in the fragile beauty we froze: let go let go let go let go!

The last shall be the first. I wrote this first , but the final album I'm Recommending to you is

(shockingly!)

Phil Ochs' Rehearsals For Retirement


I came pretty close to writing a 33 1/3 book about it this year (shortlisted, not quite good enough but thanks for trying, story of my life), and I still really want to write a book about this album. (Aside: If you know anyone, if you are a publisher, if you know stuff other than sketchy sleazy publish-yourself opportunities and if you've got anything for me other than worthless, hastily-Googled assvice, please get in touch.)

Anyway, this is about the album. Not my pitiful attempts to make something of myself.

So. Let me talk about this album in the only ways I know how.

By the time he made this album, Ochs had this idea that each song should be a self-contained narrative. Like a movie. The word I"d choose to sum up this album is cinematic. And within that, this album uses different cinematic modes, shifting frenetically between tragedy, comedy, farce, jump cuts, a switch between styles that reminds me of the Nighttown part of Ulysses or early Godard. Songs shift styles between 70s B-comic Western and historic tragedy, between war drama and musical comedy.

It isn't frenetic or schizophrenic, it's a deliberate evocation, an intentional signifying that demonstrates a mastery over different cultural styles. By the time Ochs had made this album, sneering critics had dismissed him as a bipolar alcoholic. It's my project to change the hegemonic narrative of his life, to change the way you think of him, if you think of him at all. Most just dismiss him as an inferior contemporary of Dylan's, a sad sack bipolar alcoholic who couldn't take the switch to electric and killed himself. You are wrong. This blog post will not attempt to address this biographical disservice (that's, uh, what the book was supposed to be about, because the two biographies of Ochs have been pretty lacking; mine would have been both critical and AWESOME). At the time of Rehearsals, Ochs was a multi-movie-a-day filmgoer. I often wonder how living to and through the age of MTV would have affected him and his work and I feel sad all over again that he died so young.

I thought about doing this blog post track by track, lugubriously analyzing each song, but it just doesn't work that way, not today, not on an already tl;dr post on an album that's so important to me, not already risking criticism on something where I just can't deal with it.

Rehearsals is seamless misery and rage, frustration from beginning to end. I could give you a note by note analysis. But I won't. I thought about elliptically writing impressions, but that was a little too precious for a blog post.

In a way I guess it's good I never did get to do the 33 1/3 book because all I can do is stamp my foot and make vague gestures and say, fuck recommendations, I demand that you listen to this album NOW NOW NOW because it's so essential and so passionate and sad and angry and summarizes so perfectly an important time at the brink of American politics and culture, and at the same time, it summarizes a beautiful crisis moment in one man's life. Yet it's not exploitation. It's someone screaming into a void. It's someone screaming into a void and reassembling the echoes, reassembling the reflections, in a desperate and futile attempt to make someone understand - a last-ditch effort.

So, please, I implore you, I beg you, I demand that you listen to Rehearsals for Retirement.

This album has been the constant that's followed my entire adult life. A heavy and beautiful burden. Of course it's underrated. Of course it's forgotten. Of course it's overlooked and underappreciated by sneering rock critics, but I think it's one of the greatest albums ever made.

Therefore, I Recommend it to you.


***
So, that concludes this already-delayed project (and, thanks for sticking with me, if you did). It was good to get out of my comfort zone and make myself do this (almost) every day after putting it off for a week. And now I will flee back to my comfort zone.

Next week, in a transparent attempt to vaguely cash in on the Bruno craze, I will attempt to Recommend to you 5 Postwar German films.

hungry hearts, hungry minds

I really like the strange tension involved in a recommendation blog that: 1. Has no consistent audience and 2. Leads to nobody actually experiencing my recommendations.

It's almost Borgesian, so before I break out my eye patch, I'll recommend you something that totally exists!

So today's recommendation is listening to me blather more about Anzia Yezierska in my characteristically clumsy way, because I totally had a really, really frustratingly great entry written in a notebook that's in a suitcase I haven't seen for 6 days and am, apparently, not supposed to mention here.

Please, send a hairbrush, or something.

Anyway. Yezierska.

I'm going to talk more about "Where Lovers Dream," and I'm going to avoid, hopefully, the blather that has always annoyed me about how critics have discussed it in the past. I will also hopefully not exceed my own attention span in my eagerness to post this.

Much of my *vague pretentious air quotes* research involves historiography. The narrative cultures construct about history and how it changes over time. Part of my fascination with this story involves its own historiography, the way it exists in two separate times and discusses them without it being heavily linked to stereotypes regarding discrete times and years.

This story starts with a simple, nearly postmodern fragment: "For years I was saying to myself - just so you will act when you meet him. Just so you will stand. So you will look on him. These words you will say to him."

As we used to say in happier days, in classrooms overlooking the sea discussing books, let's unpack that.

It's a pretty intriguing opening for a story that, again, has been dismissed as token, pat example of Jewish-American pulp writing in the early 20th century.

These sentences work in several ways, and that's stunningly elegant. On the one hand the speaker is referring, literally, to how she had planned for years to speak "just so" to the unnamed him (we learn later that it is the man she almost married, who rejected her because her family was poor). On the other hand, we can emphasize the just. JUST so you will stand. JUST so you will act. JUST so you will speak. These words you will say to him. It's almost an epigraph, a performance. A rehearsed litany, perhaps. Left with nothing else, able to represent herself with nothing else, the speaker unfolds her tale, building a space wherein she had once dreamed with words, evoking their power to construct nationality, identity, and social class.

She is at once external and internal to this time: she speaks from a space completely divorced from the space and time she had once built with the love she had had; yet the memory and nostalgia for it allows her to construct this space / time (diegesis) fully and vividly. Without fetishizing the poverty, without simplifying the problematics of young love, Yezierksa

Of course, nothing that happy is sustainable in America - that's really the larger message in her work (a collection of one of Yezierska's short stories is called "How I found America"; like much of her work, you can read it in 2 ways).

Perhaps some of the reason I find such affinity with Yezierska is the intellectual tradition of voluntary poverty from which she comes; her father was a Talmudic scholar who was supported by the village. The character of the non-working intellectual holy man father is a recurring one in her stories.

As someone who is desperately indebted to the life of the mind (and I mean that financially, not emotionally or anything), I guess I relate more and more every day.

Anyway, so that's your daily dose of my Yezierska evangelism. Will I write more tomorrow? Will I recommend something else? Heck, will THOM recommend something? Only time will tell! Tune in tomorrow for more!