The Benefits of Annual Events for Enthusiasts

Today was Record Store Day. For the first time in a few years, I was able to go out and celebrate by visiting a couple record stores. Record Store Day and similar events for enthusiasts, such as Free Comic Book Day (FCBD), are always enjoyable enough for me to look forward to.

The obvious benefit for fangirls and boys is the loot. As FCBD has grown, more publishers have come out with special publications just for the event, which are available for free at comic book stores. Similarly, music labels have special releases on Record Store Day. The local Disk Union had a wall displaying these releases, and many were tempting. I would have loved to walk away with stoner metal group The Sword’s 7-inch “John the Revelator,” but an enthusiast must control expenses, so I opted for only the melodic death metal group Dark Tranquility’s extended edition of their 2007 album Fiction: transparent red vinyl plus a 7-inch disk with extra tracks.

 

A thing of beauty.

But the loot at these types of events often isn’t that great, which is all right because these events are usually created for another purpose: to promote an industry and support local retailers. Small music and comic shops often have trouble attracting enough customers to stay open, but events like Record Store Day and FCBD bring in crowds. Lee’s Comics in San Mateo, California would have at most a handful of people at any given time I visited, but on FCBD, it was hard to get in the door. Sure, your Sheldon Coopers would be there obsessively flipping through the racks, but so would lots of other sorts of people. And Lee’s was great at making the day a family-friendly event, with massive sales and a shopkeeper always ready to direct kids to the children’s comics.

As an enthusiast, I’m happy to show small businesses support. Drops Record wasn’t participating in Record Store Day in any official way today, but I popped in anyway. It’s a new shop in the area that’s trying to attract business. Every time I go, I half expect to find it has disappeared, but so far it has hung in there. I was one of two people looking for records today, and I walked out with a cheap-because-it's-grubby Japanese pressing of the Pink Floyd classic Atom Heart Mother:

 

In addition to the above benefits, it’s simply fun to have an excuse to get out of the house, enjoy yourself, and participate in a subculture. Record Store Day came early for me because I live in Japan, so many places in the world still have the day ahead of them. If you’re into vinyl--or want to be--go hit your local record store. (The Record Store Day website will help you find one.) And if you can’t do that, mark Free Comic Book Day on your calendar. It’s May 7 and good for at least a couple free comics and a good time.


A related post:
Listening to Vinyl: Dust in the Grooves

Heracles' Hope in the Midst of Suffering

I don’t know the extent to which the culture of ancient Greece doubted its gods, but Euripides' tragedy Heracles certainly appears to question both their worthiness and existence. And when, in the course of human history, thinkers have entertained the idea that no gods exist, they always find something to replace them.

Heracles opens with the hero away performing his labours (mostly killing stuff) while an upstart ruler has evicted Heracles’ family from their home. Destitute and homeless, they supplicate Zeus for aid even as the ruler plans to execute them. At the last minute, Heracles returns, but the situation only gets worse. Hera sends Iris and Madness to drive Heracles into a frenzy during which he slays his own wife and children. When he returns to himself, he finds he has lost all by his own hands.

This story presents the gods in the worst possible light. The backstory is that Zeus cheated on Hera, sneaking into Megara’s bed and fathering Heracles. Hera exacts her revenge on Heracles and his family, using Iris and Madness as her pawns. We hear not a peep from Zeus despite all the supplication to him. Thus it’s no wonder that the characters repeatedly question the justice of the gods. After the bloodbath, Heracles openly holds the gods in disdain:

Let the glorious wife of Zeus now dance for joy and make Olympus shake with her footsteps! She has achieved her will; she has cast down from on high the foremost man of Greece, toppling him from his very foundations! What man would utter prayers to such a goddess? 

In the face of suffering, Christians claim that everything happens according to God’s will, which is unfathomable to mere mortals, but ever since antiquity, philosophers and common folk alike have seen the existence of evil and suffering as a significant challenge to the existence of any god worth the name. Would a good and all powerful god will the suffering of innocents? (previous post)

That is a riddle all believers face--as Heracles does. My copy of the play has introductory notes by Richard Rutherford, who states the play is merciless in its complete lack of hope for the hero. Instead of the deus ex machina coming at the end of the play to solve all problems, it happens halfway through and only stirs things up. And while some traditions hold that Heracles was later worshipped as payment for his suffering, Euripides has Theseus mention this briefly only to have Heracles shut him down. Nonetheless, I can’t help but disagree with Rutherford, for Euripides does indeed hold out hope.

Only it isn’t divine.

A recurring theme throughout Heracles is friendship. As the new Theban ruler Lycus subjects Heracles’ family to humiliation and worse, no one comes to their aid. The drama isn’t very long, but repeatedly the characters mention how friends tend to disappear in hard times. Amphitryon, Megara’s husband and the man who raised Heracles, states it as follows:

As for friends, some I see are not to be relied upon, while those deserving of the name are powerless to assist. So it is when men encounter misfortune. I pray that no friend of mine, even a mere acquaintance, may have this experience; there is no surer test of friends.

If Epictetus (or what I remember of his writings anyway) is anything to judge by, the vagaries of fate and the evanescent loyalty of friends are commonplace themes in ancient Greek literature, which is exactly why they stood out to me among all the more exciting elements. When you experience hard times, many friends would prefer to keep you and your affliction at an arm’s length, but a few will be there through thick and thin. This is the hope Euripides offers in a world where the gods are dubious entities at best.

This is hard to miss in the text, for not only does it show up repeatedly, but it is the note on which Euripides ends the play. Heracles is a defeated and broken demigod when his old friend Theseus shows up and offers some manly encouragement along the lines of “Quit crying and man up.” To this, Heracles is like, “Come on, everybody hurts sometimes,” and then Theseus, proving himself an understanding friend, is like, “Very well then. You’re welcome to crash at my place.”

They exit.

The caprices of fate strike us all, and when they do, maybe you turn your eyes to the heavens, maybe you don’t, maybe you feel a supernatural power answers, maybe you don’t, but undeniably the existence and qualities of any supposed divinity are uncertain. Friendship, on the other hand, while not always firm, is one hundred percent natural and experienced by all. In the absence of constant gods, we may find solace in inconstant humanity.

 

A Brief Train of Thought: Blacks' Magic

One of my favorite album covers is the cover of Salt-N-Pepa’s Blacks’ Magic. I ran across the album last summer and made an impulse buy based on the cover art alone. The other day, I was in the shower thinking about why I like this cover so much, when I had a realization about my attitude toward many issues today.

 

This really is a wonderful cover. Salt, Pepa and Spinderella appear to be having a sleepover in a magnificent library wherein they have discovered a tome of magic. Spellbound, they turn its leaves by candlelight. It’s a cute scene, and a little sexy.

It’s also spooky. Spirits of the dead hang overhead: Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong, Jimi Hendrix and Billie Holiday. Have the girls just chanted a passage summoning these souls from the afterlife? In any case, it’s clear their magic is not black magic of the occult variety but the magic of black musicians.

This is no perfunctory nod to great singers and instrumentalists of the past. No doubt Salt-N-Pepa were inspired by these musicians and hoped to channel a little of their artistry into the hip-hop on Blacks’ Magic. Now take that idea beyond music to all fields from visual arts and literature to science and social reform, and you arrive at an incredibly rich cultural heritage.

At this point in my train of thought, I arrived at Black History Month, which is designed to celebrate exactly this heritage. On social media, the agora of the 21st Century, there is a debate about Black History Month. The dialogue usually plays out with one side promoting the observance, while the other raises objections: If all people are equal, isn’t Black History Month itself racist? Why can’t we have a White History Month? Do we need a History Month for every group imaginable?

I do, of course, take a side in this nitty-gritty free-for-all, but my innermost self, my attitude prior to debate, the part of me that grew up among decent people, simply thinks Black History Month is a nice thing, so why not? The world has plenty of things to celebrate, and why shouldn’t the contributions to cultural heritage by black individuals be among them?

Salt-N-Pepa are interested in black heritage as African Americans, but it strikes me how this heritage is a shared heritage: It’s my heritage, too. Whenever I borrowed my dad’s Woodstock albums as a kid, my favorite tracks were Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” and “Purple Haze.” The other spirits on the cover of Blacks’ Magic are no strangers either, with Billie Holiday being a particular favorite. Of course, the list doesn’t stop there. In fact, it’s so extensive that listing names would be ridiculous. Whether you feel the need to focus on the racial label or not, black heritage is simply a part of our cultural background, and it has blessed us all.

 

I take this underlying attitude with me to a lot of cultural debates, including but not limited to race issues. The first issues to come to mind are all in popular culture: A black Captain America? Okay, cool! Idris Elba for James Bond? Okay, cool! A Muslim Ms. Marvel? Okay, cool! A lesbian Batwoman? Okay, cool! A gay Star Wars character? Fine by me! A female Thor, who is Thor and even wields Mjolnir? By Valhalla’s gates, yes!

Prior to any debate, I simply approve of a diversity of cool stuff.  

And Blacks’ Magic is cool stuff. Aside from that wonderful cover, it has intelligent lyrics, samples from Public Enemy and James Brown, a bewitching melody borrowed from The Turtles, ubiquitous salt and pepper shaker sounds, hit songs of the nostalgic sort, and a couple songs that even have that perfect hip-hop sound I spent years looking for. “Live and Let Die” is one, but “Swift” is even better:

 

I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t important issues at stake in the cultural debates of the day, only that it’s also important to step back and simply enjoy what’s out there. This is possible even if you’re the kind of person for whom a progressive social agenda is suspect. There was a time--if only mythic--when we didn’t fight over everything, and if you look, you may find that time exists somewhere within you, too.

Macbeth's Twist on Nihilism

When rereading Macbeth recently, the first thing that jumped out at me was Macbeth’s imp of the perverse (previous post). The second was Macbeth’s nihilism, which appears early in the play and increases as his doom draws near. Yet the nihilism in Macbeth is no mere dismal pronouncement of life’s meaninglessness.

Surely this celebrated soliloquy is one of the finest nihilistic statements in all of literature:

     Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

     Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
     To the last syllable of recorded time,
     And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
     The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
     Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
     That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
     And then is heard no more. It is a tale
     Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
     Signifying nothing.

From the Orson Welles film adaptation:

 

By this point, Macbeth’s life has completely fallen apart. Having attained the throne through murder, he finds himself a despised tyrant holed up in his castle and going mad. His wife and co-conspirator, Lady Macbeth, has committed suicide and he fears his own end draws near. He has played his part, and poorly, and now the curtain falls and he asks, as we all must, “What was the point?”

But here comes the twist. No sooner has Macbeth finished speaking than he learns an army approaches. His clock is up, but instead of further bewailing the dumb machinery of fate, he rouses himself to meet this final challenge on the battlefield:

     I gin to be aweary of the sun,

     And wish the estate o’ the world were now undone.
     Ring the alarum bell! Blow wind! Come, wrack!
     At least we’ll die with harness on our back.

Macbeth’s response to the meaninglessness of the universe is to create meaning through action. This is the kind of nihilism I like, positive nihilism, nihilism which says, along with Nietzsche, “Okay fine, so the universe itself doesn’t hold meaning, then I’ll give it meaning!” This is the heroic tenor par excellence, and indeed these four lines from Macbeth ring like passages from Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”:

     Death closes all: but something ere the end,

     Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
     Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

And this:

     Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

     We are not now that strength which in old days
     Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
     One equal temper of heroic hearts,
     Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
     To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Macbeth and Ulysses, murderer and hero, may not be that dissimilar. In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom quotes Nietzsche from Daybreak. In characteristic fashion, the philosopher denies the conventional moralistic reading of Macbeth in favor of something bolder and more life-affirming:

He who is really possessed by raging ambition beholds this its image with joy, and if the hero perishes by his passion this precisely is the sharpest spice in the hot draught of this joy. . . . How royally, and not at all like a rogue, does [Shakespeare’s] ambitious man pursue his course from the moment of his great crime!

This is a tempting interpretation of Macbeth, but let’s face it, it has problems. Macbeth’s pursuit of his course is very much like a rogue’s. He murders his guest and king while he sleeps. Then he hires common cutthroats to kill his dearest friend and friend’s son. I’m judging by conventional standards of morality, but if Macbeth’s behavior isn’t roguish, I don’t know what is. Although Macbeth does begin to stir earlier, it is only after all is lost that he exhibits anything I would say resembles Ulysses’ valiance.

Or rather, exhibits it again. Several lines in Macbeth make it clear that Macbeth was once a good man, a loyal servant to his king, and one hell of a fighter. According to Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, the historical Macbeth, who lived from 1040 to 1057, was also a better man than we see throughout most of the play. According to custom in nascent Scotland, there were legitimate reasons for rebelling against one’s king. Macbeth may have felt Duncan was too soft for protecting the land against invasion. Or Lady Macbeth may have had a blood feud with him. In Asimov’s words:

If Macbeth, encouraged by his wife, aspired to the throne, he did so in the approved Scottish fashion of the time. He raised an army and rebelled.

But this is the genius of Shakespeare. Many of Shakespeare’s works can be read numerous ways, the thrust changing with each director, actor and viewer. Henry V has been played as pro-war and anti-war. Coriolanus is either one of Shakespeare’s best or worst. The introduction to my copy of Julius Caesar says that Shakespeare did not try to settle the debate about whether Caesar was a hero or a tyrant and his assassins heroes or villains. Shakespeare raises questions but only toys with answers.

And so it goes with Macbeth. Does the Scottish king’s nihilism reject or affirm life? I’ve provided some thoughts on the matter, but the only way you can answer that question is by engaging with the text yourself.

 

 

Other posts on Shakespeare:

The Imp of Macbeth's Perverse

Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (and Baltar in Battlestar Galactica)

Who Would Win a Fight Between Hamlet and Coriolanus?

 

 

The Imp of Macbeth's Perverse

 Whenever I approach a text, I’m less interested in what critics tell me I should get out of it than I am in what simply fascinates me about it. This is the authentic experience of a work of art, a meeting of two spirits, one within the reader and the other within the text. One such point of fascination for me when rereading Macbeth recently was the main character’s imp of the perverse.

The imp of the perverse is an expression that comes from Edgar Allan Poe’s story of that name. The story is narrated by a man in prison who murdered someone and then could not subdue an irresistible urge to confess it. He did these things precisely because he knew he should not. Furthermore, he insists that everyone has these urges:  

With certain minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible. I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution.

Macbeth and Lady Macbeth demonstrate exactly this weakness. They cannot stop themselves from their crimes, and afterward cannot refrain from divulging them. In Lady Macbeth’s case, her weakness comes from a mental breakdown, whereas Macbeth himself, despite hallucinations and wild raving, maintains a slight grip on sanity. Nonetheless, he just . . . can’t seem . . . to stop himself. And the result is a lot of trouble. Having gained the throne of Scotland through murder, he can’t enjoy it, for his secret is out and he worries it will lead to his doom:

     We have scorched the snake, not killed it.
     She'll close and be herself, whilst our poor malice
     Remains in danger of her former tooth. 

On the surface, we may view the witches’ magic as driving Macbeth’s fate, but they are also representative of a force within Macbeth himself: his imp of the perverse. For this reason, I always feel sorry for Macbeth. He can’t hold back from his evil deeds and suffers as a result. Are we not all like this? Do not our personal failings frequently steer us into trouble? Even worse, we can tell ourselves, “You do not want to do that,” all the while knowing we will do exactly that. It’s as if there is a little demon inside driving our actions.

In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom raises Nietzsche and Freud as subsequent thinkers who also believed that “we are lived, thought, and willed by forces not ourselves,” and certainly thinkers have long seen this externality to our very selves as the essence of being human. I think of the transcendental philosophers of the Enlightenment, as well as Heidegger and his concept of Dasein. Human beings are distinguished by their ability to step back from and look at themselves, and even to step back and look at themselves looking at themselves. In that light, the imp of the perverse is merely a term for a mischievous aspect of our innermost nature that acts independently of our conscious control.  

Shakespeare is full of protagonists with this problem. Like Macbeth, Hamlet sees a ghost that may be of his own imagination, and his fitful response lays waste around him, eventually leading to his own death. Romeo and Juliet’s drives are obviously hormonal and lead to self-immolation. Coriolanus is an interesting twist on the theme, for he willingly follows his nature to his doom. In fact, he insists on it, and this very stubbornness is part of his imp.

There are many reasons to read Shakespeare, but his insight into human nature is the most compelling. He wasn’t the first to present audiences with the dual nature of their species (surely examples can be found stretching back to antiquity), but he was able to do it in a way that has mesmerized audiences for centuries and will continue for centuries more. If you haven’t already seen the latest screen version of Macbeth, I recommend you watch it. And when you do, keep your eyes open for the character unlisted in either the dramatis personae or the credits:

The imp of Macbeth’s perverse.

 

 

Other posts on Shakespeare:

Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (and Baltar in Battlestar Galactica)
Who Would Win a Fight Between Hamlet and Coriolanus?

The Ancients' Guide to Love and Sex in the 21st Century

 

"Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come"

--Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI

Plato’s Symposium opens with some Athenian luminaries attending a banquet at the tragic poet Agathon’s place. The gathering begins with everyone agreeing not to drink and ends in drunken revelry. In between, the attendees deliver speeches in praise of love, the finest of them by none other than Socrates himself. I don’t intend to offer my own encomium to love here, but I do have some thoughts on the speeches in the dialogue.

A krater depicting a symposium. I took this photo a few years ago at an exhibit of ancient Mediterranean pottery at San Francisco Airport. From my notes: Symposia were male drinking parties. Wives were excluded, but hetairai (courtesans) were welcome. Music, dancing, games and "erotic activity" were also part of symposia.

PHAEDRUS

What I find most interesting about Phaedrus’ speech is his use of the word lover. Today when we use the word lover, we usually think of one of two in a mutual romantic relationship. A close look at Phaedrus’ speech, however, shows a subtle difference. He uses the word lover to mean one who is in love with another, with reciprocity common but unnecessary. When he makes an example of Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, he admits Achilles’ love for Patroclus, but also makes a distinction between lover and beloved:

Very different was the reward of the true love of Achilles towards his lover Patroclus—his lover and not his love (the notion that Patroclus was the beloved one is a foolish error into which Aeschylus has fallen, for Achilles was surely the fairer of the two.

Perhaps I like this distinction on a rational level because it suggests one of the key points in the dialogue, that love is by the inferior for the superior. I decided to reread the Symposium because of references to it in Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein. In the novel, the narrator and titular character love each other as friends, but the narrator goes to great lengths to show that Ravelstein is the superior of the two, and thus the narrator’s devotion.

Or perhaps Phaedrus’ use of lover simply appeals to me because it allows for praise of unrequited lovers, who seek to be more virtuous and thereby win their beloved’s approval. The plight of one who moons over someone one-sidedly--a situation to which I’m no stranger--seems less unseemly when granted classical gravitas.

PAUSANIAS

Pausanias makes a distinction between high and low love:

Evil is the vulgar lover who loves the body rather than the soul, inasmuch as he is not even stable, because he loves a thing which is in itself unstable, and therefore when the bloom of youth which he was desiring is over, he takes wing and flies away, in spite of all his words and promises; whereas the love of the noble disposition is life-long, for it becomes one with the everlasting.

Judging by the jests they trade, Agathon and company have no small amount of appreciation for comely youths, so they would likely understand our modern obsession with sex, but Pausanias makes the commonplace assertion that when truly in love, you find something more in your partner. In wedding speeches and Facebook posts, husbands and wives are always talking about how “kind, caring and sweet” their partners are. This is something like that, but given how much time the great philosophers of ancient Greece spent pondering the “noble disposition,” I think Pausanias has in mind something higher than mere niceness.

But that’s for Socrates to elucidate. First, the playwright Aristophanes--of Lysistrata and Chiraq fame--makes a speech, but only after having overcome a bout of the “hiccough.”

ARISTOPHANES

Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein makes much of the sex myth in Aristophanes’ speech. The idea is that far in humanity’s past, man and woman were one being, but together they were so strong that Zeus found it necessary to weaken them by separating them. Severed from one another and finding themselves incomplete, men and women each yearned desperately for completion. Taking pity on them, Zeus provided a way for them to rejoin through love and sex. However, this was not limited to opposite-sex couples:

…or if man came to man they might be satisfied, and rest, and go their ways to the business of life: so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man.

Certainly there is poetry in this, and I used to view the search for love in this way. A good mate fills a hole inside, completes you, shines light in your darkness. Nowadays, however, I’m more inclined to see the search for “the one” in Lacanian terms. Everyone has a hole inside that is part of their psyche and can never be filled. Two people just means two holes. Thus, Lacan says that sex--seen as the ultimate fulfillment of two individuals each in the other--is impossible (previous post).

But Aristophanes’ myth, usually deployed for its picture of two individuals coming together in perfect harmony, could also be seen as explaining the very separation described by Lacan. And even Lacan didn’t mean to say that all hope was lost. While ultimate satisfaction isn’t possible, we can’t help but search for it, and the search has its own rewards.

SOCRATES

When it’s his turn, Socrates says that love is always of the beautiful, which is the good, and one who gains the good gains happiness. Since the good for Plato is the Form by which all other forms are known, love is nothing less than a vehicle to a higher state of being:

And the true order . . . is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. This . . . is that life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute.

By now we are talking about love of abstracts, of truth. Socrates typifies this latter type of love more than any other figure in the ancient world, while the love he shares with statesman and general Alcibiades--a love characterized by mutual respect and chaste nights cuddling under a blanket--represents a higher type of love between two individuals.

Does anyone experience the higher forms of love anymore? Chaste romantic relationships do exist--just ask Colin Farrell about Elizabeth Taylor--and if all my time on Twitter has taught me anything, it is that the world is full of people passionate about ideas, art and knowledge. But whatever form love takes, Socrates would tell us to do it as best we can so it makes us better people.

Socrates Seeking Alcibiades in the House of Aspasia, Jean-Léon Gérôme.

 

Previous posts mentioning Plato:

Have a Holly Jolly (and Consumerist yet Discerning) Christmas

The Philosophy of Zombie Strippers

 

A Brief Line of Inquiry: The Sixties

When Jefferson Airplane appeared on American Bandstand in 1967, Dick Clark’s questions addressed the Sixties counterculture’s challenge to social norms. The band’s answers are brief but interesting, and one in particular got me to thinking: How should we judge the Sixties?

 

I especially like this part:

Dick Clark: Older people worry, they see the way you’re dressed, they hear your music, they don’t understand. Do parents have anything to worry about?

Paul Kantner: I think so. Their children are doing things that they didn’t do, and they don’t understand it.

Kantner’s answer evokes a vision of Sixties rebellion, a vision that runs deeper than slogans like “love and peace,” a vision that marks an event (previous post), a vision that destroys an old order so it can open new possibilities, an emancipatory vision. You know that society that we’re always talking about, the one at the heart of the culture wars, the one where everyone is free to explore their potential, broaden their minds and project themselves freely regardless of race, creed, gender, sexual orientation and so forth? Well, that’s what they had in mind.

When I was growing up, the Sixties were a big topic and the attitude was generally positive. The Baby Boomers had come to run the show and were looking back at their youth. Enough time had passed to make the media interested in a retrospective. Golden oldies radio stations abounded and parents lectured their children about how superior the music had been back in the day. Pundits embraced the hippies’ vision as sincere if nothing else, discussed Camelot in tones by turns reverential and scandalized, and debated and redebated the Vietnam War. Everyone knew the Sixties weren’t all good, but let it be known those years had some substance.

However, the Sixties had already proven a bit of a disappointment. As a kid, nothing could bore me more than The Big Chill or Thirtysomething, and to this day I’ve never watched much of either, but my impression was always of Boomers gaining weight, getting divorced, and finding themselves lost after the promise of the Sixties had vanished. One year, they were poking daisies in the barrels of rifles held by National Guardsmen, smoking weed and making free love. A blink of an eye later and they were crunching numbers in cubicles, failing to lose weight, and fighting with exes over the kids.

Jefferson Airplane provides a good example. When Kantner and some other members of the group went on to form Jefferson Starship, a legal squabble over the name ensued. That's hardly the Woodstock spirit. And in her autobiography Somebody to Love?, Grace Slick herself describes her participation in Starship (yet a third band) as selling out. And as much as I love Starship, its music is all Mannequin while Jefferson Airplane’s lyrics sound more like a rant from the firebrand Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (previous post):

     We are forces of chaos and anarchy

     Everything they say we are we are

     And we are very proud of ourselves

     Up against the wall

     Up against the wall motherfucker

     Tear down the walls

          --“We Can Be Together,” Jefferson Airplane.

A 1970 performance:

 

Critics say the Sixties counterculture warriors were supposed to “tear down the walls,” but instead they caved on their ideals and became yet another generation of stiffs, the generation that created a good number of the messes facing the world today and continues to stand in the way of fixing them.

Allan Bloom offered scathing criticism in his book The Closing of the American Mind (1987). According to him, student protesters in the Sixties were a bunch of improperly educated, uncultured rowdies trying to disguise skipping school and taunting their elders as fighting for justice. When universities began caving to their demands, it was like adults ceding authority to children.

Much about Bloom’s criticism is ludicrous--like his running comparison of student protesters with Nazis--but is there not a hint of juvenile attitude in Jefferson Airplane’s interview with Dick Clark? The band members exchange glances and snicker like kids allowed to hang out with the adults, or like high schoolers smug over a prank in class. This suggests that the vision out of San Francisco may have been little more than hijinks. In retrospect, might we not see in this an indication of the movement’s quick demise?

So how should we judge the Sixties?

The answer is obvious: We need not judge any decade as wholly good or bad. The times deserve a full exploration in their complexity. This inquiry is one I will continue, but at the moment I feel that while the aspirations of the Sixties were a dream that has ended, that dream has not been forgotten and thus still holds potential. Perhaps, looking back to the Sixties for inspiration, we can still do what our forbearers didn’t, and in so doing take the world, if not to utopia, then at least a step closer.