working because a week’s reading on the syllabus is done, because a page limit has been reached, because a due date has arrived. He probably knew, however unconsciously, how uncomfortable I was with the part of my job that demands that I be an officer of the law, that I impose limits and insist that certain conventions be followed.
And I probably knew that he knew. But at the time, we silently agreed to perform ignorance about all this knowledge. And I’m glad to have shared in this performance, and to have experienced the kind of pedagogical and personal relationship that it enabled.
I don’t feel as though I knew Scott very well, but there are sometimes paths of relationship between teachers and students that neither side understands completely.
I didn’t know him until his senior year, when I worked with him in a tiny seminar in the first semester and as advisor for his senior thesis project in the second. We spent a lot of time in my office, because the seminar was small enough to meet there and then we held our thesis meetings there. When he got to my office he usually seemed to be holding himself in, restraining an onslaught of thoughts and ideas that would soon overflow after a perfunctory period of listening to me try to frame the issues for our class discussion or conference. When I think of Scott he’s always in motion—striding into my office, yes, usually barefoot, rocking a bit in his chair as he stared at some point unseeable to the rest of us, or at least to me, and unleashed a pack of ideas about sound, music, identity, politics, identity politics, hip hop, Beck, M. I. A., Brittany Spears, Plato’s Phaedrus. Some Buddhists talk about imagining the self not as a container of thoughts, but as a point through which thoughts pass. For some reason when I think about Scott I think of my office as a point through which he passed, through which some, probably not all that many, of his thoughts passed. But it’s an image of movement, of direction, of energy. Of coming from and going to places that I had no access to, before and after glancing and invigorating points of contact.
Here’s something else that thinking about Scott helps me to see. Students recognize their incompleteness. Indeed, ideally, it energizes them. Some teachers teach because of the fantasy that they can offer their students some kind of completion. Others, like me, teach because of an equally phantasmatic identification with the students’ sense of incompletion, and their comfort with it. For me, Scott became a special embodiment of this capacity for being moved and motivated by things one doesn’t completely understand. Everytime Scott came into talk it was about something different. His continually palpable excitement and intelligence were in some ways the only continuous things about his intellectual life, for generally he’d show up wanting to talk--effusively, wondrously, skeptically, angrily--about something new.
As teachers, we have to set assignments for students, with due dates. Working with them on their senior theses, we sometimes have to cajole them into developing their ideas, staying focused, getting their drafts and final version in on time. This didn’t always work so well with Scott. Even as the final deadline approach, each week tended to bring in a new overall argument, a wholly new take on various facets of the phenomenon called pop music, as embodied in a frequently shifting set of figures and texts. He was one of those challenging students who can’t stop—can’t stop thinking, reading, writing, listening, feeling, talking. And here’s the thing: Scott threatened to blow my cover, reveal my secret—that I’m not that interested in making them stop. He knew so well that completion is a convenient fiction. He knew so well that minds don’t stop working because a week’s reading on the syllabus is done, because a page limit has been reached, because a due date has arrived. He probably knew, however unconsciously, how uncomfortable I was with the part of my job that demands that I be an officer of the law, that I impose limits and insist that certain conventions be followed.
And I probably knew that he knew. But at the time, we silently agreed to perform ignorance about all this knowledge. And I’m glad to have shared in this performance, and to have experienced the kind of pedagogical and personal relationship that it enabled.
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