Pour Me, Pour You
I’m not sure I can pinpoint the precise moment that popular music became meaningless dreck. Sure you can blame it on Barry Manilow, but he coexisted when rock ate its young. Las Vegas called. They washed ashore with glitter lapels and a few precious tubes of Brylcreem for the pomps. No I think Barry’s off the hook. All the powder blue tuxedoes can’t be laid at his doorstep because The Clash weren’t even born yet. Think of the mass hysteria resulting from booking acts boring enough for the White House or the National Christmas Party. They’d applaud Perry Como’s disembodied cardigan. Black people are off the hook too, despite Barry White and Lionel Richey. Those were white guys owning Studio 54 when disco made hip replacement surgery inevitable.
Writers don’t have a Las Vegas to go to when they start to suck. There is no handy alternative universe, no White House bookings, no Long Island wedding industry to prop that shit up. When the prose is bad a whole bunch of vicious critics rip it apart, guys like Newt from Georgia on Amazon. They gotta say it or Pat Robertson will send a hit squad to speed you on to heaven.
Maybe there could be a town somewhere for writers in decline. Never mind the young and struggling. They’re hip, they’re okay. Let’s have a town with forty bookstores, sixty libraries, a town where a fading hack can get some sunshine. It would probably have to be in California or Spain, somewhere warm. Where did all the Rod McKuen books end up? Bodega Bay? Oh no that’s where Hitchcock filmed The Birds, dude. Imagine the stress of that after decades of decline you got birds all over you, big ones, cormorants, turtle doves, red tailed hawks. Where is that literary Las Vegas?
August 11th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
Robert Benchley had a piece back in the 1930s where, when writers died, they went to an afterlife that consisted of a clubby little bar. The writers spent most of thier time sniping at one another and reading newspapers–concentrating on auctions, where they gloated over how much their private papers or first editions are fetching back on earth.
The big problem, however, is that none of them can afford to pay their bar tabs, and some of them have reached their credit limit.
Every so often, however, a publisher dies, and when he gets to heaven he invariably buys them a round; the publishers are still flush in the afterlife.
August 12th, 2006 at 12:51 pm
[...] Pour Me, Pour YouIt turns out that writers can’t retire to Vegas and start lounge acts when their careers wane. David Thayer worries about these things and more. [...]