kultureflash

ARTWORKER OF THE WEEK #31

Geoffrey O'Brien

Call it O'Brien's Quandary: just because you've won acclaim for the strange brew of essay, memoir, prose poetry, and novelistic verve that animates your books The Phantom Empire (Norton, 1993), Dream Time (1988), The Browser's Ecstasy (2000), and now Sonata for Jukebox (2004, all from Counterpoint Press), why should that overshadow your equally unique contribution to contemporary verse -- especially when your fans include authorities on the level of John Ashbery and August Kleinzahler? Best answer might be: just wait. When your poetry -- populated by ancient heretics, old-movie tough guys, and daydreaming children -- is as permeated with the stuff of myth and desire as the work O'Brien has collected in A View of Buildings and Water (Salt Press, 2002) and its predecessor Floating City: Selected Poems 1978-1995 (Talisman House, 1996), its time is always present.

To read Geoffrey O'Brien's contribution to KultureFlash's Poem of the Week browse here.

The following interview took place by e-mail between London and New York City.

Barry Schwabsky: Your new book Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life seems to form a trilogy with two earlier books, The Phantom Empire and The Browser's Ecstasy -- a sort of homemade phenomenology of the reception of cinema, books, and now music. But whereas, if I remember correctly, the previous two are written in the third person so that the individual, subjective viewpoint is simultaneously collective -- really the abstract portrait of the experience of a swath of a generation -- Sonata for Jukebox uses the first person and contains more of the kinds of particulars typical of a memoir. Does this reflect a development in your writing, or a difference between music on the one hand and movies and reading on the other?

Geoffrey O'Brien: Actually, The Phantom Empire is couched largely in the second person ("You have woken up in the middle of your life to find yourself alone in what for a second you take to be a movie theater") in order to suggest an "I" who is in some sense object rather than subject. And Browser's Ecstasy begins in third person plural ("We had already been talking about books for several hours") before being handed over to a fictional "I" responding to that "we" ("When I was in your midst, sharing your talk, it was as if all things were linked...") In Sonata for Jukebox I decided to forego such devices and go for an "I" that would actually be myself, simply because I wanted to weave personal and family history into the book, and quickly realized that fictionalisation wouldn't work -- I wanted the real-world referents, actual radio stations, bands, etc. It seemed that to write about music necessarily involved writing about social life in a way that writing about movies or books didn't, for whatever that's worth.

BS: Speaking of real-world referents, I was intrigued by the story, early in the book, of your brother Joel's involvement in The Flying Machine, James Taylor's first band. It seems your brother had a flourishing career as a drummer for a short period in the early '70s, recording a good deal with artists like Carole King and Kate Taylor. Then he seems to disappear from the recorded archive. What's the rest of the story?

GOB: My brother Joel -- who sometimes records as Bishop O'Brien -- has continued to be active in music, though the recordings have been all too sporadic. These days he works most frequently as a jazz pianist and singer, and has cut a couple of CDs with The Kansas City Sound, a jazz band whose personnel has at times included Roswell Rudd, Bill Crow, Eddie Diehl, and other luminaries, and whose repertoire pays extensive homage to Count Basie and Duke Ellington. He's also been very active for the past decade as a collage artist. Joel, I should add, is my chief informant in all things musical, and I could not have dreamed of writing this book without the lifetime's worth of musical education I've gotten from him (and whatever I didn't get from him I got from my brother Bob, whose expertise is more in the classical and operatic repertoire).

BS: The new book's subtitle refers to "pop music", although classical music also comes into it to a much lesser extent. But in the books on movies and reading, and in your essays generally, there seems to be very little distinction between high culture and pop culture -- it's all a continuum. How much sense does that distinction make today? Doesn't recording -- which really seems to be as much your subject as music itself -- tear any kind of classical music, Western or Eastern, from the web of its tradition and render it a set of consumable objects like pop songs?

GOB: Obviously more could have been drawn into the net, something I tried to suggest with some very brief passages about opera, ancient Mediterranean music, and so on. When I realized that the book could be infinitely long, a good many potential sub-chapters bit the dust... for another time maybe. When you proceed outward from the act of listening, as I tried to do, the genres and historical eras crisscross in unexpected ways, but it would have taken a lot more room to talk, for example, about listening to a lot of early music (Dufay and Ockeghem) at the same time as listening to the Beach Boys in the early '70s -- or tuning in to Kurt Weill at the same time as early '60s rock 'n' roll, and how all those things commented on each other. So the best you can do is one "for instance" after another, and obviously anybody else can do the same according to their own idiosyncratic playlist. (And in the meantime in the age of remixes and Opera Babes somebody else is already out there providing pre-packaged crossovers...)

BS: On the other hand the distinction between the obvious and the esoteric seems essential to you, although the same music can somehow be both, simultaneously. Can you comment on that?

GOB: I love the idea of things being hidden in plain sight, the sense of mystery that can inhere in surfaces of stunning flatness and obviousness. There's a continuum that links such surfaces to the most recondite, allusive, deliberately complex work (work that can, contrariwise, sometimes usefully be turned on its head by being looked at as if it were brutally simple, like a comic book version of Shakespeare). Popular culture (in all places and ages) has a way of encompassing both ends of the spectrum in one package (I'm assuming a popular culture that is just as sophisticated in its means and intentions as any other sort...)

BS: Your "jukebox of the mind" ends in 1982, with Twlight 22 (whom I'd never heard of), Culture Club, and Orchestre Baobab. It is that cut-off a generational thing, or do you think something profound changed in music when the digital era began, as it did around that time?

GOB: The book oscillates between two different kinds of change, cultural and commercial versus biological and generational. (Public versus private would be another way to put it.) In experience the distinction is blurred. The "jukebox of the mind" list (which was added as an afterthought, at my editor's request) clearly reflects my own demographic niche, with its centre late '50s to early '70s (i.e., from late childhood to early adulthood). What happened to me from the early '80s on was that my listening had less and less to do with the state of the pop charts, or at least the US pop charts. On the other hand, it's indisputable that fundamental changes occurred around the same time, with digital sampling in the forefront. I could of course have pushed forward in the book into the new era, with myself in the role of my own grandfather at the beginning, born in the 19th century and ending his days listening to the Supremes and the Rolling Stones... but by then the manuscript was clearly long enough. Perhaps I'll save it for Sonata for Jukebox: The Final Confrontation.

BS: Somewhere in the book you write, "When you get to pick the music you can change history." What music would you pick right now to change history how?

GOB: An impossible question, but how about the old Nonesuch album of shakuhachi music, A Bell Ringing in the Empty Sky? Anything to induce a state resembling detached tranquil awareness all around...

Barry Schwabsky is a contributing editor to KultureFlash and the author of The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Opera: Poems 1981-2002 (Meritage Press, 2003).