Ken Tucker’s Pop Culture

For the immediate future, all blogging will be done, guaranteed almost daily, from

Ken Tucker’s Watching TV

http://watching-tv.ew.com/

Also, for more Tucker writing on different subjects, go to my Best American Poetry blog :

http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/ken_tucker/

And my Facebook page for links to my music reviews for NPR’s “Fresh Air with Terry Gross.”

Thank you.

Ken

Manny Farber, one of the 20th century’s greatest critics and a powerful painter, has died at age 91. Notice I didn’t just say “film critic”—Farber wrote primarily about the movies, but his collection of film criticism Negative Space is essential to understanding all modern, non-academic criticism. Farber established a tone, cleared a patch of cultural landscape, and filled it with more ideas, opinions, and attitude than a thousand reviewers and bloggers–not just in the movie genre but in music, television, book, and art criticism–will ever muster.
With the exception of Pauline Kael, Farber was probably the movie critic other movie critics most often quoted, particularly his hugely influential 1962 essay “White Elephant Art Vs. Termite Art,” which came as close to anything he wrote to boiling down his critical creed. In that piece, Farber positioned himself ferociously against what he called the “self-aggrandizing masterwork” that “treat[s] every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity.” In opposition to this he championed “termite art,” which “goes always forward eating its own boundaries… leav[ing] nothing in its path other than signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.”
At a time when crap nostalgia is routinely praised with unthinking effusiveness, it’s harder now to appreciate how daring and emboldening it was to read Farber’s championing of supposedly minor work such as the then-ignored Westerns of director Budd Boetticher and the face-slamming camera-work of director Sam Fuller.
As the years went by, Farber began writing less and painting more: many of them beautiful, bright-color still-lifes of everything from flowers to overhead views of toy train-track assemblies. Farber could paint the contents of a messy writer’s table with an unsentimental clarity that could move a viewer to tears. Surely some worthy appreciator of Farber—Dave Hickey or Sanford Schwartz, say—should write a book-length study of Farber’s artwork.
Others will write longer, better pieces than this one about Farber’s centrality in American criticism; these are merely my immediate reactions.
Taped to my wall is a quote from Farber that captures his pugnacity, clear-eyed romanticism, and inspirational fervor as well as anything:
“I get a great laugh from artists who ridicule the critics as parasites and artists manqués—such a horrible joke. I can’t imagine a more perfect art form, a more perfect career than criticism. I can’t imagine anything more valuable to do.”
Not many critics could—or would dare to—say such a thing today. One more reason why Farber will remain forever invaluable.
–Ken Tucker

In the space of a week, another great editor has died. First Ted Solotaroff, and now L. Rust Hills, dead at age 83 and one of the finest fiction and magazine editors, as well as one of America’s most neglected humorists. Hills’ run at Esquire, where he edited everyone from Norman Mailer to Raymond Carver, was covered pretty thoroughly in his Times obit.
I will speak up for Hills-as-humorist. As someone who has spent half his life quoting Hills’ axiom, “Cleaning up as you go along is half the fun,” I am squarely in the camp of Hills’ idealized “fussy man,” the sort of reader who found Hills’ 1972 book How To Do Things Right: The Revelations of a Fussy Man both rib-tickling and soul-satisfying. This collection of comic essays, gathered from Esquire, The New Yorker, and other publications, were models of the sort of precise, unadorned prose Hills valued in the more literary writers he edited, while also containing just the right amount of obsessive crazy-juice that would compel a man to explain the proper way to eat an ice-cream cone. (”First, revolve the cone through the full three hundred and sixty degrees, snapping at the loose gobs of ice cream […] Then, with the cone still ‘wound,’ which will require the wrist to be bent at the full right angle toward you, apply pressure with the mouth and tongue to accomplish the overall realignment, straightening and settling the whole mess.”)
In an essay such as “How To Refold A Map,” Hills can be read as a precusor to early Nicholson Baker, of the Mezzanine era, with Hills’ languid, meticulous descriptions of everyday objects yielding a fresh way to look at banal items. Looking back to writers preceding Hills, there was an element of Robert Benchley-ism to his advice, the sense that the world (frequently in the more immediate form of the family) was looking over his shoulder wondering why Husband/Daddy was being such a stick-in-the-mud, when of course what he was trying to do was nothing less than impose order upon an increasingly anarchic (or in Hills’ comic framework, messy) universe: “…You may have to inspect the road map carefully to determine which is the original crease. Use a flashlight at the picnic table, if necessary, if it’s getting late and the family is gathered around you, watching anxiously. Don’t hurry. Be careful. Explain it all to the young ones-the theory, the practice, the inevitability of the second fold after the first fold, the beauty of the conception…”
There was another side to Hills’ comic writing, however, an aspect that may today strike us as being at odds with his “fussy man” strictures: The smoking, hard-drinking, priapic suburban man he was, or at least suggested he was, when he devised such Platonic concepts as “the Three-Legged Stool, supported by Booze, Coffee, and Smokes, which interdepend essentially.” And then there is Hills’ deathless comment on the essential problem with those who engage in adultery: “Split-second timing is required of the sort of people who may not even wear a watch.”
Like the magazine era over which he commanded such influence throughout the 1960s, the humor writing Hills practiced will seem ever-more quaint as the years go by, I suspect. But re-reading How To Do Things Right after hearing of Hills’ death, I was exhilarated once again at the tangy zest of his approach to both writing and life, of his enviable raffishness, of a WASP-y charm that makes the TV show Mad Men seem like a kiddie, aspirational text when compared to Hills’ artful, effortless embodiment of it.

–Ken Tucker

It has been reported that the extraordinary science-fiction writer, poet, and essayist Thomas M. Disch has died—he is said to have commited suicide on the 4th of July. He was 68.
The general public may be familiar with his best-known credit: He wrote the novella The Brave Little Toaster, which became the acclaimed 1987 Disney cartoon. But Disch also wrote ten science fiction novels and scores of short stories that placed him at the center of his genre for their uncommon literary adroitness, dry wit and clear-eyed skepticism. Go read the lyrically beautiful On Wings Of Song (1979) immediately, please. He also wrote a unique trilogy of mordant thrillers: The Businessman: A Tale of Terror (1984), The M.D.: A Horror Story (1991), and The Priest: A Gothic Romance (1994).
Disch’s primary calling, however, was as a poet. He published a half-dozen collections characterized by a mastery of poetic form, and in 1995 published a collection of essays, The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters, that was overflowing in its glowing appreciation and ruthless criticism of what he considered the best and worst tendencies in modern poetry. I keep it on my bedside table for periodic re-reading and inspiration.
I’ll quote just one apercu among many from that collection that all critics would do well to heed: “The larger value of negative criticism—beyond the sigh of relief that ‘At last someone has said it’—is that, without it, any expression of delight or enthusiasm is under suspicion of being one more big hug in that special-education classroom where poets minister to each others’ needs for self-esteem.”
My small request is that you read the full range of what Disch wrote and fully appreciate his art, craft, and passion. It was the failure of an audience to appreciate the scope of what Disch accomplished that, I’m willing to bet, was one cause of his sad, too-early death.

Unlike many who will pay tribute to Paul Nelson, the great rock critic and editor who died earlier this week, I can’t claim a close friendship, but I knew Paul well enough–in print and in person–to know these things.

First, he was a remarkable writer; his prose had a quality of lucid calm with an undercurrent of deep passion. You never read even the smallest capsule record review by Paul without knowing immediately that he had listened to that music over and over, had given it the full benefit of his concentration, and had attempted to figure out the artist’s best intentions and come to some conclusion as to whether he or she had achieved them. He treated music the way he treated people—with great respect and a sharp instinct for understanding motives and dreams.

Second, he was a brave and kind man who managed to be serious and funny in equal measure. He was one of the first editors who took my rock writing seriously and published it in Rolling Stone and Circus Magazine when he was record-review editor there. I will always remember hearing his voice on the phone, that tone he had in which words seemed to be emerging from a simultaneous sigh of worldweariness, a groan of barely-suppressed shyness, and a surge of enthusiasm, saying to me, “Soooo, you wanna write a review about Television and the Ramones?” I dropped my reviews off in person at the Stone offices whenever I could, just to talk with Paul for a little while, hoping to pick up some advice, hear some stories, get some recommendations on what I should be listening to and reading. It wasn’t until years later that I realized what a heroic battle he was constantly waging against other forces at Rolling Stone who didn’t often agree with his choice of lead reviews, reviewers, or their opinions. Paul fought for all of that, for all of us, yet he rarely let on how besieged and lonely his battle could be. He lived by a code of honor that he applied to himself and no one else, and it was as steadfast as that of any fictional character he admired, and usually stronger than most of the artists he profiled.

I knew him well enough to visit his small apartment a few times, to watch Sam Peckinpah’s “The Killer Elite” with him (we shared a fondness for even Peckinpah’s supposedly minor work), and browse through his collection of first-edition hardboiled fiction. I was one of countless people who went out to restaurants with Paul, excursions that were characterized by his ordering two Cokes at the start of every meal and a steady amount of smoking before, after, and sometimes during the eating. When I lived in L.A. in the late ’70s, Paul stayed with my wife and I in our small West Hollywood apartment, and my wife remembers that he made a point of not just talking music-and-detectives; the rock-critic version of fan-boy communication–but of finding out what she was interested in and talking about that as well.

I’d say that the pieces Paul wrote about the artists he admired most about Jackson Browne and Ross Macdonald and Warren Zevon and Bob Dylan and numerous others, as well as the first-rate work he did to pay the bills, will live on forever, but that may be a foolish hope. Paul was working in the most evanescent of pop-culture genres at a time when few people thought to recognize and preserve such work. An anthology of Paul’s work now would be of immense value to current and future pop-music writers; there is so little of his sincerity, his measured generosity, and his intense working-out of aesthetic arguments in rock criticism these days that I cannot help but believe Paul’s example would help serve as both edification and encouragement to many writers and readers, now and forever.