“We can’t stop here, this is bat country!”
Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”
Give me the demented inkslinger any day. Give me the outrageous, outlandish, over-the-top commentator whose incendiary prose incites internal chaos in my psyche — especially when what they’re about is a full frontal assault upon all that I hold culturally sacred.
With the pundits that I’m totally into, I’ve always been able to separate their art from that which they are slicing and dicing. As these pieces very seldom influence whether or not I see a film or buy a book or a CD or attend a concert or a stage production, I’m able to ride along on their long strange trips with a wink and a smirk.
Some of this highly-creative venom is spewed, with extreme subtlety and nuance, not at works of art or craft but at the wider expanse of societal mores and such. One of my favorite cultural observers, Dorothy Parker, forged a career at this end of the spectrum, issuing biting barbs in an almost haiku-like fashion that could filet a pompous ego with a whisper.
Coming to fame during the ’20s as the sharpest wit among the über-hip Algonquin Round Table literary circle, Mrs. Parker, as her close confidante Robert Benchley religiously referred to her, sharpened her verbal scalpel at Vogue and Vanity Fair before taking over the book-review desk at The New Yorker.
My all-time favorite Parker zinger, and one to which, even in the age of Google, I’ve been unable to apply context, is actually not all that subtle: “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly; it should be thrown with great force.”
After sitting through a Broadway show, she lamented: “If you don’t knit, bring a good book.” She also never cut herself much slack. “I wish I could drink like a lady/I can take one or two at the most/Three and I’m under the table/Four and I’m under the host.” Did I mention her poetry?
Operating at the opposite edge of this literary galaxy is, or was, Lester Bangs. Although it’s been nearly thirty years since his untimely passing, keeping collections of his stream-of-consciousness rock-and-roll criticism from Creem, The Village Voice, and Rolling Stone close at hand has somehow afforded him a beach crash-pad in the present tense.
Lester could gleefully rip the musical gods of my youth new download ports in his signature Benzedrine prose quicker than he could knock back a fistful of Darvon.
Accusing Bob Dylan of dallying in “Mafia chic” when he wrote “Joey” for Joey Gallo on his 1976 “Desire” LP and Miles Davis of producing “music for the living dead” on 1981’s “The Man with the Horn,” Bangs again reminded his faithful readers of his old axiom that “the first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.”
“Rock ‘n’ roll is an attitude, it’s not a musical form of a strict sort. It’s a way of doing things, of approaching things. Writing can be rock ‘n’ roll, or a movie can be rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a way of living your life,” was another oft-repeated gospel according to Lester.
The best “Bangs” for your bucks in what I call his “ecstatically-despondent” take on the music scenes of the ’60s and ’70s would be his two posthumously-published collections: “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung,” edited by Griel Marcus, and “Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste,” edited by John Morthland.
In adding film critic Pauline Kael to this piece, it must appear that in order to make the cut with me you have to be looked upon as a cultural malcontent. Well, yeah, what’s your point? I irritate, therefore I am!
From the moment Kael began as film critic for The New Yorker in early 1968 she became a prickly burr under the industry’s saddle blanket. She loved “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), “The Godfather” (1972), “Nashville” (1975), and “Taxi Driver” (1976) but found “The French Connection,” “Chinatown,” “Manhattan,” and almost everything by Kubrick and Cassavetes to be superficial in script, direction, or production value.
“Kevin Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head. The Indians should have called him ‘Plays with Camera,'” delighted me terribly, although I loved all ten hours of “Dances with Wolves.” I also dug it when she hinted that the four words “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” successfully reduced the basic appeal of movies to its molecular level.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social scenes for the past 40 years.