(column - originally appeared in Vital)
[October 2002]


"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…"
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance


Howdy. I am, apparently, the new sheriff in these parts, or at least the Pop Culture editor of these here pages, and as such, I’ll be delivering reviews of all manner of cultural artifacts to you in the months to come.
But it’s not really fair to present my opinion to you without giving you some idea of what my tastes are, is it? After all, I could be offering my take on something you’ve never heard, seen or read – telling you it’s the greatest – when in reality it’s the most unreasonable piece of crap in the world. My friends will tell you that is exactly my modus operandi.

So here, though any of the ten may be removed from the list before these words see the light of day, here is a list of things that have insinuated their way into my life of late:

The Proud Highway – Hunter S. Thompson
Autobiography of A Brown Buffalo – Oscar Acosta
Before he became an icon to furry drug-loving iconoclastic freaks everywhere, Hunter Thompson was a bright-eyed young and fierce writer, idolizing Fitzgerald and capable of turning out prose with a ‘high keening sound’. These letters, to friends and editors and faceless corporations alike prove his talent, offering us a glimpse of the author before he started believing the press that termed him some sort of counterculture messiah.

Oscar Acosta was a running buddy of Thompson’s, a kindred soul in an odd time. He is portrayed as the ‘300-pound Samoan attorney’ in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but is much less the one-dimensional drug fiend and pervert portrayed in those pages (and the surprisingly faithful 1998 movie, directed by Terry Gilliam). In Brown Buffalo, Acosta recounts his life, from growing up a outcast and clarinet virtuoso among the Mexicans and Okies in Riverbank, California to leading a Chicano revolution. Both of the books offer me inspirational tales, Horace Greeley-like fables about growing up with vision and determination, what the old folks called grit – and they both make me want to write my own book.

So does Beneath The Underdog by Charles Mingus, the memoirs of the esteemed bassist and composer. Mingus led a mighty interesting life, growing up in the Watts of the early half of the last century and drifting through a life filled with the same sorts of ne’er-do-wells Malcolm Little (not yet X) would hang with on the other side of the country – pimps, hookers, grifters, junkies and the like. Like Acosta’s autobiographical work, Beneath The Underdog covers an era of the author’s life pre-fame, and is doubtless much more interesting for it – after all, how many more tell-all autobiographies do we need to wade through to discover that the road of stardom is a horribly lonely one?

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung – Lester Bangs
If it seems trite for a rock critic to pick the collection of pieces by a man who is frequently referred to as a ‘legendary critic’ as a favorite, I apologize. Thing is, it’s trite but true. This book, compiled by his literary executors and edited by fellow ‘legendary’ critic Greil Marcus, offers something most criticism doesn’t: the view of a fan who is as passionate about the things he reviews as the people who read him are.

Like every cultural artifact, there’s bejillions of other books I recommend and namecheck: some more – ‘Rule Of The Bone’ by Russell Banks; the works of the Beats (primarily the ‘Big Three’ of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, but also people like Richard Brautigan; ‘Gulcher’ by Richard Meltzer; ‘A Fan’s Notes’ by Frederick Exley.

The Mekons - Rock & Roll A group of malcontented Britons discover America after a career that started during the first wave of punk back in the late seventies (and "Where Were You?", a blistering single), and ran hesitatingly through an early-eighties embrace of the hard country of Hank Williams and Gram Parsons, igniting with this record in 1989 in which our heroes discover that rock is a commodity, U2 are phonies and Elvis is still the King (or at least our reason for being – pro and con). The angular punk guitars are gone by now, replaced by the quiet roar of arena guitars and a full sound, but the lyrics remain smart’n smarmy as always ("The fancy shirt I wore is just lying in the drawer/the girl I used to sleep with I don't see her anymore", they tweak Bono in "Blow Your Tuneless Trumpet", "We don't want the glamour the pomp and the drums/the Dublin messiah scattering crumbs"

The Mighty Mofos - Sho’ Hard Despite the knife-stabbing pain that shot through my ear and into my brain from a particular note cum feedback blast that guitarist Ernie Batson delivered regularly, they’re best live band I’ve ever seen. Despite the fact that these long-time favorite sons of the Minneapolis cognoscenti rarely leave the Twin Cities and have only released three works as the Mofos in a decade-plus (there are a couple more from an earlier outfit called the Hypstyrz), this LP (I’m not sure that it was ever released as a CD) resonates with heartfelt riff-songs about playing rock and roll way past the age where it’s considered cool ("Dreams Die Hard"), the romance borne of bars ("Screw", a cover of the Small Faces’ "Afterglow") and the general ennui of the times when you’re involved in neither ("Another Bad Day"). Building on the frames of classic sixties pop-punk as filtered through the giant amplifiers of arena-rock, the Mofos managed a classic.

I change favorite records like some people change hairstyles. I’ve written separate essays naming ‘Let It Be’ by The Replacements, ‘Oar’ by Skip Spence and ‘Henry The Human Fly’ by Richard Thompson as my desert island choices and the last hree CDs I’ve been listening to are by Pharoah Sanders, Swamp Dogg and the Germs. Some others – ‘Marquee Moon’ by Television; ‘#1 Record/Radio City’ by Big Star; ‘Double Nickels On The Dime’ by The Minutemen; ‘Kind Of Blue’ by Miles Davis; the works of the Grifters; the works of Sun Ra; ‘Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)’ by Brian Eno; ‘Exile On Main Street’ by the Rolling Stones.

Stranger Than Paradise (dir: Jim Jarmusch) I could pick any of Jarmusch’s films, really, but this one wins because of Ezter Balint’s winning performance as a visiting Hungarian cousin with a Screamin’ Jay Hawkins fixation. Shot in vignettes on available remaindered film stock, the pacing of this movie is nigh unto glacial (a common Jarmusch trait), but like so much of everything I’m writing about in this column, as much of what’s omitted is meaningful as what’s included. A scene filmed at Cleveland’s Lake Erie Flats made me go look at them in person the first time I visited – even though I arrived at about 3am on January 2nd. The pilgrimage was about what you’d expect from watching the movie – portending of satori, but ultimately, just another sight.

Apocalypse Now (dir: Francis Ford Coppola) In true geek-fashion, I generally pick this as my favorite movie of all time. It’s geekish because it’s truly a fanboy sort of movie: like most comic book stores I’ve been to, there are no women to speak of in its initially released form and it takes on the macho-posturing tough battles between life and death and good and evil that pimply-faced adolescent boys everywhere think their lives will be.

Some other movies I like - the works of Robert Altman; ‘Two Lane Blacktop’ (dir: Monte Hellman); ‘Electra Glide In Blue’ (dir: James Guercio); ‘The Last Picture Show’ (dir: Peter Bogdanovich); the works of Jacques Tati; ‘Yojimbo’ and ‘Throne Of Blood’ (dir: Akira Kurosawa); the ‘Trinity’ films (dir: EnzoBarboni); the ‘Man With No Name’ trilogy (dir: Sergio Leone); the works of the Coen Brothers.

The Americans–Robert Frank(photos) Jack Kerouac writes in the foreword ‘Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world’ and I think he’s right. Frank’s photos – particularly these, but really all of his work – are a lot like koans in their willingness to give us as much meaning as we care to take.

Tulsa – Larry Clark(photos) I was lucky (and smart – it doesn’t tour very often, and the book version has been in and out of print since the early seventies) enough to catch this at the Milwaukee Art Museum when it came through a few years ago, after hearing it mentioned a seeming million times as some sort of cultural touchstone. And it is! The drug-loving squalor of the cusp between the happy vapid smiles of dope smokers and the snarling paranoia of needle speed users of these photos is as much an emblem of the end of the halcyon hippy days to me as Altamont, Manson or Nixon. Still ingrained in my mind, years after I saw it: a photo of a baby in a coffin, like some old-timey keepsake from the industrial revolution transported from those hardscrabble times to an era of plenty. Chilling stuff.

Some other art I like – the sculpture of Tim Hawkinson and Louise Nevelson; the canvas work of Mark Rothko, Stuart Davis and Andy Warhol; the photographs of J.H. Lartigue, Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston and Lee Friedlander and oh-so-much more.

Wow. There you go: a list of ten cultural artifacts that have moved me somehow, or at least seem like they have on this late summer day. I’m already second-guessing myself, but I have stop writing this sometime and turn it in.

Things I note: there aren’t a lot of films from outside the early seventies; there aren’t any modern forms of music like hip-hop or electronica; there’s no poetry; the art is almost entirely from the seventies. I cannot defend myself against the truth of these charges. I can only point again to the Emerson quote up there and tell you, gentle reader, that this list (and this entire section) is by no means intended to be an exhaustive primer on what I like, nor is it intended to be a set of hard rules for you, just a set of guidelines.

I hope that we’ll interact a bit, you and I, and from that, we’ll both learn about something new.