Lindgren, Reviews

Michael Lindgren Selected Reviews www.mikelindgren.com 212 481 6488

ON GRAM PARSONS: It took Gram Parsons just over six years to change the face of American music. Parsons brought fresh force to country tradition with the International Submarine Band, remade the Byrds in his own image on the classic Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, founded the Flying Burrito Brothers, and recorded two solo albums of aching beauty, all before his death in 1973. Along the way, he taught the Rolling Stones about country music, discovered Emmylou Harris singing in a nightclub in Washington D. C., wrote a handful of songs — “Sin City”, “Hickory Wind”, “Brass Buttons” — that stand as classics of down-home American soul, and, by all accounts, ingested more alcohol, cocaine, and heroin than seems possible. It would be hard to overstate his influence on country, alt-country, Americana, roots music, and all their permutations. Despite his towering legacy, the most complete biography Parsons has received until now is Ben Fong-Torres’s well-intentioned but slapdash Hickory Wind (1991). Fong-Torres has a keen sense of Parsons’s music, but he scrambles to keep track of the myriad musicians and scenesters who moved in Parsons’s orbit, and his narrative feels choppy and rushed. With Twenty Thousand Roads, Parsons has finally received a book equal to his musical accomplishments and outsized personality. David N. Meyer’s biography is an exceptional piece of research and writing, lucid and penetrating about the music, fair-minded yet tough about Parsons’s shortcomings and wasted potential. Meyer has tracked down and interviewed hundreds of Parsons’s associates, some of whom have never spoken on the record before, and his synthesis of these sources is fluid and absorbing. Meyer has gone farther than anyone else in understanding the roots of Parsons’s self-destructive tendencies, tracing them to his upbringing in a rich Southern family haunted by suicide and alcoholism. He also debunks many of the myths that have grown up around Parsons, and provides as objective an

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account of Parsons’s doomed last night at the Joshua Tree Inn and its notorious aftermath as we will ever have. For the most part, Meyer’s analysis of Parsons’s music is articulate and perceptive, with the exception of his dismissal of the Fallen Angels, the pickup band that toured with Parsons in 1973 (Meyer faults drummer N. D. Smart for his inability “to play anything other than a 4/4 shuffle,” even though Smart’s drumming on the waltz-time “Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man” is sprightly and swinging). Meyer’s book is otherwise especially illuminating about the technical aspects of the music Gram made his own, whether explaining the difference between Nashville and Bakersfield country or discussing the intricacies of pedal-steel guitar playing. As a bonus, the book includes a comprehensive and often droll (Keith Richards is identified as “the only man who can play a Chuck Berry song worse than Chuck Berry”) encyclopedia of Parsons’ contemporaries. The true strength of Twenty Thousand Roads, however, is its insight into how Parsons’s demons and excesses were inextricably linked to the greatness of his music. Meyer is clear-eyed and occasionally brutal about Parsons’ drug use, wobbly work ethic, and callow self-absorption, but he refuses to romanticize his subject’s excesses or exploit them for prurient effect. In the end, Meyer’s book betrays a deep sense of sadness over what could have been. That sadness is part of what made Gram Parsons’s music so moving. It is also part of what killed him. -- NO DEPRESSION #72, November 2007 ON NELL FREUDENBERGER: Nell Freudenberger’s career to date reads like a novel in itself, with her Harvard education, slinky good looks, New Yorker publication, famous literary agent, and mentions in Vogue and Elle. It is a letdown, of sorts, to find that her debut novel is such a banal affair. The Dissident tells the story of Yuan Zhao, an exiled Chinese artist who comes to live with the Traverses,

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a Southern Californian family that is a Woody Allen-style parody of shallow Beverly Hills life. The dramatis personae include an absent-minded writer father, a sexually unsatisfied homemaker mother, two surly teens, and a Chinese-American student who— surprise!—is authentically talented. Hijinks ensue, secrets are revealed, lessons are learned, etc. This is, to put it mildly, well-trodden territory. To be fair, Freudenberger is a crisp stylist, and she effortlessly captures the tics and mannerisms of these feckless Californians, as observed by the bemused Yuan in his role as cultural ambassador. Freudenberger’s observational powers and way with a phrase only go so far, however, and as pleasant and absorbing as it is, The Dissident imparts no impact: it practically evaporates upon completion. -- THE BROOKLYN RAIL, November 2007 ON WARREN ELLIS and Crooked Little Vein: This scabrous detective yarn is the straight-fiction debut of Warren Ellis, better known as the creator of the Transmetroplitan series of graphic novels. The whacked-out sensibility that characterized Transmetroplitan survives the transition to prose, but minus the supercharged imagery, the narrative comes across as slapdash and juvenile. Crooked Little Vein relates the cross-country adventures of down-and-out private eye Mike McGill and his feisty sidekick Trix, with the plot functioning almost exclusively as a device for introducing a staggering procession of perverts and fetishists. Ellis may be after dark, shocking affects, but the action is so peppy and cheerfully paper-thin that any sting is neutered. Crooked Little Vein has some fun playing with the timeworn conventions of the gumshoe novel, and floats a half-baked sub-theory about the cultural mainstreaming of the deviant, but on the whole remains singlemindedly shallow. After a while, you get tired of waiting for the next gross-out, although the relationship between Mike and Trix eventually betrays a hint of sweetness and mutual need. An amusing ride, but hardly

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a major accomplishment. -- L Magazine, July 18, 2007 ON JOSEPH COULSON & Of Song and Water: This overtly poetic midwestern gothic has a rhythm and pull that carries it through its sometimes overwrought stylings. Jason “Coleman” Moore is an itinerant jazz guitarist and sometime sailor whose alcohol-soaked life is haunted by the ghosts of his domineering forbears and by fraught relationships with his daughter, his former lover, his ex-wife, and his musical soulmate and partner. Moving backwards and forward through time and place, from Detroit in 1932 to present-day Lake Huron, Of Song and Water is a convincing if static portrait of loss and regret. Coleman Moore is a challenging and sometimes frustrating protagonist: self-absorbed, irresponsible, not particularly articulate, he is torn between the sailor-hero legacy of his father and grandfather and an ill-formed sense of artistic and musical ambition. It testifies to Joseph Coulson’s resources as a writer that his portrayal of this proud, difficult man contains enough psychological acuity to carry the weight of a novellength narrative. Coleman is a broken man, physically and emotionally, haunted by his own missteps, but Coulson gives him a stubborn dignity that endows his failures with a believably poignant sense of missed opportunities. The novel’s evocative power stems largely from its deftly-managed narrative structure. Rather than a straightforward recounting of the protagonist’s life, Of Song and Water moves on a long series of fluid and emotionally gripping shifts in time and place. The flow of Coleman’s consciousness shapes the narrative, organizing it thematically rather than chronologically, as characters and scenes move ethereally in and out of focus. The technique is also the source of the novel’s gothic inscrutablility; the slow unspooling of the events of Coleman’s past, which

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include murder, mutilation, suicide, infidelity, and other Faulknerian squalors, casts his anomie in terms of existential despair. He “considers whether or not the sacrifice of his hands served as some sort of redemption, a strange rite of passage — a fated balancing of the scales,” saying to himself, “I had yet to discover the full extent of my sins, the crimes of my family, my history, but there’s no salvation in pleading ignorance.” Coleman may take a perverse pride in his flinty worldview, but the burden on the reader grows increasingly heavy. There is no humor and very little light and joy in this book; despite the nautical scenes and occasional paeans to the lure of open water, the story’s mood is relentlessly claustrophobic. Coulson’s ornate and sometimes heavyhanded prose does not help. He is clearly a gifted stylist — his descriptions of small-town Michigan are precise and lyrical — but he is capable of wince-inducing overreaching. Attempts to bring a poetic language to descriptions of jazz and sailing have defeated more renowned novelists than Coulson, but defeat they do: “He takes the opening, finding new turns and dark corners in the song and creating a world all his own. He plays a cascade of diminished runs that electrifies the air. It sparks a small flame of tenderness and fills the room with audible light.” A “cascade” that “sparks”? “Audible light?” Unfortunately there is quite a lot in this vein, blunting the effect of the novel’s crisper passages. In the end, Of Song and Water stands as an admirable but not wholly successful literary genre hybrid. An unreliable and shifting narrative is traditionally associated with the experiments of high modernist fiction, which is why Of Song and Water renders an odd dissonance in the reader. When yoked to the gothic grotesquerie and the high-falutin’ language, the fractured narrative seems out of place: an austere abstract painting in a room full of rococo still lifes. Coleman Moore’s story is many things: a

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warning against overvaluing personal freedom, a metaphysical meditation on divine will, a loving ode to the transformative power of music. These are good and deep qualities to explore, but it’s a slow ride. -- KGB Bar Lit, April 2007 ON MICHAEL LOWENTHAL & Charity Girl: The protagonist of Michael Lowenthal’s engaging novel Charity Girl is one of the fifty thousand women imprisoned by the U. S. Government on spurious security charges during World War I. This sounds like a dull premise to hang a novel on, but what bubbles up through the setup is a spirited and even sexy romp through a Boston in the grip of war fever circa 1918. A seventeen-year-old Jewish shopgirl, Frieda Mintz likes fast cars, handsome young officers, dances, drinking, and the Red Sox; her resistance to parental authority and her independence of spirit mark her as something of a proto-feminist. The details of her arrest and exile to a women’s labor house have obvious parallels to the suspension of civil rights post-9/11, but Lowenthal wisely does not harp on the connection or force a political message onto his narrative. The period setting is vividly rendered without the overabundance of superfluous detail that makes so much historical fiction headache-inducing. What stays with the reader from Charity Girl is Frieda Mintz and her thirst for life. -- L Magazine, January 17, 2007 ON PAVEMENT: Between 1992 and 1999, the band Pavement released six albums of idiosyncratic rock’n’roll that served as an underground countersoundtrack to Nirvana, flannel, and Pulp Fiction. For kids in the know, Pavement’s fractured, sometimes jarring guitar noise, spliced with pockets of sudden melodic beauty and underlined by frontman Stephen Malkmus’s surreal, hipster-smart lyrics, defined a version of 90’s cool.

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Pavement’s dour independence and authentic indifference to the conventions of popular stardom gibed perfectly with the decade’s concern with never appearing to try too hard. With Rob Jovanovic’s unconventional band biography, Pavement finally gets the book they deserve: Perfect Sound Forever is a true literary corollary to the group’s freewheeling spirit. Jovanovic is a fan and writes like one; charmingly, he notes that 1995’s Wowee Zowee, a diffuse record even by Pavement standards, “has undergone a marked shift in most fans’ perceptions, often gaining ‘favorite album’ status.” His prose is workmanlike at best, and occasionally unnecessarily pedantic, such as when he identifies Journey as “soft rock dinosaurs” or explains what college radio is. Minor weaknesses like these, however, are overwhelmingly countered by the book’s superior design, in which Jovanovic’s narrative is splattered with dense, collage-like swaths of handwritten notes, set lists, fanzine reviews, and gritty b & w photos. Although material like this will keep the Pavement fan busy for a while, the book also serves as a concise history of 90’s indie rock, an era which today seems almost as distant as love beads and sit-ins. -- L Magazine, August 4, 2004 ON GREIL MARCUS & The Shape of Things to Come: This diffuse, frustrating, and occasionally brilliant book continues in the vein of cultural criticism that Greil Marcus has made his own over the last thirty years. Starting in 1975 with the now-classic Mystery Train, Marcus has spent his entire career working variations on one fairly simple idea: that the story of American culture, its central truths, are communicated in diverse, sometimes public, sometimes private ways. By finding common ground in the voices that speak from the margins of art and society, he hopes to uncover truths that are inaccessible to the mainstream. The examination of the stubborn, haunted characters of Roth's novels I

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Married a Communist and American Pastoral and the surreal, violent landscape of Lynch's Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me is the heart of the book, yet it is here that the reasoning becomes chaotic, somehow both repetitive and difficult to follow. Marcus faces here a very basic and probably unconquerable problem. Since he can't assume that every reader of this book has read all of Philip Roth and seen all of Twin Peaks and loves Pere Ubu, he is forced to expend a lot of his energy — and the reader's patience — in exposition and recapitulation. Reading a blow-byblow encapsulation of a book or film that one has not read or seen, even from a critic as articulate and expressive as Marcus, is rarely engaging. At bottom, it is a conundrum of intention and of audience: if this were an academic work — Marcus is a professor of American Studies at Berkeley — then his audience would be familiar with his sources, but in a commercial publication intended for broad readership the sources are too obscure to be common pop-culture property. Thus does he try to split the difference, ending up with the worst of both worlds. The long rehashes are not the only drawbacks, either. Marcus tends to repeat himself, suggesting that parts of the book were stitched into place after the fact; much of the Philip Roth material, for example, had originally appeared in nascent form earlier this year in The New York Review of Books. In addition, Marcus is fond of overreaching hyperbole: is a shot he remembers of Chris Isaak as an FBI man in Lynch's Fire Walk With Me really "one of the most complete and uncanny images of America ever produced"? Is it accurate to say of an early Pere Ubu single that "there were holes in the music and there was room in the sound: it made its own gravity, and it pulled you in"? Such grandiosity has the effect of dulling the passages where he reaches more legitimately for profundity. Reading The Shape of Things to Come, one comes to understand that Marcus's intellectual existence — his whole life, one imagines — consists of mentally absorbing and cataloguing an ongoing set of impressions from a wide variety of sources, from Melville and Lincoln to forgotten

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rock'n'roll songs and bad B movies, and then searching out the themes that unite them. His method, then, is essentially inductive — trusting that the diverse cultural artifacts that compel his interest will yield a telling pattern — rather than deductive — applying a set of presumably objective standards to a finite work at hand. Marcus's writing is thus a poetic act of self-expression, not an evaluative or analytical one, and its effectiveness rests on whether one finds his intuitive selections fruitful, and whether one perceives that he has successfully united these extremely disparate elements into a coherent narrative. If your sensibility is not in tune with his, if your personal barometer registers a different stratus of cultural atmospherics, then you're probably not going to be willing to follow him very far along the path of The Shape of Things to Come. -- RAIN TAXI, Fall 2006 ON CHUCK KLOSTERMAN: As a longtime admirer of Chuck Klosterman’s writing on pop music and culture, it pains me to report that his latest book, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story, is a dismal, shoddy piece of work. The premise is promising: Klosterman sets out on a cross-country road trip to visit all of the sites of rock’n’roll’s long, rich history of necrography. It seems a brilliant idea, because Klosterman’s combination of irreverence and curiosity make him the perfect candidate to unseat the holy-pilgrimage seriousness (and pathos) of most writing on rock’n’roll death. It doesn’t take long for the project to turn sour. Here’s the problem: Klosterman is used to skating by on the wit and originality of his own personal world-view; in his last collection, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, his observations on MTV, pornography, video games, and so on, emerged from a perspective that led him to some surprising conclusions. There was a sense of play – of intellectual gamesmanship – that was fresh and engaging. In Killing Yourself, however, his interiority has become reflexive

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to the point where he can no longer discriminate between what is valuable and what is piffle; it’s all self-narrative. If he’s looking at something, he thinks his reaction to it – how it affects him – automatically matters simply because it’s him, Chuck Klosterman, looking at it. He has become too lazy and uninterested to give any serious effort at thinking, observing and analyzing what a specific site or incident might mean, and falls back on relaying what it means to him, at that moment. The most devastating element here is the incomprehensible decision to let Klosterman devote much of the book to pseudo-Hornby writhing about the three (!) women with whom he’s currently involved (that is, either sleeping with or wanting to sleep with). Aside from being, at times, downright creepy, it’s both lazy and irrelevant: as smart and funny and interesting as Chuck Klosterman is, I couldn’t really give two shits about his love life. His self-absorption on this count goes so far as to include a chapter-long conversation between the three women and himself that takes place all inside his head. What’s sad is that he seems to realize this; the book closes with a (putatively actual) conversation between the author and one of his female colleagues at Spin, who urges him not to become “the male Elizabeth Wurtzel.” At this point, one tends to agree wholeheartedly with the criticism, and Klosterman’s only retort is to tell her that “her disdain can only be voiced if I do the opposite of what you suggest.” It’s pre-emptive critical damage control; it’s embarrassing. It is unsettling to see how turning Klosterman loose on such a promising theme brings out his worst instincts as a writer, because his feature pieces for Spin are often brilliant. A perfect example was his reporting on the Rock Cruise, one of those only-in-America phenomena wherein 40year-old couples pay to hear REO Speedwagon and Styx perform on a boat. It is hard to imagine a riper opportunity for superiority and ridicule, yet Klosterman never condescends to these people -- working-class Midwesterners who are paying money to see over-the-hill versions of the two of the most reviled bands in rock history -- and in the end lends both the bands and fans an odd kind of dignity. The piece said… something

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interesting, but what? That the middle-aged parents waiting to see REO Speedwagon are in their own way engaged in something just as authentic as the young adults who pack the Bowery Ballroom to see the Killers or Bloc Party, and therefore as deserving of respect? That would be an almost revolutionary notion, but it is not one you will find between these covers. It is frustrating to know that the author is capable of such insights and then to slog through 235 pages of crap that wouldn’t make it onto a Weezer B-side. Klosterman is most definitely – he prides himself, actually – on being a creature of his age, and in this context Killing Yourself to Live is, unintentionally, a telling document. In a sense Killing Yourself is the final endpoint of the much-vaunted, now-tired New Journalism, the place where self-absorption takes the final step towards full eradication of observation and analysis. For those of you busy listening to your iPods and honing your retro-cool look, the New Journalism of the 60s and 70s, invented by Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, apotheosized by Hunter S. Thompson, was an invigorating re-thinking of the whole idea of journalism, and the engine of some genuinely great writing. By putting the author at the center of the story, and eschewing traditional ideas of objectivity, the New Journalists uncovered realities that lay outside of the who-what-why-when-where verities of traditional journalism. Fast-forward to Chuck Klosterman and 2005, however, and the whole idea seems to have swung so far over as to be hopelessly out of whack. Compare Klosterman to a traditional rock critic like Greil Marcus, who relies on close analysis of the music within a cultural context. Klosterman’s best writing makes Marcus look dim and stuffy by comparison, but, as dismally out-of-touch as Greil Marcus now is, he still makes Klosterman seem… irrelevant. Like all culture, criticism is cyclical. As with so many other cycles, what seemed fresh and biting in the 60s and 70s has become empty gesture. It is well time for the inevitable backlash against this solipsistic place that the innovations of the New Journalism have brought us. With some effort

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and focus, Chuck Klosterman may still be the man to help push the pendulum back; he’s young, he’s a talented, and lurking under the muck are still some interesting questions about rock’n’roll, celebrity, mass media, authenticity, and all the other swirling elements of contemporary popular culture. One can only hope that Killing Yourself was just something he needed to get out of his system. -- L Magazine, July 20, 2005 ON THURSTON MOOORE & MIXTAPE: For rock fans of a certain age — roughly 30 to 50, say — the homemade cassette compilation was a rite of passage, a folk art medium, an outlet for thwarted expression, and perhaps most important, a romantic device more potent and totemic than any love letter. I made mix tapes – God, I made them. Everyone I know made them. Everyone you know made them. So did Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore and lots of his artist, musician, and filmmaker friends. Mixtape: The Art of Cassette Culture is a tidy slab of high-gloss eulogy for what is now, sadly, a lost art form, and a peerless document of the sprawling, idiosyncratic music at the margins of 80s rock. There are no U2 songs on these mixes, but plenty of Spacemen 3, Super Furry Animals, Black Flag, and the like. The collection features page after page of exquisitely reproduced cassettes – some with colorful collaged covers, some simply scrawled lists – which offer an affectionate, intensely evocative look back. Part of the retro-cool elegiac tone of the collection is that the concept of the mixtape does not seem to transfer to the digital age with the same allure; in Moore’s delightfully gnostic formulation, “analog has the mystery arc where cosmos exist, which digital has not yet reined in…a cassette rocking at normal bias will bring healing analog tones to the earheart.” It’s a point made elsewhere by others — Chuck Klosterman, for

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example, who has written comically of the danger of running off two copies of the same CD for different would-be girlfriends — but the essential idea is that making a mix tape was so time-consuming as to make each one sui generis. Part of the masochistic, hapless-romantic appeal of making a mix for someone was the time and effort expended in the production, particularly since the object of the crush in question, one always suspected, invariably took the tape off halfway side two and never listened to it again. Dean Wareham puts it best: “The time spent implies an emotional connection with the recipient…the message of the tape might be: ‘I love you. I think about you all the time. Listen to how I feel about you.’” No wonder these kids today just drift in and out of each others’ lives like a bunch of gerbils; they never had to decide which was the exact right Motley Crue song to start side B. On this level, Mixtape is a celebration of the personal and the democratic. As Los Angeles writer Matias Viegener points out, “mixtapes mark the moment of consumer culture in which listeners attained control over what they heard, in what order and at what cost.” On another level, because the book inevitably summons one’s one memories of this most universal and accessible of media, the reader becomes akin to a participant. The romantic mixtape subgenre, for guys like me, is just about as agonizing and exhilarating a rite of passage as adolescence offered. Take the mix I made for a girl I pined for, painfully, when I was seventeen: I was certain that the songs on the tape spoke powerfully and eloquently of emotions that I was not articulate enough to convey. My conception of that tape as being unique in its power to communicate my lovestruck feelings, this book makes clear, was the least unique thing imaginable: it was an experience and a feeling precisely duplicated by millions of teenage boys everywhere. I still remember that mix, with its Del Fuegos and Pretenders and Springsteen’s great cruising-with-the-top down instrumental “Paradise by the C.” The girl is long gone, but I wish I still had that tape; there’s a click of connection when artist Sue de Beer expresses the exact same sentiment regarding one of her recklessly dispensed, long-lost mixes. Romantics under the skin.

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The sense of connection in Mixtape is offset by a whiff of insular selfabsorption: maybe it’s just that I’m not familiar with most of the contributors but suspect that I should be, or maybe it’s that the mix tapes in the book feature songs by Tom Waits and the Velvet Underground, whereas mine were full of Lynyrd Skynrd and Seger. There’s something either charmingly postmodern or faintly ridiculous, depending on one’s point of view, in making such a crude, low-tech artifact — dozens of 79cent hunks of C-60 plastic — the object of such a lushly photographed and meticulously assembled volume. The book comes to us from Rizzoli, best know for their extravagant art books, and has the disorienting feel of a catalogue for a gallery exhibit that never existed: a catalogue raisonne sans raison. Its true value, however, is not as an exercise in hipster nostalgia, nor as a document of faux-outsider art, but as an incantation of a peculiar and highly idiosyncratic conjunction of media and packaging. The mixtape had a brief window of time, prompted by a peculiar intersection of technology and economics — from 1985, when cassettes and recorders became widely and suddenly inexpensive, along with $7.99 Lps and the Sony Walkman, to 1995 or thereabouts, when CDs and iPods displaced them – that will never again exist. Mixtape knows that, lovingly, and will not forget. -- L Magazine, May 11, 2005 ON THE DOWNTOWN BOOK, edited by Marvin Taylor: It is always both startling and inevitable when yesterday's avant-garde inexorably turns into today's orthodoxy. Samuel Johnson famously estimated that the passage of a century's time was prerequisite to an objective evaluation of a work's reputation. The acceleration of culture aside, by Dr. Johnson's formulation The Downtown Book, edited by Marvin J. Taylor, arrives eighty years early; yet much of he art and music it covers already seems as distant and displaced as a sepia-toned daguerreotype.

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This sense of historical dislocation is especially acute when the genre in question is the downtown ethos of 70s and 80s New York City, that roiling, chaotic, admittedly exciting decade when punk, No Wave, performance art, and language poetry collided in a scabrous, heady stew: perhaps the last genuinely bohemian moment in American culture. The artists of the East Village and Soho of the time were intent on subverting and destroying the orthodoxies of modernism, which from their vantage had ossified into irrelevance. Their weapons were the spray paint can, the Marshall amplifier, the Super-8 video camera, and the mimeographed fanzine. Not media that transfer well to the confines of a large-format art book. To his credit, Taylor is almost apologetically aware of the "contradictions and pitfalls" inherent in "an institutional exhibition and publication about a scene that, at its very core, set out to undermine institutions." The paradox of trying the get a handle on the slippery conditions of an art that prided itself on its ephemerality, whose transient nature was part of its ethos, and that was a product of a very specific time and place, is repeatedly invoked, to the extent that it becomes a theme. Carlo McCormick, whose essay "A Crack in Time" is the intellectual linchpin of the book, writes that understanding the downtown scene is "not to follow the footsteps imprinted in history but the skid marks of spontaneous encounters" that took place in "a phantasmagoria of subjectivities." Taylor elsewhere places downtown art within the framework of Pierre Bourdieu's "field of cultural production" and "position takings," a reimagining of the artistic dynamic as flowing up from below (via fanzines, nightclubs, loft parties) rather than down from above (via museums, publishing houses, record labels). Whatever the difficulties of the book's topic matter, as a piece of scholarship, writing, and publishing The Downtown Book - which is published in tandem with an survey exhibition due at the Grey Art Gallery in February - is impressive. The editors and writers have shown laudable

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ambition in even attempting a defining survey of such an unruly decade, and the chapters are often full of vivid description and shrewd analysis. Robert Siegle, for example, covers an immense amount of territory in his chapter on "Writing Downtown," and is especially incisive on how the literature of the time was both an outgrowth of and reaction against such formative prior influences as Dada, Surrealism, Beat, and Oulipo. Bernard Gendron does an similarly heroic job in making pithy sense of the various strains of downtown music, which nominally included both the austere post-minimalism of Phillip Glass and the unfettered roar of the Ramones. The Downtown Book is equally ambitious in its attempt to be thorough, but the destruction of the traditional boundaries and categories makes for a lot of cross-pollination and a lot of scattershot inclusiveness. At times the best the writers can do is to provide long lists of names, assuring us the persons listed were integral parts of the "scene." (Sounds like high school to me.) The book also includes personal vignettes from a number of prominent artists, including Gracie Mansion, Lynne Tillman, the ubiquitous Richard Hell, and others. Their recollections add humanizing color, even as some of them tip over into melancholy you-had-to-be-there nostalgia. Nostalgia - such a dirty word to this or any other avant-garde - for better or worse creeps across these pages like a shadow. The street-level gusto that these artists purveyed, when viewed from the long lens of twenty years' time, begins to give one a squirmy but undeniable sense of diminishing returns: after all, there's something faintly comical about a glossy $35 hardcover art book whose full-color illustrations largely depict photocopied flyers torn from lampposts and smeary photographs of deranged-looking people in dark basements. What The Downtown Book does undeniably share with the art it takes as its topic, and what lends it whatever force and durability it retains, is its skeptical spirit, a spirit that tends to produce in artist and reader alike questions both basic and profound: what is art? whom is it for? how does it communicate? how does it subvert hierarchy? That questioning spirit is the downtown artists'

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true legacy, and one that never goes out of style. -- RAIN TAXI, Spring 2006

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