RIP Gary Indiana

 Gary with a waspish portrait of Susan Sontag - someone he admired / liked !

Interviewed Gary for Rip It Up on account of his involvement in the NY scene circa No Wave and Mutant Disco, connections to Mudd Club, polymath artistic activities on many fronts...  Very entertaining, gossipy.... maybe I'll dig it up and run the whole thing... One of those rare people who spoke like he wrote, in perfect, elegant sentences

Here's a good read: "Bless You, Toxic Dwarf: An Appreciation of Gary Indiana By One of His Many Estranged Friends" - written by Ira Silverberg, my onetime US agent. 

One of the mysteries about pop is its repeatability.  The way that repetition of a song doesn't dim its power, or only at extreme degrees of repetition (absolute blanket radio coverage causing you to get temporarily get sick of a song).   A great song is that seemingly contradictory thing: the repeatable surprise. The classic pop single as a radio drama that never wears out.

This degree of repeatability is not unheard of in other forms, but is much rarer. There are a few films that can be watched over and over; a few books, likewise. But wherever plot as such is involved, the ability to repeat-view or repeat-read is severely diminished. Whereas the pop song is plotless, it offers drama without narrative. 

(Okay there are some story-songs but most pop songs do not involve a punchline or pay-off or resolution; they don't "go" anywhere; they capture a state or a moment; or there is a movement back and forth between two states, two modes of action / feeling - verse to chorus, tension and release, buildup to climax).  Rather than narratives, pop songs are dramas of energy. 

 

 

Charles Baudelaire 

There are many translations of this, and the one I prefer is the one that has the closing line

"It is the hour to be drunken! Lest you be the martyred slaves of Time, intoxicate yourselves, be drunken without cease! With wine, with poetry, with virtue, or with what you will."

That's a much more interesting headswerve  - the idea that you could get intoxicated with virtue

Perhaps it's even possible to be intoxicated with sobriety, or the idea of sobriety as society-salvation, a cause, the single solution to everything wrong  (the fanatical anti-drink campaigners of the temperance movement)

Born again former drug users, addicted to AA meetings, clutching little positivist mantras to one's bosom

(R. Meltzer quite scathing on how a cleaned-up Lester Bangs got into this whole humanist trip, 'bring back emotions, they are threatened in this society', reeling out maxims and homilies of the kind he would once have mercilessly scorned and mocked)