of his pocket, but nothing worked. There was no bounce, just aridity and suspicion. It finally dawned on me that in this place that we had set aside to nurture culture and study its workings, culture didn’t work.
It couldn’t work in this place, because all the things that I wanted to talk about—all those tokens of quotidian sociability that had opened so many doors and hearts for me—all those occasions for chat, from Tristram Shandy to Roseanne, from Barnett Newman to Baby Face—belonged to someone. But not to everyone. All the treasures of culture were divvied up and owned by professors, as certainly as millionaires own the beach-fronts of Maine. So, even though, in the course of a normal day, I might chat with the lady in the check-out line about Roseanne, might discuss the Lakers’ chances with some guy at the blackjack table, might schmooze on the phone with Christopher Knight about Karen Carson’s new paintings, and maybe even dish with Karen herself about an all-male performance of Swan Lake, there was no hope of my having a casual conversation with an English professor about what a cool book Tristram Shandy was.
Because, in this place, books and paintings and music were not “cool stuff.” In society, these objects were occasions for gossip—for the commerce of opinion where there is no truth. In school, they were occasions for mastery where there is no truth—an even more dangerous proposition—although my colleagues, being masters, had little choice but to behave masterfully. Exempted by their status from the whims of affection and the commerce of opinion, they could only mark territory from the podium, with footnotes, and speak in the language of authority about things they did not love—while I listened. Which I did, and I learned a lot, returning to school. All the secrets of the universe, however, would have been poor recompense for the miasma of social desolation; they could never have redeemed the fact that, within the cloister, we moved among one another, and among all the treasures of human invention, like spiteful monks sworn to silence, like silly, proprietary eunuchs in some sultan’s harem—while all the joys that bind the world together kept us sullenly apart.
So this book is about other, more ordinary, uses for art and books and music—about what they seem to do and how they seem to do it on a day-to-day basis. It is not about how they should work, or must work, just about the way they seem to have worked in my experience, and the ways that I have seen them work for others. The pieces in this book, then, are quite literally “speculative writing,” neither stories nor essays but something more like fables: compressed narratives, grounded in real experience and as true as they need to be, with little “morals” at the end. They move directly from what I have seen and experienced to what I think about it, from the particular to the general, with none of the recursiveness of ordinary essays and short stories. So there is a lot more “thus,” “then,” “therefore,” and "because" than I would ordinarily tolerate. This is endemic to the form and the consequence, as well, of my having written them straight through, under deadline, in hope of enlisting haste as an aid to candor.
Unfortunately, since some of these deadlines were very short, there is probably a surfeit of candor in this book, occasionally at the expense of felicity. I have tried to smooth out some rough spots in revision, but the fact remains that some of these pieces end in places that I should never have gone, had I not started out in the direction that I did. Some of them conclude on notes that I should never have played, had I not begun with the simple little riff that I did. So understand that I have not set out to shock or offend, only to speculate on the consequences of my own experience, the shape of it; and be assured, as well, that all of these essays began in innocence, in extremely simple, even childlike questions that begin with “Why?”
The real heart of this book, in fact, lies in a little “why?” During the nineteen seventies, when I was writing rock criticism and pop songs, and playing music, I used to wonder why there were so many love songs. More specifically, I wondered why ninety percent of the pop songs ever written were love songs, while ninety percent of rock criticism was written about the other ten percent. My own practice complied with these percentages. When I wrote songs, alone or with cowriters, I wrote love songs—happy ones and sad ones, mean ones and sweet ones, hip ones and square ones: hundreds of them. When I wrote about music, I wrote about other things, mostly about music history, politics, drugs, hanging out, and playing the guitar.
Why? I wondered—and I wondered all the time, because it’s disquieting to be doing something and not know why you’re doing it. I came up with a provisional answer on a cool, windy afternoon in the zócalo of a little town on the slopes above Mexico City. I was sitting in a shady arcade with my old friend Brownie, who isn’t called that anymore, since he is presently in the Federal Witness Protection Program. We were down in Mexico on a nefarious errand that doubtless contributed to Brownie’s uncomfortable accommodation with the Feds, but, on this afternoon, nothing very nefarious was going on. We were just sitting at a little table, shooting nothing but the breeze and enjoying the air. Brownie was drinking a beer. I was drinking coffee. At one point, Brownie reached over and touched my arm, nodding at something in the square behind me. I turned around and beheld a perfect Latin American tableau.
On the edge of the curb, on the other side of the square, three people were standing in a row. There was boy of about seventeen, wearing a cheap black suit, a white shirt, and a narrow black tie. Beside him was a beautiful girl of about the same age, in a white lace dress, and, beside her, a duenna in full black battle-regalia with a mantilla over her hair. The duenna was a large woman, and looked for all the world like Dick Butkus in drag. The three of them had been about to cross the street into the plaza when they found their way blocked. Now, they were just standing there, at a loss, lined up on the curb with two dirt-brown dogs fucking in the street in front of them.
It was a scene deserving of Murillo. The boy was biting his lip, full of antic life but holding onto his composure, trying not to grin at the ludicrous spectacle. The girl had lowered her eyes demurely to stare at the tips of her black patent-leather shoes. The duenna was discombobulated, agitated. Her eyes were darting about. First she would glare at the offending canines, who showed no signs of stopping, then she would glance sideways at the young couple, policing their responses, then she would scan the square with her social radar, hoping against hope that no one was seeing them seeing brown dogs fucking. Brownie and I, being gringo assholes, were cracking up, and suddenly it occurred to me (probably because I had written a nice melody that morning) that these kids, having a duenna and a lot of other structure besides, did not require a wide selection of love songs. Then, perversely, it occurred to me that the dogs didn’t need any love songs at all.
That was my answer. We need so many love songs because the imperative rituals of flirtation, courtship, and mate selection that are required to guarantee the perpetuation of the species and the maintenance of social order—that are hardwired in mammals and socially proscribed in traditional cultures—are up for grabs in mercantile democracies. These things need to be done, but we don’t know how to do them, and, being free citizens, we won’t be told how to do them. Out of necessity, we create the institution of love songs. We saturate our society with a burgeoning, ever-changing proliferation of romantic options, a cornucopia of choices, a panoply of occasions through which these imperative functions may be facilitated. It is a market, of course, a job and a business, but it is also a critical instrumentality in civil society. We cannot do without it. Because it’s hard to find someone you love, who loves you—but you can begin, at least, by finding some one who loves your love song. And that, I realized, sitting there in the zócalo with Brownie, is what I do: I write love songs for people who live in a democracy. Some of them follow.
A HOME IN THE NEON
It’s the strangest thing. I have lived in a lot of cities, some of them for substantial lengths of time, but I have never thought of any of them as home. I thought of them as “where I’m living now.” Then, the other morning, I woke up and realized that Las Vegas has, indeed, become my home—that I routinely think of it as such. Somehow, in the few years that I have been living here and traveling out of here, this most un-homelike of cities has come to function for me as a kind of moral bottom-line—as a secular refuge and a source of comforts and reassurances that are unavailable elsewhere—as a home, in other words.
Even as I write this, however, I realize that claiming Las Vegas as my home while practicing “art criticism”