Romancing the Looky-Loos
UNBREAK MY HEART, AN OVERTURE
Two nights ago, I was talking with some local artists about things that used to be cool and weren’t anymore—things that we missed. These artists were mostly kids, so they missed some really stupid stuff, I thought, like Adam Ant and giant shoulder-pads in women’s clothes. I told them that I missed “standing alone”—the whole idea that “standing alone” was an okay thing to do in a democracy. “Like High Noon,” I explained, and one of them said, “Oh, you could do that today . . . (pause for effect) . . . But first you’d have to form a Stand-Alone Support Group!” Everyone laughed at this, and I did too, because she was probably right, but I didn’t laugh that hard, because, at the time, I was proofing this book, which constitutes my own last, tiny fling at standing alone. It’s hardly High Noon, I know, but these essays do represent an honest effort to communicate the idiosyncrasy of my own quotidian cultural experience in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century—to recount some of that experience and, whenever possible, account for it.
The stories that this book tells populate the deep background of everything I have ever written, but I am telling them now because too often in the past I have spoken their lessons in the shorthand of authority. I spent my childhood, for instance, in the cacophonous, postwar milieu that gave birth to bebop—to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. It was my father’s world, and I remember it today with the brightness of a child’s vision. Its stresses and permissions are manifest in things that I have seen with my eyes and felt in my body, so I know, in a physical sense, what virtuosity and improvisation meant in that moment, as a style and a lifestyle, how necessary they seemed. Too many times, however, alluding to these complexities, I have simply written “Jackson Pollock,” and let it go at that. On too many other occasions, rather than trying to evoke the sense of queasy dread that has accompanied my every encounter with the diffuse network of proprietary surveillance that permeates this society, I have simply written “the diffuse network of proprietary surveillance, etcetera,” footnoted Foucault, and moved along.
This book is an apology for that sort of authoritarian behavior, because, in truth, I have never taken anything printed in a book to heart that was not somehow confirmed in my ordinary experience—and that did not, to some extent, reform and redeem that experience. Nor have I had any experience of high art that was not somehow confirmed in my experience of ordinary culture—and that did not, to some extent, reform and redeem that. So I have tried to reinstate the connective tissues here, and, in the process, have written an odd sort of memoir—a memoir without tears—without despair or exaltation—a memoir purged of those time-stopping exclamation points that punctuate all our lives.
So there are no Mozart Requiems here, nor masterpieces by Velázquez, no mind-bending sexual encounters or life-confirming acts of friendship, no bloody curtains or puking withdrawals, no heartbreaks, gunshots, humiliations, or bodies hanging in the bedroom. This is just the ordinary stuff—the ongoing texture of the drift, where, it has always seemed to me, things must be okay, or the rest will certainly kill you; and if I have any real qualification for the job that I have undertaken, it is that I have always been okay with everyday life and beguiled by the tininess of it—and beguiled as well by the tininess and intimacy of artistic endeavors—by The Bird with his horn and Velázquez with his tiny brush—and by the magical way these endeavors seem to proliferate.
When I was a kid, books and paintings and music were all around me, all the time, but never in the guise of “culture.” They were remarkable domestic accouterments that I encountered nowhere else. They were not to be found in the homes of my friends, and I can assure you that my family played no part in any “larger cultural community.” We played no part in anything, except America. We were just out there in the middle of it, on the edges of it, and on the move. So cut apart were we, in fact, that I can remember being amazed that whatever city we landed in, my folks could always find these little bookstores and record shops, art galleries and jazz clubs that no one else knew about. I thought of them as secret places where you could go and meet other people who were part of this secret thing.
So the whole cultural enterprise, when I was growing up, was at once intimate and a little mysterious. It took place at home, in other people’s homes, and in little stores. Yet, as we moved around, I begin to get a sense of how huge an enterprise it really was. Everywhere we went there were bookstores and record shops, art galleries and jazz clubs, where otherwise normal-looking people did all these cool things. And nobody noticed. Nobody knew anything about it! My teachers didn't know about it. The newspapers didn't know about it. My scoutmasters didn't know about it. The television didn't know about it. My friends didn't know about it. Even their parents didn't know about it. For a kid, this was awe inspiring. I was like Oedipa Maas, in The Crying of Lot 49, when she discovers the Tristero, because, thanks to my folks, I was privy to this vast, invisible, underground empire that, unlike the Tristero, trafficked in nothing but joy.
I chose to dwell in that underground empire for the first forty-seven years of my life—in record stores, honky tonks, art bars, hot-rod shops, recording studios, commercial art galleries, city rooms, jazz clubs, cocktail lounges, surf shops, bookstores, rock-and-roll bars, editorial offices, discos, and song factories. I lived the freelance life, in other words, and did okay at it, until 1987, when this nation, in its wisdom, decided that citizens who lived the way I did were no longer deserving of health insurance, by virtue of their needing it a lot. Faced with this reality, I began to take teaching gigs in universities and soon discovered that, for the length of my whole life, from birth until the day I stepped on campus, I had been consorting with the enemy. According to the masters of my new universe, all the cruelties and inequities of this civilization derived from the greed and philistinism of shopkeepers, the people who ran those little stores, who bought things and sold them, as I had done.
I found this amazing, because the problem for me had never been who sold the dumb object, or bought it (it was just a dumb object), but how you acquired the privilege of talking about it—how you found people with whom you could talk about it. My new masters were obsessed with things. So I wondered if they had known any shopkeepers. What, I wondered, would these people have thought of Sumpter Bruton, a tasty jazz drummer by night and shopkeeper by day, who ran the little record store where I learned about everything from bel canto to Blind Lemon to Erik Satie, who loved every kind of noise that human beings made—with the possible exception of the noises made by Neil Diamond? And what would they have thought of Mickey Ruskin and Hilly Kristal who ran great bars where new worlds were made, where you could talk about things and listen to music? And what would they have thought of Harold Garner and David Smith, whose bookstore was their baby and the site upon which I discovered Twentysix Gasoline Stations and Logique du sens, who would order weird books because they thought I might be interested in them, and never tell me if they weren’t returnable? The books I didn’t buy would just lay around, gathering
