ATTENTION

by Joshua Cohen

  Obviously, throughout this period a more official culture kept on keeping on. The #1 album of 1976 was Frampton Comes Alive; disco’s ball twirled over the dance floors; while Uptown, for the formal-dress folks, it was Mozart and Beethoven as usual. When the 1980s arrived, representing for majority America an MTV/VH1 homogenization of culture, Downtown proved the infamous exception: genre distinctions, in the mean streets, were meaningless, as a mess of loud, angry music rose up amid the squalor, IV-drug addiction, and AIDS suffering of the administration of Mayor Ed Koch. The conversion of New York from cacophonous wasteland to bougie functionality began with Rudolph Giuliani, who as a young federal prosecutor led a landmark police action in 1984 that cleared Tompkins Square Park—Zorn’s immediate neighborhood—of its narcotics trade. By the time Giuliani became mayor ten years later, “gentrification” was not just a buzzword they taught at university but a program that expanded New York University, while spattering Downtown with luxury boutiques.

  CBGB, the punk club that debuted the Ramones, lost its lease in 2006 and is now a men’s fashion store selling $130 T-shirts and $800 pants. The Knitting Factory and Tonic, two clubs whose schedules Zorn frequently curated, were forced to close due to rent increases. Downtown jazz clubs now cater almost exclusively to European and Asian tourists who pay inflated prices to sip watery alcohol and not smoke in the most illustrious bastions of American music. In November 2008, Christie’s held its inaugural auction of punk memorabilia. A Patti Smith poem sold for $375; a poster advertising a concert by Television, signed by Richard Hell, “realized” a price of $313. In December 2008, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex NYC opened Downtown. Its collection contains the ultimate ready-made relic: a urinal from CBGB.

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  ZORN’S CAREER IS A PARALLEL STREET to Downtown’s decline— one-way, but in the opposite direction. He was born in Queens on September 2, 1953, making him a Virgo, making him gifted at languages and attracted to the foreign; that his moon is in Cancer makes him ingenious and likable, but also overly sensitive and petty; all of this might make him the sort of person who believes in astrology. Zorn has always existed on this knife-edge: He’s sincere but defensive, a wiseass but also a mystic.

  These opposites collided on the corner of 175th Street and Jewel Avenue in the Utopia section of Fresh Meadows, between Jamaica and Flushing. Zorn’s subway, his umbilicus to Manhattan, was the F train, which brought in the bridge-and-tunnelers for their weekend doses of kulcha. Utopia/Fresh Meadows was Jewish; the Zorn family was Jewish; but John, the youngest of two, was sent to a church’s Sunday school, and the family celebrated Christmas (Zorn’s mother was an education professor at NYU; his father, who emigrated from Ukraine at age six, a hairdresser). After graduating from the United Nations High School, Zorn went on to Webster College in St. Louis, where he studied music for three semesters. The piano, guitar, flute, and clarinet he’d tinkered with as a teenager were gradually supplanted by the saxophone, and, after a float to the West Coast, Zorn returned to New York in 1975, ensconcing himself in the Colonnades Building on Lafayette Street. The apartment he slept in by day moonlighted as the Theater of Musical Optics, a prime setting for concerts of improvised music whose attendance seldom exceeded four.

  Zorn’s next decade was spent composing “improvisational frameworks” (which his bands would read off blackboards and index cards), while personalizing an approach to his instrument, negotiating between the black vernacular of jazz “sax” and the extended techniques of contemporary-classical woodwinds (blowing through the mouthpiece without fingering the keys, fingering the keys without blowing through the mouthpiece, slap-tonguing, multiphonics). In 1985, Zorn signed with the label Nonesuch and recorded The Big Gundown, his arrangements of the music that Ennio Morricone wrote for director Sergio Leone’s 1960s spaghetti westerns. A recording of Spillane followed, Zorn’s noirish homage to the Mike Hammer detective novels.

  But in 1987, after initial success, a restless Zorn moved to Tokyo, where he spent the next six years steeping himself in its hardcore and noise circles, playing the troublemaker role of gaijin guru while also managing to master Japanese. At the time, his chief project was the band Naked City—named after the 1958 TV show, itself named after the 1948 film—featuring Bill Frisell on guitar, Wayne Horvitz on keyboards, Fred Frith on bass, and Joey Baron on drums. In 1993, however, the grind of bicontinental life, along with the death of his father, returned Zorn to New York, and to Judaism—homecomings that informed his founding of “Radical Jewish Culture,” a mid-’90s movement that marked a retaking of Downtown aesthetics, and their intermingling with Downtown ethnicity, by the secularly Jewish generation born in America after the war.

  Two projects emerged from Zorn’s relocation: Masada, an acoustic quartet named after the Judean mountain where, in 73 C.E., an army of Jews martyred themselves instead of surrendering to the Romans; and Tzadik, Zorn’s own record label, whose name is the Hebrew word for “righteous.” Subsequently, definitive marks of Uptown approval began arriving for Zorn’s compositions: a MacArthur “Genius Grant” in 2006, and Columbia University’s William Schuman Award in 2007. With the Stone programming six nights a week and Tzadik releasing almost fifty albums per year, many of its owner’s own music, Zorn had become Downtown’s premier impresario, a DIY success story and so both a vindication and betrayal of antiestablishmentarianism.

  Zorn’s first compositional innovations were evident with his Game Pieces, structured improvisations in which the composer acted as conductor, cuing musicians through gestures and signs (including doffed baseball caps and holding up a prearranged number of fingers). Happily, maximally, Zorn used improvisation to guide his composing just as a rare coterie of daring conservatory-grade musicians were starting to gig and make their bones: the denizens of Naked City and Masada, and peers like pianist Uri Caine, guitarists Marc Ribot and Elliot Sharp, and conductor-cornetist Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris—all hyphenated performer-composers who could not only read music but also improvise their own improved versions of it on the spot. Although once established as the first-call saxophonist of this scene that was, on street level, ten scenes or more, each with its own ephemeral cults, Zorn again adlibbed a dance on the outer rings of counterintuition: At the turn of last century, he relinquished his reeds, abandoning nightly performance to focus on composing.

  From the beginning, Zorn’s compositional systems were always his own, not just personal but hermetic. While his Game Pieces rewrote avant-garde aesthetics through a new skill set, Zorn’s take on popular music was belated yet total. Naked City audaciously defined the popular as a certain intensity or energy, and proceeded to gather under that insatiable rubric of Zorn’s private invention a host of related sonics: blues, jazz, cartoon music via Warner Bros. composer Carl Stalling (Looney Tunes) and MGM composer Scott Bradley (Tom and Jerry), both kinds of cowboy music (country and western), and all those old/new varieties of rocks and metals. Throughout this madcap amassing of repertoire that could be played only by ensembles of close friends and neighbors, Zorn was also composing scores for export and for traditional reproduction—thoroughly notated pieces orchestrated for classical instrumentation.

  There has not yet been a complete catalog made of Zorn’s compositions, or a compiled discography, and such a task can seem beyond the ambitions of even the most ardent Zornithologist. Since there are over a hundred albums, and thousands of compositions (Masada alone boasts a book of 613 “tunes,” reflecting the number of mitzvot, or commandments, in the Torah), it might be better to just account for their highlights with one of Zorn’s signature forms, the list: There are the soloist showcases (Aporias and Contes de Fées, a de facto violin concerto); string quartets (Cat o’Nine Tails, Memento Mori, Kol Nidre, The Dead Man, Necronomicon); piano trios (Amour Fou); sonatas (Le Mômo for violin and piano); solo music, whose extremes are exemplified by the stridencies of Goetia for violin and the antic Carny for piano; vo
cal music, notably Rituals, for mezzo-soprano with “wind machines, wooden gears, gravedigging, bull roarers, bird squeakers”; and then there’s the film music, including soundtracks for TV commercials by David Cronenberg and Jean-Luc Godard, Japanese anime, a documentary about Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, and the gay-porny telenovela spoof Latin Boys Go to Hell.

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  ZORN, THEN, MIGHT BE the most we can ask of a modern artist: prolific. In an age of excess, the more excessive the artist, the more important he seems. In an earlier age, when composers accepted musical systems without question, creating their works within not only a single system but also a single style, Zorn might have been accused of exploitation, of thinking too big with too little.

  This accusation would still ring true if Zorn were actually a creator, or foremost a creator, a composer in the olden mode: piano, pen, paper, five-lines-to-a-staff. But he’s not. He’s something newer—an artist as browser, as curator, an amasser of references, a filcher of licks and riffs, a relentlessly curious collector of kitsch.

  Here would be the place for the diligent writer to perform an online search for “collecting,” then to collect those results into a paragraph, copy-’n’-pasting quotations from (in alphabetical order) philosophers Giorgio Agamben, Jean Baudrillard, and Walter Benjamin. The lattermost was the first to consider seriously the activities of the Collector, whom he established as an emblematic urban personality, flâneuring through a rush hour’s undifferentiated mass in desperate search of only one thing—whatever other people miss. This person used to be Benjamin himself, and it used to be Marcel Proust, who collated and rewrote easily ignored, easily forgotten observations and overheard remarks into a novel that provided the deepest literary engagement with the social reality of his time. But when, through technology, that reality became overwhelming in its stimuli, this person—this, as Saul Bellow would have put it, “first-class noticer”—went from being a participant or social commentator to a sort of attending trashman, a searcher through the detritus that an accelerant culture had left behind. The refined collector of the bourgeois nineteenth century was to be recycled as me, as you, and, iconically, as disposaphobic Zorn.

  With the advent of online, the accumulation of dreck finally fits everyone’s budget. In an era in which culture is becoming ever more free—people expect free music in these downloading days, as concert attendance perceptibly wanes—everyone becomes their own archivist, their own immediate memorializer. Just as Zorn pieces together with saxophone spittle the shards of pop and unpopular records, we too, from the laziness of our livingrooms, customize our lists of Top 10s and rotating Favorites; we’ve become DJs of the self, montagemakers or editors of the films that are our lives.

  But when we select and shuffle musics, we are seeking the familiar, whereas Zorn—working with musicians and not computers, sampling not through clicks but by transcription—is determined to defamiliarize us through challenge. His goal seems to be the imprinting of a local sensibility on an unprecedented wealth of source material, giving both a flippant finger to skyscraper corporatism and a human face to technological perfection. This means that his music is both open and parochial—while listening, it helps to have a sense of humor, preferably Zorn’s sense of humor—and driven by giddy outrage (Zorn, in German, means “rage”). This split is most enjoyably evinced when Naked City improvises on traditional jazz and blues forms at outlandish volumes and speedfreak tempi, debanalizing the chord changes of Tin Pan Alley through visceral force; or else when Masada pursues its brand of klezmer and transitions from Eastern European cantorial kitsch—a snaky synagogue melody—into a variant of “free jazz,” as the tightly spaced Oriental intervals are expanded into yelps, the disconsolate howls by which multiculturalism mourns Culture.

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  ESSENTIALLY, ZORN’S PROVOCATIVE BRILLIANCE lies in this: For all that he encompasses every distorted barre chord and hiphop break, the way that showtunes swoon and ragtime syncopates, he persists in turning that plenitude inward, encoding his own experience of influence. When we listen to his transformations of canonical classical music especially, we are listening to music by listening to listening, as what has to be called Zorn’s music, and nothing but Zorn’s music, is amplified in both its newness and historicity. In the same way, the New York—the Downtown—that sounds the grounding bass of his biography is not the city that is or was, but a city of Zorn’s own composition.

  The New York I live in is lately, like all megalopoleis, also located on the cloud, and the effects of its having gone virtual have not been virtual. Online’s intensification of New York’s socioeconomic shockwave that historically located arts neighborhoods concentrically farther from Midtown’s concentrated power, and in my own lifetime from what became Ground Zero, has ensured that Downtown can now be anywhere—that the underground has, finally, moved. But where to? Brooklyn or brooklyn.com? The most notable new music after Zorn’s might be the whirring hum of the fan that cools a computer’s circuits from fevered searching.

  FROM THE DIARIES

  MEDITATIONS FROM THE GYM

  Smoke and drink in moderation, but define that moderation not by the practices of others, but by your own appetites’ extremes. Sleep like it’s practice for death.

  Judge your friends and lose them. Hate everything that lacks the ambition of estrangement.

  Avoid imagination. It is merely the plagiarism of your inexperience or ignorance.

  What in school was true in life is false and in death will be meaningless.

  In the office, work. Outside the office, work to forget.

  Love only he or she who feeds you. And love yourself least of all.

  Take not a taxi, because were you to be murdered, or were you to kill yourself—by jumping in front of a bus or train—your money would still be useful to others.

  Without pain, there is no gain. But with pain, there is no gain either. There is never any gain. Pain, therefore, is meaningless.

  EDITING THE I

  ON GORDON LISH

  SO HERE I AM AT midnight, sitting in a Barcalounger, reading the Collected Fictions of Gordon Lish while idly masturbating. Idly, that is, not idolly, because Lish is no god of mine so much as he is a lazy indulgence. And if what comes of this is merely tedium with the occasional spasm of delight, so be it. Nearly all of these one hundred Collected Fictions are written in the first person—no other people exist for Lish—which will explain this guilty pleasure: me speaking as me, but imitating him.

  Perversion, awareness of language, a perverted awareness of language, brevity, comedy, stock phrases—these mark the fictions of Gordon Lish. Not the stories of Lish, the fictions (Lish enjoys italics too). Over the past three decades, Lish has published five collections of them, which have now, on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, been bound into a single volume that either reliably diverts or dulls with its obsessions: men and women, literature, sex and the self.

  I’m of both minds, then, here in my Barca. Lish so obviously knows what he wants out of writing: a single voice singularly voicing, a monologue that pleads but does not please. And yet it’s not what I want out of writing—which is to say utter immersion within the tale, not just facile sentences comprising facile clauses, rhetoric-schmetoric, the cant that ultimately can’t. Reading prose like “Shun negativity. Eschew negativity. Send down negativity. Turn a cold shoulder to negativity. Never know the name of negativity. Make yourself the assassin of negativity,” all I want to do is play Mad Libs, negating each instance of negation with a scatological noun.

  Sitting here in my Barca, reading with one hand, it’s difficult not to pronounce the pained and painful line, the line that will make me seem even more ridiculous than any public whacking: Lish, editor extraordinaire—reviser of Joy Williams, Barry Hannah, Harold Brodkey, and Cynthia Ozick—needs an editor. Less collecting, more selecting—there it is. I’m mortif
ied. One of us has no clothes on.

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  IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, editors, who are supposed to sublimate their egos, instead developed them to match writer with market: Think of Maxwell Perkins, editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, fleshing out F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books while trimming Thomas Wolfe’s; think of Lish at Alfred A. Knopf, similarly editing—minimizing—Raymond Carver. Whereas Perkins worried over Wolfe’s pacing, and worried about keeping Fitzgerald sober and solvent, Lish’s editorial interventions went beyond deletion and reordering, into changing the surface of the prose itself, and so changing the very intentions of Carver’s corpus—their collaboration less an amity than an agon. As Carver, a Fitzgeraldian figure, drank himself away, Lish kept busy by stripping his author’s fiction of everything he considered extraneous—the padding, the stuffing, the interiority between the incidents—with a violence that communicated a concomitant violence of mood underlying Carver’s domestic exchanges. Since the originals of Carver’s stories are often two or three times longer than the canonical versions, what Lish did to them (and gloated about doing to them) requires another verb. Not “edit” but “traduce,” “violate,” “molest.”