Jonathan Richman, A Man Among Gods

Jonathan Richman Live at the Henry Miller Memorial Library, May 16, 2010

I've loved Jonathan Richman for years and for various reasons, but I have to admit I never really got him, I don't think, until I finally saw him live.

As a punker, I adored the early Modern Lovers, having found "Government Center" on the Troublemakers weirdo compilation and a much-copied tape of the original Modern Lovers record via another John Cale-loving friend around the same time. Boy, did Jonathan have the cred from all that, the stories of him living on Andy Warhol's couch, Jerry Harrison and whats-his-name from the Cars having been in the Modern Lovers, that rocking good time. And of course my college band did a version of Road Runner -- who didn't?

But there, the earlier version of me succumbed to the then-rap on Jonathan that he had somehow walked away from the hardcore of the alternarock scene, to go off and make silly if pleasant records, in obscurity. I missed a decade of Jonathan for the worst reason in the world, not because he wasn't making good music - he was, it was excellent - but because of some screwed up idea I had about what good music was.

Happily I rediscovered Jonathan in the late 80s when he was on Rounder, which was located right down the street from me (and is/was run by the great Red Sox fan, Bill Nowlin). Since then he's shown up in my ears off and on as his pleasantly diverse career has poked itself up here and there. I laughed so hard at seeing him in Kingpin, basically doing what he was doing then -- playing at small venues and playing his heart at -- I once again got the mistaken idea that he had now become a sort of sly jokester, projecting hipster irony all over his rather sweet and sincere repertoire. His further cinematic appearance, this time to considerable narrative importance in an outright Hollywood hit, There's Something About Mary I'm sure brought him to wider acclaim as he deserved, but for those of us who seeming had been listening to him forever, it was sweet narrative delivery. It seemed like the kind of kidding-on-the-sly message Jonathan's music was made for. Not confessional in the singer-songwriter sense, just out and out honest about the difficulties of sincerely pursuing one's heart in an age of stalkers, slackers, and sly looks. The presentation of his music -- and his on-screen persona as a chorus -- was so tongue and cheek but melodically graceful it felt, well, wonderful Jonathan had arrived, or rather, America had caught up with him.

My latest phase of Jonathan misunderstanding is sort of retro: my son, at the age of six, knows his work via "I'm a Little Airplane" and "Ice Cream Man", the very so unhip songs we lamented back in the decade after the early Modern Lovers that made his alterna-rep. Now really appreciating the way Jonathan channeled the whole experience of childhood - it wasn't nostalgia, it was genuine insight, that drove those songs - I thought, well, he's been singing to different audiences, maybe just tailoring his message all this years. A true entertainer.

When Jonathan got around to his only "hit" song (well, one of two) of the concert he played at the outdoor Henry Miller Library in Big Sur on Sunday (his 59th birthday, incidentally), he did so with a great ad lib mid-song that he was playing at the Henry Miller library, after all -- looking at the many other middle-aged fans such as myself who'd brought their young kids along -- and said, "This ain't Romper Room!" before carefully slurring the last syllable in "Pablo Picasso". "He never got called an ASS-O...NOT LIKE YOU!"

Here's the thing about Jonathan of 2010. He has no Facebook page. There's no official MySpace. No Twitter Feed. He has no web site. There's a stub on the website of his "label", Vapor Records, which carefully points out Jonathan has nothing to do, at all, with the internet. At the concert, there's no swag or souvenirs for sale - no t-shirts, no CDs, nothing to buy. What you get is the experience of Jonathan singing. I feel like such an...Ass-o, Fanboy that I am, when we started talking to him before the show. I asked him if I could take a picture of him with my son -- which he obliged, coming down off the stage -- Jonathan's response was "hey, do whatever you like." I awkwardly told him about my own Massachusetts roots as we both got tea. He said, "I'm from Natick." I paused, dorkily. "Um, I knew that!" Jonathan looked at me and said, "How'd you know that?" Here's where my ugly past as a self-absorbed poseur, a reader of fan magazines and liner notes and self-described encyclopedias of rock and roll, a browser of Wikipedia, was shamefully exposed. The best I could do was to say um a couple of times and respond..."I'm psychic...?"

And it wasn't until the music started that, yes, I think I finally got it. I got Jonathan. It's not just that he's a performer, an artist, a songwriter. He's the original punk rocker. He's completely fucking sincere to himself, and to the audience. He emotes, he makes eye contact, he sings straight to you, and while he's funny, and self-aware, and political, and cultured, and erudite, and yes, entertaining, there's just no artifice about the whole thing. I've been to some amazing, great, rock and roll shows, but even among the most "honest" artists and groups I've walked among, there's always a distance of the rock star, the idol, the very stage itself. Even in the glory days of the hardcore scene, when bands performed on the same level (literally) as the fans and let them take a turn at the microphone, there was the artifice of the faux equality at the heart of the matter. Never, never, before I saw Jonathan play did I ever get such a sense of such utter honesty at a show. Hell, I got the rock star vibe from none other than Pete Seeger when my son and I saw him last fall. He was fabulous, but he was on a pedestal. Not so Jonathan.

And the lo-fi minimalism -- it isn't really lo-fi or all that minimalist. I finally also get the point of bringing the volume of the music down so far that it's still the essential rock and roll of rockabilly days and before. Jonathan stepped out in front of his microphones several times during the show, just singing to the air and playing his half-size Spanish guitar to the air and the redwoods. It might've been a little harder to hear, but not much so, and at those moments the last barrier between artist and audience -- the technology of amplification -- vanished as well. But rock and roll it is. The drumming from Tommy Larkin may not be loud but it has the complexity of syncopation required by each song. The role played by the electric bass is simply played by Jonathan having a strong chord structure that articulates both bass and treble lines. He makes this dinky little acoustic with nylon strings as "loud" and clear a rock guitar as you could imagine. It dawned on me fairly early: Jonathan, at some point during the last 40 years, has become a guitar maven. He has this way of channeling, well, Segovia or somebody, with pseudo-classical licks, but he has this vast vocabulary of quotes in his notes. It's a seamless chord dictionary on one hand, but alternatively it's often just your basic three-chord sequence with little lyrical jaunts up and down.

So Jonathan does two "hits", Pablo Picasso and a ten-minute encore of "Let Her Go", he does "Hurricane" he does a song called "Celestial" (in Spanish)about reading aloud with his wife and the virtues of a good book, he sings in Italian, French, Spanish, English, and Bostonian, he does a Leonard Cohen with such a wicked lick to it it could've been a heavy metal hit, he does "Vermeer" one of the truest songs about a painter I ever heard and "Keith Richards" with the same admiration and a taste of the same slight alienation from the peculiar talent and life of that particular artiste. He started out with an update of "Old World" about how, yeah, he liked parts of the Old World but he doesn't miss torture and sexism and tyranny and so forth.

Jonathan started the show when somebody asked him "When are you going on?" while he talked with a couple of audience members, and decided to go on then; the first thing he did was told everybody to pull the chairs closer, because "we're not afraid of you if you're not afraid of us." (We did pull all the folding chairs closer.) He ended it with a single encore and then went right back to talking with everybody in the audience.

Jonathan is the anti-rock god. He's just a man in a profession that has always been full of the bullshit of the idol, the elevation of the artist over the audience, most especially commercially. All those elements that were used to describe Jonathan as "cult" or "eccentric" suddenly make perfect, wonderful, sense to me. The acoustic-minimal instrumentation, the ever-changing interest in genre, the insistence on simple gigs with so little equipment it could fit on the back of a bicycle (plus a trailer for the drums), the eclectic song subject matter, the rejection of almost all the trappings of the business (from the concert t-shirt to the very idea of self-promotion). It's DIY, for real. No wonder there's a small cadre that follows him like he was the Grateful Dead, sort of, but don't really because they have lives and Jonathan does, too.

The experience is still fresh in my mind, so this may just be the happy mojo and good karma talking, but I have this feeling this may have been the best rock concert I'll ever go to. It cleansed me of much of the crud I feel I've been carrying over the years about experiencing the music. The Gods are dead. Long live humanity.

The Proper Use of Social Media

I'm skeptical about the literary value of the so-called social media -- movies being made from blogs notwithstanding, it does not seem like the sort of thing that lends itself to complicated ideas, or even simple ideas -- but I would make a great exception for this twitter feed, which is just asking to be made into an epic novel followed by a film trilogy.

Cyberformication

Documenting one of my neologisms, in the vain (?) hope of preserving credit of authorship:

Cyberformication (n) to cyberformicate (v) - the strange feeling your website is being crawled. By extension, any sixth sense concerning electronic media being invaded by uninvited parties, such as computer virus infections, robots, etc. "Imelda felt her spine shudder at the thought of her blog being cyberformicated." "When Antonio grep'd his system process table, he realized that his eery feeling of cyberformication was probably in error."

The Three AM Web Search

I just checked my google web history trends, and discovered the only hour of the day I haven't made a search since they invented this thing -- and I, idiot that I am, have tracked the web history as long as I can -- is 3 AM. I note this includes searches done in different time zones, so 3 AM may simply be a boundary condition for my consciousness. I wonder if Hillary Clinton is ready to google at 3 AM...?

Ken Burns, Liar

The War is a documentary film, but one that reminds me not so much of a brilliant scholarly work, a single-volume history, a collection of primary material artfully organized, or even a popularized retelling of a story so much as a clips show. There's nothing about the story that hasn't been done better elsewhere, and possibly even more economically if you cut out all the commercials on the History Channel and its brethren. I won't get into quibbles on the history, as I did previously with (the much superior) Civil War and Baseball, because that's beside the point. If Burns' mission was, as he's intimated in interviews, to correct the misapprehensions of American high school students that World War II was fought against Russia, he could've used a few Cliff Notes devices to get the point across a little more succinctly. If the true motivation of the film, as one suspects, is to explore the "why we fight" theme for "the good war" in an age of diminishing moral clarity about the use of armed force by nations (which is itself a relativistic assessment), then he's buried his lead rather ham-fistedly. (Embarrassingly so: the script uses foreshadowing in a way that would get a 10th-grade English essay a "B", with one-off lines about a soldier enlisting in 1942 'who would find out why he fought in 1945' -- is there going to be a concentration camp liberation in the last episode, by chance?) If the point of view was supposed to be the close to the ground social web of a Studs Terkel, the backgrounding which takes up over half the movie is inexplicably discursive. If it's to provide that survey course everybody in this country needs in World War II 101, then the bullet points got messed up during the transfer from PowerPoint.

If, as the term "documentary" suggests, it was meant to be a collection in the first person -- Burns has also cited the rapid disappearance of World War II vets to the march of time as a reason for doing this project -- then perhaps it should've spent more time with veterans who hadn't already told their story elsewhere, much more thoroughly. The starkest example is Quentin Aanenson, the fighter pilot who touched on virtually the entire American campaign in Western Europe (and ended up on the ground as a forward air observer and close attack coordinator, so had the unique combination of a bird's eye and a worm's perspective). Aanenson did a magnificent, DIY documentary 15 years ago, "A Fighter Pilot's Story", which was a remarkably gritty, grim, and honest description of a job overly associated with glamour and gung-hoism. So in the Burns version, we get a watered-down cut-and-paste, better photographed and produced but already distinctly a third-person second-sourcing even when Aanenson is being interviewed directly.

What did PBS do with the release of "The War"? It pulled the DVD of "A Fighter Pilot's Story" from sale last month. That should describe in detail the educational motivations of the network.

All that said, my text today is the lying that passes for documentary film-making. I'm not speaking of specific historical facts; as I said, mine is not to quibble on this front. It's the Burnsian technique of mixing still photos, narration, sound, soundtrack, and in this case, archived film amongst his set-piece interviews. (This is a common issue, one not unique to Ken Burns, of course, but whenever there's a well-spoken of documentary, the fact that it is mostly artifice and very little in the way of on-screen truth-telling should be brought up.)

The problem is this. The viewer hears a narration about men in a particular battle, while a picture taken from another battle is shown. That's a lie. It creates the false visual association of what the picture conveys with what the narrator is talking about. Perhaps the picture is an accurate reflection of that experience, perhaps it isn't. But the viewer isn't given the fact that it's not a "matching" picture to make up his or her own mind. Similarly, nearly every time you hear an explosion, a ratatat of a machine gun, or another sound in this film you're hearing something that's been pasted on to the film, not something that was recorded at the same time and place as the visual image displayed. It's no different than, say, Saving Private Ryan, or even Sands of Iwo Jima; it's a war created in post-production. The experience of the sound of the war, of the moment, might match what the sound editor and director have inserted, but I doubt it.

This is not documentary. It's a form of historical fiction, which no matter how well-researched or well thought-out to convey the larger truth of the situation, is simply an act of artifice. As such it's also ahistorical, a form of narrative that's about the filmmakers' understanding and not the topic at hand.

How do I know this? To even the amateur historian, there are plenty of tells. Some of the footage and stills is familiar. To the simply observant viewer, there are plenty more tells. Describing the ascendancy of Major General George Patton in the Tunisia campaign, for instance, we see a picture of Patton surveying a dusty battle field -- wearing three stars, the mark of a Lieutenant General. In footage of the D-Day landings in June, we see stock footage of Navy personnel apparently supervising the bombardment -- wearing winter clothing. We have pictures of "H Hour" at Omaha Beach, which are all from the third wave or later (the lack of photos from the first waves has been a well-discussed issue; the combat photographers in the first wave lost their equipment or spoiled their film, leaving only one partial roll of pictures.) I noticed at least a half dozen more such anachronisms in a very short period of film, and as I said, I'm an amateur.

One might argue that a filmmaker without access to a true visual record of a specific event isn't obligated to do more than provide a backdrop to the verbal text. But by the same token, it would then be OK to provide erroneous captions to photos in history books if one is missing a really good photo for the text on the opposite page. I don't buy it.

Can you footnote a TV show? Yes -- by simply having accurate date and place descriptions attached to photos or film when they're played. This would at least break up the associative array in the viewer's mind when they hear one thing and see another.

But this is rarely done, because it breaks up the visual continuity of the film. That's what this ultimately comes down to: the filmmaker who wants a flow, a pace, a visual feel, who uses the pan and the fade and the wipe and the timed edit, because those are his or her tools to create an emotional response in the viewer.

And that, in turn, is the bottom line here. When documentarians and historians sacrifice accuracy for beauty, they're creating something that, fact-based and reality-driven though it may be, is intended for emotional consumption, not analytic consumption. It's as much a work of fiction as any John Wayne shoot 'em up.

I don't mean this as a blanket condemnation of Ken Burns' work, which has had some real virtue to it over the years. But there's a difference between recreating the Civil War, which in the collective consciousness is entirely a fourth-hand memory, and World War II, which is still available as a first-person. One thinks the money and time spent on this documentary would've been better spent getting lower-tech, archival interviews with surviving vets and Americans of the era, doing real first-person documentary work, maybe a higher-effort version of the many Oral History projects that are proceeding spottily in the country (as has been done quite well for holocaust survivors). If the point was to put together a survey, the way the Civil War did, there wasn't perhaps quite enough of a rethinking of the canonical recounting of the War, the point of view or voice, or the basic (and now nearly dreadfully famliiar) film technique for making that story. In a war that arguably had even higher stakes than the Civil War -- not just the future of the country, but of the world, at stake -- the dreadfully desperate situation doesn't seem quite so vivid. The World at War, forty years old now and done for a foreign audience originally, actually still has a more direct approach to the topic.

The controversy over the "inclusiveness" of Burns' talking heads (even if they aren't historians, but participants, they're still talking heads) misses the point that there's so much clutter in this film, which is neither a good survey nor a good first-personer, nobody's going to learn the real social history of the war accurately from it, anyway. A braver filmmaker might've trusted himself to stick to only interviews and maybe still pictures of the interviewees and their families, and left them to speak for themselves without the all-too-available action footage of combat. (That in itself is a kinetically-charged succubus to a movie maker - soooooooo sexy, visually.) Or alternatively, to put together that good single-volume modern semi-revisionist history to show to our high school kids, made it a bit more exciting and ignored the artifice of pretending to be an inclusive first-personer, simply rifling his interview subjects for the goods and using what works. (The number of truly boring and unilluminating anecdotes left in this movie is rather startling.)

Here, I think, is the real point of the film:

Burns closes the film with a picture of his dead WWII vet dad, the man who never told Ken his own story. The Spielbergian-missing-father psychological motivation for making a film is a little too pat, of course, although it's very, very tempting. But look at how PBS is positioning this: it's a nostalgia trip, launched during fund-raising season, aimed not at the World War II generation or even at today's callow and misinformed youth, but at Burns' generation, the Baby Boomers who need to have that emotional connection with their own parents affirmed as their parents die off and they in turn become the senior generation. That's what this film plays as. And if that happens to get more corporate sponsors from that generation, or pledges during pledge drive week...