Beefheart's Wake and the Cultural API

Attended the Beefheart "symposium" last night. Enjoyed it. As one speaker said "This is really a wake". Very few young people, mostly old men--except for Robin, who came along. Earlier in the week I'd asked my film students how many had gone to the SF Cinematheque, and no one knew what I was talking about. On the way home last night, out in the world, while passing bright new billboards for the Beatles, I had a sudden "Blade Runner" feeling. I had a kind of flash-backed premonition. Instead of buildings and physical infrastructure left in disrepair, there was a culture with so much of its vitality lost that the present couldn't be understood, we are left with behavioral habits without knowledge of their cause. The Beatle billboards were the ads in Blade Runner, and Beefheart and Independent Cinema were the missing creators of the unmaintained architecture and infrastructure. Where are the counter-cultural inventors who construct truly new meaning from the new technologies? Who create art that is unsalable not because it is scatological, but because it is so radical in its form that it demands work from the viewer to perceive that it has an aesthetic source. There is absolutely no need for another Beefheart, or Beatles for that matter. But I look for more desperation to invent one's self even at the cost of losing one's self.

Or maybe invention maintains the same relation to the underlying culture as it ever did, and we just have less underlying movement to be reflected in new art. That seems hard for me to believe, with all the technological innovations present. And we can see those so clearly reflected in Egypt, as the people there are forced to reinvent themselves as free souls within a world community. Perhaps here we have too little need to reinvent the self as presently imagined by society.

Gary Lucas shared a Beefheart quote last night: “I think of music as primarily an irritant”. There is no understanding this unless you posit a disconnect between the form to which the society requires the artist to con-form, and the need by the artist to produce a form that differs from it. If the self-form that the artist/citizen requires matches the one enjoined by cultural infrastructure (the API calls work in both directions), you don’t get the desperation to reinvent the self. Note this isn’t at the social level (which is analogous to a digital “skin”), but at the cultural level (not directly available to the conscious, but sensed by the conscious as an emotional or physical/synaesthetic malaise). If that malaise isn’t present: no need to create a self reformed so that it can survive without the cultural API communications. The “irritant” is such not because the artist wants someone to feel badly, but because s/he is trying to invent his or her own albumin…one that because of its source and purpose is impermeable to the cultural API…and that creates a mirrored malaise between the albumin and the outside society.

So perhaps it is a good thing that it does not occur to youth to basically reinvent itself: as sign of alignment between the young individual and the surrounding culture. Either that, or there is no sensitivity left: no individual, no name, numb.