Hey all! Another week in the books. Here’s an update on some project reading-
Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop was great, and much better than expected. Among other things, it uses some “generational” discourse in a way that’s not totally stupid! In many ways, he harkened back to older generational models. For one thing, his generations are short, following a five year fashion cycle among youth in big cities, especially New York- essentially, the years between which kids (in a consumer society) would have some money to spend, and when they “aged out of” making youth culture their main thing due to parenthood, etc. Chang also follows the old idea of generations being more a matter of artistic elites than just the whole population born within a given time range. Of course, Chang would likely not call “the hip hop generation” elites- most of them were kids from housing projects in New York, and eventually elsewhere. And beyond socioeconomic, he’d have a point- hip hop, before it became a mainstay of pop culture, had a considerably tighter loop between artist and listener (or viewer, in the case of graffiti and breakdancing, once considered key parts of hip hop) than most art forms. It was more participatory. In any event, I learned new things from Chang, and got new perspective on things I thought I knew. A good book!
Gary Indiana, on the strength of this one book and reading his wiki, anyway, strikes me as basically a much sharper Bret Easton Ellis. Rent Boy beats American Psycho hands down in terms of New York-in-the-eighties unreliable-narrator decadence-and-maybe-imaginary-crimes fiction. Among other things, Indiana had the fortitude to be out in public at the time. For another, his narrator has to work for a living. It has all the cynicism and some reality — but not too much! Shit is still weird! — to back it up, and none of Ellis’ tragic-rich-kid bathos. Will my impression of Indiana hold up under the strain of as many of his books as I plan on reading for this project? Who’s to say?!
Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology - honestly, the schtick is getting old. That’s another funny part in Rent Boy- Indiana viciously mocked Acker, like more than I even would. They were friends- apparently, Acker never forgave him (she died in the nineties too, so there shan’t be forgiveness forthcoming). Blah blah, sex, yadda yadda, learned references, transgression, etc. I will always hold out the caveat that if I didn’t experience adolescence with an internet connection, I might find Acker’s provocations more shocking, but, I did, and I don’t, and the “innovative” (read: pointless and opaque) quality of her prose doesn’t help.
All this reading wears Mithra out!