Artists crossing mediums

Tom Waits is the guest editor of the July 2010 MOJO music magazine. Many of the issue's features possess a Tom Waits seal of approval: a small picture of a a somewhat vaudevillean Waits, raising his hat to us over his shoulder, surrounded by the words 'Tom Waits Approved and Edited'.

Waits is an artist whom I have long admired, but I've always viewed him from a slight distance. When one of my housemates in a giant student dwelling I lived in a good few years back tried to get me more into Bowie, I joked that there was only room in my life for one weird old musical male at a time (and at that time, the position was most thoroughly filled by Bob Dylan). And looking back on my musical obsessions, this quip actually holds a lot of truth. My major ones tend to run successively rather than simultaneously - with offshoots and sidelines, of course.

Identification as a dimension of one's engagement with art is something that I've taken a long time to come around to. I still disagree with many of the ways in which the phenomenon is conceptualised, but I no longer believe that it can be dispensed with entirely. My engagements with Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen in particular have crucially involved identification, albeit of two very different sorts.

Which takes me back to Tom Waits. I have never felt quite able to accept the invitation to the particular kind of identification that the Waits persona might be seen to offer. I am neither a great raconteur nor a drinker, so straight away I'm at a disadvantage! I feel as though I can understand and appreciate the appeal and artistry of Waits in a limited way, but I remain on the outside looking in. And whilst I think some art will deliberately strive to keep all its audience in such a position, in the case of Waits this is my particular position and not the only one available. I see that Waits has a brilliant and coherent artistic voice, part of which is a set of vocal chords whose timbre tells as much of a story as any story they tell, but I remain aware that it is not nor ever could be my voice. To which I must immediately add that I don't think for one minute I could 'achieve' the voice of Dylan or Springsteen. What I mean is that I would (do?) elect them to speak on my behalf. They articulate what I believe (and lead me to a greater understanding of what I believe) in a way that Waits does not.

So much by way of introduction (the above is something I've been grappling with for a while as I try to write a book about, amongst other things, how we engage with characters in the Hollywood cinema). What I really want to talk about emerges from the fact that in this particular issue of MOJO, we learn about the art that Waits enjoys: music, but also novels and movies (my three key mediums). Why do the artistic tastes of artists hold such fascination for us? To some readers the answers to this question may seem obvious, but I'd still like to separate them out, and end with a point that I'm particularly interested in.

1. We are interested in the tastes of anyone we respect/love. Love makes us want to understand another better, and respect can make us want to be more like them. Both desires will be fed by immersing ourselves in the culture that has helped to produce the object of our esteem/affection. In the case of an artist, who produces her/his own art, then if we harbour artistic aspirations of our own, then this takes on the specific form of reading what he/she reads to try and be able to write like he/she writes (insert references to other mediums as appropriate).

2. If we enjoy the artworks of a particular artist so much, then pursuing what that artist identifies as informing context is a way of prolonging and extending our contact with the loved object(s).

3. If we wish to understand the artist's work better, the things that the artist is interested in may provide clues or even direct references, indicate abiding concerns, help us to understand the genre the artist is working in better, and so on.

(Before my fourth and more extended point: what did Waits actually choose? The cover CD, compiled by Waits, is like many other MOJO cover CDs in content (and I don't mean that as an insult), and echoes especially many of Bob Dylan's key musical reference points: the Delta blues of Son House, the country music of Hank Williams, the electric blues of Howlin' Wolf. The film picks are solid. I was pleased to see The Night of the Hunter in there, and the inclusion of Wise Blood made me more determined to get around to watching it (John Huston's adaptation of a Flannery O'Connor novel; I want to see if I can write something about Huston's adaptations of female Southern authors - he also adapted Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye). 'All Carl Dreyer films' was an impressive declaration - and Babe: Pig in the City the biggest surprise. Despite being 'Tom Waits Approved and Edited', though, some lazy rhetoric gets in there. We are told, for example, that Leaving Las Vegas's 'tragic denouement is a rumination on an age-old adage: life's too short'. The novels, like the music and film picks, lean heavily towards the American, and suggested a few things I'd like to follow up if I ever find the time, including a Leadbelly biography.)

Reading about Tom Waits's tastes in films and novels also got me thinking again about something that's been on my mind for a while. How well can the art of an artist, and its particular appeals, survive the transition across mediums? I'm sure that there is no general answer to this question, and it would have to be dealt with on a case by case basis (especially given that some artists successfully work in several different mediums - which is not to say that the appeal of their work in each medium is necessarily analogous). In doing so, however, we might discover some general principles.

I have yet to discover much about Bruce Springsteen's taste in movies. I do know a little about things he has read at various points in his career, and this has already led me to read Caril, an account of the Starkweather murders across Nebraska in the 50s. Reading this book, a pleasure in its own right, has filled in a bit of the background context of the album Nebraska for me (and it is also informing context for Malick's film Badlands, based loosely on the Starkweather murders - and Badlands in turn is context for Nebraska; for example, the latter draws images from the former). It also piqued my interest in Flannery O'Connor's output, after I read Springsteen's comment that 'There was something in those stories of hers that I felt captured a part of the American character that I was interested in writing about ... some sort of meanness'.

How well would Springsteen's tone and rhetoric transfer to the screen? Part of me thinks it might not be a felicitous transportation. To return to Dylan for a moment: I have yet to see a film associated with the man and his work that I have thought an unreserved success. Don't Look Back probably comes the closest, but Masked and Anonymous is meandering and pretentious, and I'm Not There seems to me to suffer from similar problems of diffusion (and I also think of Dylan more as a modernist than a postmodernist, but it's through the latter lens that Haynes's film treats Dylan and his persona(e)). One should never judge films one has not seen, but the prospect of sitting through Renaldo and Clara fills me with dread.

In the case of Dylan, I find that the captivating images, admonishments, phrases and textures of his songs are not served well by a visual medium or by the dramatic modes that one usually finds there. I would never accuse Dylan of indulgence in his musical output, but on the screen that's what I feel one is presented with. (I am prepared to acknowledge that this is partly a result of my being most attuned to and appreciative of dramatic fiction in film.)

Springsteen presents a different problem. The narrative is there, but it's too economical for a feature length narrative fiction film. 'Then I got Mary pregnant, and man, that was all she wrote/And for my nineteenth birthday, I got a union card and a wedding coat'. The temporal compression and pared-downness of detail is intrinsic to the effectiveness of the song. Linking the events through a rhyme and reporting them all in the space of a few seconds reinforces the idea of a causal relationship (getting your girlfriend pregnant means you must marry and support her - in the world that the song depicts) and of the protagonist's experience of looking back on a series of events that seemed both inescapable in their logic and rapid in their succession. If the narrative were expanded out so that we got a scene of lovemaking, then later a scene of revelation, then a wedding, and so on, the original effect would be lost. (I should add here though that thinking about how Springsteen might or might not transfer to the screen is what led me to articulate this small point about 'The River': like many thought experiments about art, it generates critical insights and helps one to better articulate the effects of the text as it exists.)

Listening to the voices of Springsteen's characters in his songs, I am able to respond to them in the way I intuit the song wants me to. These characters are telling me the stories of their lives. They are narrating and summarising their experiences. But if I had to accompany them for the duration of a dramatic fiction, and see them live their lives rather than just hear them talking about them, would I feel the same way about them?

This will have to remain an open question for now. I will close by saying that George Pelecanos definitely manages to achieve a lot of 'Springsteen moments' on the page in his novels. As for the movies, I think my investigation should begin with Sean Penn's The Indian Runner, the plot of which is extrapolated from the words of Springsteen's 'Highway Patrolman', one of the songs on Nebraska.

Notes on Springsteen, part one

Even though I'm not an American, no longer young, hate cars, and can recognize why so many people find Springsteen bombastic or histrionic (but not why they find him macho or jingoistic or dumb - that kind of ignorant judgement has plagued Springsteen for a huge part of his career, and is made by smart people who are actually a lot dumber than he has ever been), 'Thunder Road' somehow manages to speak for me.

Nick Hornby

It was quite a thrill yesterday to momentarily contribute to the output of Radio 4 rather than merely listening enthusiastically. On last week's Saturday Live, Tracy Chevalier (author of Girl with a Pearl Earring) chose Bruce Springsteen's 'The River' (taken from his 1980 album of the same name) as one of her 'Inheritance Tracks'. This week, the following e-mail was read out:

Far from disspelling American stereotypes, Miss Chevalier's tracks and musings served as a reinforcing catalyst. Bruce Springsteen in 'The River' sums up all that is bad about the USA: redneck racism and insular allegiance to a flag, not a free-world ideal, and a nation which shirks its responsibilities. The American Dream is merely an American delusion.

(Now it is just possible that the writer is saying that Springsteen is depicting and diagnosing 'redneck racism', rather than simply propagating it, but this was a ten-second but in a magazine-style programme, so dominant impressions are what we have to consider.) I could not let this go unchallenged. I went to the programme homepage, and fired off a comment. Imagine my delight when about twenty minutes later, my e-mail was read out, pretty much verbatim:

I have no idea why on Earth you chose to read out such an ill-informed dismissal of Bruce Springsteen. He might perhaps be accused of a brand of macho sentimentalism or unuseful nostalgia but the charge of racism leaves me baffled and rather angry.

But for someone with as much of an investment in Bruce Springsteen and his music as I have, these few words only mark the start of a conversation I would invite.

The original comment that the editors chose to broadcast is close to being a rant - especially as it claims to find all of the negative attributes it outlines contained in 'The River'. In that song, a man tells the story of his life: he gets his girlfriend pregnant, marries her, works construction, struggles later to find work, measures the distance that has grown between him and his wife, and remembers going down to the river with her. It's a highly condensed life-story, and the details that Springsteen uses to bring his sketch to life are objects ('a union card and a wedding coat') and emotions ('I just act like I don't remember/Mary acts like she don't care'). Macroeconomics play their part in the narrator's woes, but he simply states 'Lately there ain't been much work/On account of the economy', and leaves it at that (Simon Frith has noted that Springsteen's focus in his songs on 'individuals' fate[s]' make his brand of populism ambiguous). Whence 'redneck racism' or 'insular allegiance to the flag'?

In my reply I tried to acknowledge arguments that have been levelled against Springsteen and which I can see the reasoning behind, even if they are still arguments that I would still ultimately aim to counter. Saturday Live's stand-in presenter (the Reverend Richard Coles) got closer to aesthetic and cultural issues that I think are genuinely at stake when, after the original comment, he asked his guest, 'When you hear the Boss, Jodi [Picoult], do tears spring to your eyes and do you want to hoist the stars and stripes in front of your clapboard house with your apple trees nodding around?'

Immediately after firing off the e-mail I began to think I had conceded too much (see the Nick Hornby quote at the start). But that need not trouble us if, as I suggested above, we treat the above comments as simply the opening rhetorical moves in a much more extended discussion.

Unfortunately it has taken me longer than I though to write even this much. It's almost midnight, the last song on Nebraska has just started ('Reason to Believe'), and I need to go to sleep, so I shall have to end with a promise to continue this at a later date, in the I-hope-not-too-distant future.

I know you're lonely
For words that I ain't spoken
But tonight we'll be free
All the promises'll be broken
There were ghosts in the eyes
Of all the boys you sent away
They haunt this dusty beach road
In the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets
They scream your name at night in the street
Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet
And in the lonely cool before dawn
You hear their engines roaring on
But when you get to the porch they're gone
On the wind, so Mary climb in
It's a town full of losers
And I'm pulling out of here to win

'Thunder Road'

A collection of quotes

From an article in The Economist:

Universities are feeling the strain in various ways these days. With government funding under pressure, Cambridge is [...] considering tapping the bond market for the first time in its 800-year history, to raise some £300m for building projects. There is a massive debate about the purpose of higher education. At the heart of it all is a widespread perception that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are being unfairly barred from Britain's most famous universities, and thus must struggle harder than the more privileged to escape a lifetime of mediocre job prospects.

Which reminded me of this exchange in George Pelecanos's The Way Home (a haunting novel which I'm still trying to get my wife to read):

"Don't... don't compare yourself to me. Back in my day, with only a high school degree, you could still make something of yourself. But now there are two distinct societies, Chris, plainly separated. The educated and the uneducated. You don't just go to college to learn. You go to mingle and forge a permanent network with people who all move up the chain together. Don't go to college and there's going to be a ceiling on your earnings. The pool will be limited on who you date and marry. Not only will you probably live in a lower-income neighborhood, but so will your children, and their peers will be lower income, too. Don't you see how it works? There are people who strive to make it to the upper level of society and then there are the other people who stay down below."

"It was you who was always cracking on the lawyers and doctors in our neighbourhood. Saying how they came up from privilege and money, and how they had a leg up. Being all sarcastic about how they never got their hands dirty or broke a sweat. Like how you sweated every day."

The Way Home's epigraph is from Bruce Springsteen's 'My Father's House':

Last night I dreamed that I was a child

out where the pines grow wild and tall

I was trying to make it home through the forest

before the darkness falls

Pelecanos's Hard Revolution also has a Springsteen epigram, this time from 'Adam Raised a Cain' (on Darkness on the Edge of Town) - a song that also features in yet another Pelecanos novel, which my wife is currently reading - but in a part she hasn't read yet (I'm very excited about her getting to it):

Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain

Now he walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame

You inherit the sins, you inherit the flames

The last two lines quoted here definitely form part of the epigraph; I can't check it as HR is one of the GP novels that Pete owns. We have kind of a joint collection. I haven't yet found the movie equivalent of Springsteen, but I'd say Pelecanos is definitely the novel one.

We listened to some Springsteen tonight, but also to the Traveling Wilburys:

Well it's alright, riding around in the breeze

Well it's alright, if you live the life you please

Well it's alright, doing the best you can

Well it's alright, as long as you lend a hand

I'm slowly getting through Gaye Tuchman's Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University One of its epigraphs, from Robert Birnbaum, is:

An educational philosopher might claim that those things of greatest value are precisely those things that cannot be measured [...] If we cannot measure what is valuable, we will come to value what is measurable.

We watched Lifeboat this evening too. In Hitchcock's Films Revisited, Robin Wood, reviewing his earlier description of the movie, comments:

I would now wish to offer a more political reading, examining the film's very subversive critique of capitalist values: the way in which, by paralleling the Nazi captain and the American self-made millionaire, it suggests that fascism is an extension rather than the opposite of capitalist democracy. This is [...], however, too simple a formula for this extremely complex work, one of the guiding principles of which seems to be that every position, once established, is elsewhere qualified or contradicted.

The movie contains a very moving reading of a psalm that in any case never fails to move me, probably the most famous of all the psalms:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.