This Woman Was a Prophet

Ellen Willis's writings are trickling onto a Tumblr run by her daughter, though the links keep breaking almost as soon as they are linked. But it gives me the chance to see some of her articles I hadn't seen before, like this New York Press piece on the Elian Gonzalez controversy. For those who've forgotten the case, five-year-old Elian was rescued from the waters off Florida after his mother and several other adult Cubans had drowned trying to reach the US. His parents were separated and his father, back in Cuba, hadn't consented to the project, so he demanded his return with Cuban government support. US Immigration ruled that Elian should go home, but his relatives and other Cuban exiles in Miami created a political circus that raged for seven months. In the end, federal agents raided his great-uncle's house in Miami just before dawn, took the boy, and returned him to his father.

I remember it vividly because I happened to be visiting a friend with a TV that weekend, so I saw the coverage. It occurred to me the raid went so smoothly (and it did: no one was hurt, and despite theatrical wailing from his great-aunt, Elian was found and rescued without difficulty) was because a deal had been worked out between the government and the relatives, to save face for the latter. Why had they kept a little boy up all night, till 5 a.m.? How did an AP photographer get there so fast? (At first I thought he'd been there when the raid began, even more suspicious; but I was wrong.) The relatives had threatened armed resistance -- as Willis wrote, "Elian was both their prize and their hostage. They had no scruples about putting him in danger" -- but luckily those threats were empty. The friend I was staying with, a heterosexual of conservative politics with a father's-rights focus, was a bit conflicted: on one hand he thought Elian should be 'allowed' to stay in the Land of the Free; on the other, he thought his father's wish for his return trumped his relatives' wish to keep him with them. Another even more reactionary masculinist I knew felt the same way.

Anyway, it's history now, and little Elian is now grown up. This retrospective is amusing, though, for its blatant dishonesty:

As you can see, Elian looks like a normal boy. His cuteness factor though, has dwindled because of what he now stands for. But he's 16-years old so he can't be blamed; we can probably thank his country's government for corning him into that. While Elian Gonzalez and his family originally fled their native country to escape Fidel Castro's communist regime, these pictures were taken of him at a Young Communist Union meeting.

"Corning him into that"? I have no idea what that means, and I don't think I want to know. But it's false that "Elian and his family originally fled their native country," because Elian was only five (a five-year-old taken to Cuba by his mother -- without his father's knowledge! -- would not have been described in the US as having fled George Bush's imperialist regime), and his father remained in Cuba.

But back to Ellen Willis. What I want to pass along is her judgment on the Clinton administration, though Democrat-wise, not much has changed since then.

The far right has lost the culture war. Americans may be social conservatives, guilt-ridden about sex and self-righteous about the undeserving poor, but they don't like theocrats, sex police and antigovernment fanatics. Nor can they whip themselves into a frenzy about Castro, in this 11th year since the fall of the Berlin Wall. They much prefer Clinton's mushy corporate neoliberalism, not to mention his softer brand of masculinity. The irony is that Clinton, who thinks a principle is someone who runs a school, never met a reactionary he didn't want to appease. He has pandered to the right on family values and welfare. He has been its staunch ally on censorship and the drug war. He allowed the Elian crisis to burgeon out of control by not ordering [Janet] Reno to take action back in January. He stayed silent on Elian until the last possible minute and then spoke with all the passion of Alan Greenspan announcing a rise in the interest rate. Al Gore was even more pathetically eager to lie down for the Miami Cubans; never mind that he can expect as many votes from them Giulani could from blacks in New York City. Hacking at a sponge with a razor blade, the right manages to look both ridiculous and insane. Yet somehow they keep afloat, waiting for their next chance at something like a coup.

I wonder what Willis (who died, too young, in 2006) would have to say about the Obama administration if she were still alive. (This 1992 letter to the New York Times on corporate violence is suggestive, as is this 1998 Nation piece on the need for a radical left movement.) Obama, too, never met a reactionary he didn't want to appease, and has pandered to the right when he hasn't been its staunch ally. I think Willis's reading of the American public is correct too; only a small, if vocal, fringe wants theocrats, sex police, and antigovernment fanatics in charge of the country. The Democrats continue to try to win these frothers over, instead of brushing them off, let alone confronting them, which turns off the majority. The hopeful sign is the recent emergence of a third option, not asking either party for its support. I'm not sure it will succeed, but it appears that the Occupy movement is not going to be intimidated by Red- or hippie-baiting, so it might manage to survive. And then we'll see.

This Woman Was a Prophet

Ellen Willis's writings are trickling onto a Tumblr run by her daughter, though the links keep breaking almost as soon as they are linked. But it gives me the chance to see some of her articles I hadn't seen before, like this New York Press piece on the Elian Gonzalez controversy. For those who've forgotten the case, five-year-old Elian was rescued from the waters off Florida after his mother and several other adult Cubans had drowned trying to reach the US. His parents were separated and his father, back in Cuba, hadn't consented to the project, so he demanded his return with Cuban government support. US Immigration ruled that Elian should go home, but his relatives and other Cuban exiles in Miami created a political circus that raged for seven months. In the end, federal agents raided his great-uncle's house in Miami just before dawn, took the boy, and returned him to his father.

I remember it vividly because I happened to be visiting a friend with a TV that weekend, so I saw the coverage. It occurred to me the raid went so smoothly (and it did: no one was hurt, and despite theatrical wailing from his great-aunt, Elian was found and rescued without difficulty) was because a deal had been worked out between the government and the relatives, to save face for the latter. Why had they kept a little boy up all night, till 5 a.m.? How did an AP photographer get there so fast? (At first I thought he'd been there when the raid began, even more suspicious; but I was wrong.) The relatives had threatened armed resistance -- as Willis wrote, "Elian was both their prize and their hostage. They had no scruples about putting him in danger" -- but luckily those threats were empty. The friend I was staying with, a heterosexual of conservative politics with a father's-rights focus, was a bit conflicted: on one hand he thought Elian should be 'allowed' to stay in the Land of the Free; on the other, he thought his father's wish for his return trumped his relatives' wish to keep him with them. Another even more reactionary masculinist I knew felt the same way.

Anyway, it's history now, and little Elian is now grown up. This retrospective is amusing, though, for its blatant dishonesty:

As you can see, Elian looks like a normal boy. His cuteness factor though, has dwindled because of what he now stands for. But he's 16-years old so he can't be blamed; we can probably thank his country's government for corning him into that. While Elian Gonzalez and his family originally fled their native country to escape Fidel Castro's communist regime, these pictures were taken of him at a Young Communist Union meeting.

"Corning him into that"? I have no idea what that means, and I don't think I want to know. But it's false that "Elian and his family originally fled their native country," because Elian was only five (a five-year-old taken to Cuba by his mother -- without his father's knowledge! -- would not have been described in the US as having fled George Bush's imperialist regime), and his father remained in Cuba.

But back to Ellen Willis. What I want to pass along is her judgment on the Clinton administration, though Democrat-wise, not much has changed since then.

The far right has lost the culture war. Americans may be social conservatives, guilt-ridden about sex and self-righteous about the undeserving poor, but they don't like theocrats, sex police and antigovernment fanatics. Nor can they whip themselves into a frenzy about Castro, in this 11th year since the fall of the Berlin Wall. They much prefer Clinton's mushy corporate neoliberalism, not to mention his softer brand of masculinity. The irony is that Clinton, who thinks a principle is someone who runs a school, never met a reactionary he didn't want to appease. He has pandered to the right on family values and welfare. He has been its staunch ally on censorship and the drug war. He allowed the Elian crisis to burgeon out of control by not ordering [Janet] Reno to take action back in January. He stayed silent on Elian until the last possible minute and then spoke with all the passion of Alan Greenspan announcing a rise in the interest rate. Al Gore was even more pathetically eager to lie down for the Miami Cubans; never mind that he can expect as many votes from them Giulani could from blacks in New York City. Hacking at a sponge with a razor blade, the right manages to look both ridiculous and insane. Yet somehow they keep afloat, waiting for their next chance at something like a coup.

I wonder what Willis (who died, too young, in 2006) would have to say about the Obama administration if she were still alive. (This 1992 letter to the New York Times on corporate violence is suggestive, as is this 1998 Nation piece on the need for a radical left movement.) Obama, too, never met a reactionary he didn't want to appease, and has pandered to the right when he hasn't been its staunch ally. I think Willis's reading of the American public is correct too; only a small, if vocal, fringe wants theocrats, sex police, and antigovernment fanatics in charge of the country. The Democrats continue to try to win these frothers over, instead of brushing them off, let alone confronting them, which turns off the majority. The hopeful sign is the recent emergence of a third option, not asking either party for its support. I'm not sure it will succeed, but it appears that the Occupy movement is not going to be intimidated by Red- or hippie-baiting, so it might manage to survive. And then we'll see.

I Can Talk to Strangers If I Want To, 'Cause I'm a Stranger Too

(The title comes from Randy Newman's "Have You Seen My Baby?", a song I'd almost forgotten until Ellen Willis mentioned it in her review of Newman's Twelve Songs.)



Some more quotable bits from Out of the Vinyl Deeps.



From a review of Song Cycle by Van Dyke Parks (102):

His most nearly perfect triumph is "Donovan's Colours," an exquisite three-and-a-half-minute instrumental track that sounds like a nice, simple piano piece played by someone with six hands.

I love that sentence, but I'm not sure it accurately describes the track; listen for yourself. Virgil Thompson reportedly said that music criticism should be done by simply describing the music, and the description will be the criticism. I'm beginning to think, as I reread Willis's criticism, that she was not a very good music critic in Thompson's sense, though she was very good on culture and politics.



For example, her realization about Bette Midler's concert at the Palace, 1973 (94):

The real test of Bette's genius was whether she could make me believe in palm trees and cricket noises, feather-duster fans, the Harlettes in their chorus-girl outfits, and -- oh, God, as Bette would say -- Hawaiian dancing girls. Although I thought I was prepared, the overblown production jolted me into exactly the reaction it was calculated to elicit: What is this? Then I remembered that Bette Midler grew up in Honolulu, and I wondered -- as I was sure I was meant to -- at how the schlockiest elements of our popular culture always relate in some way to some person's real life.

On Simon and Garfunkel and "rock poetry" (103):

Bob Dylan, so we kept hearing, had banished the infamous Tin Pan Alley cliche. Accordingly, Paul Simon ... became a "rock poet," dealing with such noncliche subjects as the soullessness of commercial society and man's inability to communicate.

On the generation gap (it comes so soon) between the Sixties and the Seventies (111f):

When Grand Funk [Railroad] was becoming the most popular son-of-white-blues band in the world, I listened some more, on the usually reliable theory that a band beloved of teenagers must be doing something right. The music still didn't do much for me; I caught myself thinking of it as abunchanoise, and I knew what that meant -- creeping senility. Hadn't my parents reacted the same way to Little Richard? (Little Richard was the supreme test: my mother liked Elvis, but she couldn't stand Little Richard.)

Finally, something written not by Willis but about her, by her former student Evie Nagy and her longtime fan Daphne Carr in the book's Afterword. In 1995 Willis co-founded the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University.

CRC graduate Priya Jain remembers a shocking meeting of Ellen's Sex and American Politics class where she challenged liberals who argued that it was absurd to think gay marriage could lead to legal plural marriage or bestiality -- her suggestion, to everyone's extremely awkward horror, was that legally, perhaps it could. "What Ellen did was say those things with the full confidence that your liberal beliefs could withstand some of the more taboo arguments," says Jain. "It's not good enough to say there are areas where you're not supposed to make an argument -- all she really wanted you to do was articulate it, and once you articulate it, you realize how shaky it is, and from there you figure out how and where to draw the lines. And it doesn't mean you can't continue thinking that gay marriage, for example, is a good thing." For Ellen, as Lauren Sandler says, "there was no party line." Her consistency was in thought, not personal ideology, and it was one of the reasons she was so effective at putting herself in her work without indulgence, and teaching others to do the same [230-1].

It's hard to say whether I learned not to be afraid of following arguments to their conclusion from Willis -- there are other writers and thinkers who led in the same direction -- but she was surely an important influence on me. I tend to approach the kind of slippery-slope argument mentioned here from the other side, pointing out that plural marriage is a traditional Biblical value, so why don't conservatives support it? (Willis once wrote a satirical piece, "Toward a National Man Policy," reprinted in Beginning to See the Light, that played with the same idea.) But like her, I reject the common liberal response to many conservative arguments, Oh how can you say such awful things? because I believe that if those arguments are that absurd, they should be dissected, pitilessly. If rereading Willis these past two days has been somewhat less exciting than I expected, it's probably because so many of her radical ideas have become my common sense. Didn't I already know that? If I know it now, it's because I encountered it so compellingly in Ellen Willis's writing.

I Can Talk to Strangers If I Want To, 'Cause I'm a Stranger Too

(The title comes from Randy Newman's "Have You Seen My Baby?", a song I'd almost forgotten until Ellen Willis mentioned it in her review of Newman's Twelve Songs.)



Some more quotable bits from Out of the Vinyl Deeps.



From a review of Song Cycle by Van Dyke Parks (102):

His most nearly perfect triumph is "Donovan's Colours," an exquisite three-and-a-half-minute instrumental track that sounds like a nice, simple piano piece played by someone with six hands.

I love that sentence, but I'm not sure it accurately describes the track; listen for yourself. Virgil Thompson reportedly said that music criticism should be done by simply describing the music, and the description will be the criticism. I'm beginning to think, as I reread Willis's criticism, that she was not a very good music critic in Thompson's sense, though she was very good on culture and politics.



For example, her realization about Bette Midler's concert at the Palace, 1973 (94):

The real test of Bette's genius was whether she could make me believe in palm trees and cricket noises, feather-duster fans, the Harlettes in their chorus-girl outfits, and -- oh, God, as Bette would say -- Hawaiian dancing girls. Although I thought I was prepared, the overblown production jolted me into exactly the reaction it was calculated to elicit: What is this? Then I remembered that Bette Midler grew up in Honolulu, and I wondered -- as I was sure I was meant to -- at how the schlockiest elements of our popular culture always relate in some way to some person's real life.

On Simon and Garfunkel and "rock poetry" (103):

Bob Dylan, so we kept hearing, had banished the infamous Tin Pan Alley cliche. Accordingly, Paul Simon ... became a "rock poet," dealing with such noncliche subjects as the soullessness of commercial society and man's inability to communicate.

On the generation gap (it comes so soon) between the Sixties and the Seventies (111f):

When Grand Funk [Railroad] was becoming the most popular son-of-white-blues band in the world, I listened some more, on the usually reliable theory that a band beloved of teenagers must be doing something right. The music still didn't do much for me; I caught myself thinking of it as abunchanoise, and I knew what that meant -- creeping senility. Hadn't my parents reacted the same way to Little Richard? (Little Richard was the supreme test: my mother liked Elvis, but she couldn't stand Little Richard.)

Finally, something written not by Willis but about her, by her former student Evie Nagy and her longtime fan Daphne Carr in the book's Afterword. In 1995 Willis co-founded the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University.

CRC graduate Priya Jain remembers a shocking meeting of Ellen's Sex and American Politics class where she challenged liberals who argued that it was absurd to think gay marriage could lead to legal plural marriage or bestiality -- her suggestion, to everyone's extremely awkward horror, was that legally, perhaps it could. "What Ellen did was say those things with the full confidence that your liberal beliefs could withstand some of the more taboo arguments," says Jain. "It's not good enough to say there are areas where you're not supposed to make an argument -- all she really wanted you to do was articulate it, and once you articulate it, you realize how shaky it is, and from there you figure out how and where to draw the lines. And it doesn't mean you can't continue thinking that gay marriage, for example, is a good thing." For Ellen, as Lauren Sandler says, "there was no party line." Her consistency was in thought, not personal ideology, and it was one of the reasons she was so effective at putting herself in her work without indulgence, and teaching others to do the same [230-1].

It's hard to say whether I learned not to be afraid of following arguments to their conclusion from Willis -- there are other writers and thinkers who led in the same direction -- but she was surely an important influence on me. I tend to approach the kind of slippery-slope argument mentioned here from the other side, pointing out that plural marriage is a traditional Biblical value, so why don't conservatives support it? (Willis once wrote a satirical piece, "Toward a National Man Policy," reprinted in Beginning to See the Light, that played with the same idea.) But like her, I reject the common liberal response to many conservative arguments, Oh how can you say such awful things? because I believe that if those arguments are that absurd, they should be dissected, pitilessly. If rereading Willis these past two days has been somewhat less exciting than I expected, it's probably because so many of her radical ideas have become my common sense. Didn't I already know that? If I know it now, it's because I encountered it so compellingly in Ellen Willis's writing.

Out of the Vinyl Deeps

I found something today that I'd known I wanted, but didn't expect to turn up: a new collection of Ellen Willis's pop/rock criticism, Out of the Vinyl Deeps (Minnesota, 2011), edited by her daughter Nona Willis Aronowitz.

Because her main interest was political (left/feminist/Zionist), Willis didn't write much about music after about 1980, though her rock criticism was always political. After her very professional essay on Bob Dylan was published in Cheetah in 1967, the New Yorker, of all places, hired her as their rock critic. She stayed on until 1975, writing fifty-six pieces for them. Her work was very influential but partly because she left the field and (mostly?) because she was female, it has been largely forgotten. This compilation and republication may help to remedy that situation -- I hope so.

As I read the book, though, I'm struck by some odd mistakes, especially in reviews of Bob Dylan's work. In the Cheetah article, for example, she refers to the "electronic beat" (11) of "Desolation Row", whose instrumentation consists of two acoustic guitars and an electric bass. Not exactly "Pump Up the Jam"; the arrangement owes a lot more to Marty Robbins's 1959 song "El Paso" than to the Rolling Stones. Again, she wrote that on 1970's New Morning Dylan "plays the piano for the first time since Highway 61 Revisited" (32) but Dylan had played piano on "Dear Landlord" on John Wesley Harding. (Hell, he's credited with playing piano on Blonde on Blonde.) These aren't big problems, just small annoyances, but couldn't they have been fixed for republication?

I'm also bothered by some more serious mistakes, as when she confused "bisexuality" with "androgyny" in a piece on David Bowie.

As for his self-proclaimed bisexuality, it really isn't that big a deal. British rock musicians have always been less uptight than Americans about displaying, and even flaunting, their "feminine" side. Androgynousness is an important part of what the Beatles and the Stones represent; once upon a time Mick Jagger's bisexual mannerisms and innuendos were considered far out. Bowie's dyed red hair, makeup, legendary dresses, and onstage flirtations with his guitarist just take this tradition one theatrical step further [39-40].

"Bisexuality" doesn't mean a man wearing a dress or wearing lipstick (strictly speaking, neither does "androgyny"): it means that one relates sexually to persons of both sexes. It's true that many male rock critics were upset by Bowie's theatrical effeminacy (Lester Bangs once referred to him as "the chicken-headed king of suck rock"), but Bowie's bisexuality involved writing songs about sexual/erotic love between males, most notoriously "Queen Bitch" from Hunky Dory. There were also rumors -- I'm not sure at this remove how seriously to take them -- of love affairs between Bowie and other male rockers. Willis doesn't mention any of this, and I don't believe she wasn't aware of it.

It occurred to me how much the job of writing has changed since the early 70s when Willis mentioned that Nils Lofgren looked "like a cross between Donovan and the lead singer of the McCoys" (36). The New Yorker's fact checkers were famous even in those days, so surely someone could have made a phone call and learned that the lead singer of the McCoys was Rick Zehringer (aka Rick Derringer), later to play with Johnny Winter, Steely Dan, and as a soloist; but nowadays you (or I, anyway) would expect a writer to do some Googling rather than leave out the name.

(Another mark of changing times: she refers to "the ten-dollar-top ticket prices" (37) for Elvis Presley's 1972 Madison Square Garden concert, clearly regarding that as a high price. It's like seeing an old movie featuring a gas station selling gasoline for under a dollar a gallon.)

Mostly, though, it's a pleasure to reread these pieces, many of which I read when they first appeared. I value Willis's writing so much because, as her New Yorker colleague Karen Durbin writes, she was "that wondrous creature, an intellectual who deeply valued sensuality". Even when I disagree with her, which I did more often later in her career as she became more of an apologist for Israel and even (to some extent, ambivalently) for the War on Terror, she's one of my most important role models as a writer and an intellectual.

(Which reminds me, I need to do a post about Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism, and when I do, I want to address Willis's review of it.)

Out of the Vinyl Deeps

I found something today that I'd known I wanted, but didn't expect to turn up: a new collection of Ellen Willis's pop/rock criticism, Out of the Vinyl Deeps (Minnesota, 2011), edited by her daughter Nona Willis Aronowitz.

Because her main interest was political (left/feminist/Zionist), Willis didn't write much about music after about 1980, though her rock criticism was always political. After her very professional essay on Bob Dylan was published in Cheetah in 1967, the New Yorker, of all places, hired her as their rock critic. She stayed on until 1975, writing fifty-six pieces for them. Her work was very influential but partly because she left the field and (mostly?) because she was female, it has been largely forgotten. This compilation and republication may help to remedy that situation -- I hope so.

As I read the book, though, I'm struck by some odd mistakes, especially in reviews of Bob Dylan's work. In the Cheetah article, for example, she refers to the "electronic beat" (11) of "Desolation Row", whose instrumentation consists of two acoustic guitars and an electric bass. Not exactly "Pump Up the Jam"; the arrangement owes a lot more to Marty Robbins's 1959 song "El Paso" than to the Rolling Stones. Again, she wrote that on 1970's New Morning Dylan "plays the piano for the first time since Highway 61 Revisited" (32) but Dylan had played piano on "Dear Landlord" on John Wesley Harding. (Hell, he's credited with playing piano on Blonde on Blonde.) These aren't big problems, just small annoyances, but couldn't they have been fixed for republication?

I'm also bothered by some more serious mistakes, as when she confused "bisexuality" with "androgyny" in a piece on David Bowie.

As for his self-proclaimed bisexuality, it really isn't that big a deal. British rock musicians have always been less uptight than Americans about displaying, and even flaunting, their "feminine" side. Androgynousness is an important part of what the Beatles and the Stones represent; once upon a time Mick Jagger's bisexual mannerisms and innuendos were considered far out. Bowie's dyed red hair, makeup, legendary dresses, and onstage flirtations with his guitarist just take this tradition one theatrical step further [39-40].

"Bisexuality" doesn't mean a man wearing a dress or wearing lipstick (strictly speaking, neither does "androgyny"): it means that one relates sexually to persons of both sexes. It's true that many male rock critics were upset by Bowie's theatrical effeminacy (Lester Bangs once referred to him as "the chicken-headed king of suck rock"), but Bowie's bisexuality involved writing songs about sexual/erotic love between males, most notoriously "Queen Bitch" from Hunky Dory. There were also rumors -- I'm not sure at this remove how seriously to take them -- of love affairs between Bowie and other male rockers. Willis doesn't mention any of this, and I don't believe she wasn't aware of it.

It occurred to me how much the job of writing has changed since the early 70s when Willis mentioned that Nils Lofgren looked "like a cross between Donovan and the lead singer of the McCoys" (36). The New Yorker's fact checkers were famous even in those days, so surely someone could have made a phone call and learned that the lead singer of the McCoys was Rick Zehringer (aka Rick Derringer), later to play with Johnny Winter, Steely Dan, and as a soloist; but nowadays you (or I, anyway) would expect a writer to do some Googling rather than leave out the name.

(Another mark of changing times: she refers to "the ten-dollar-top ticket prices" (37) for Elvis Presley's 1972 Madison Square Garden concert, clearly regarding that as a high price. It's like seeing an old movie featuring a gas station selling gasoline for under a dollar a gallon.)

Mostly, though, it's a pleasure to reread these pieces, many of which I read when they first appeared. I value Willis's writing so much because, as her New Yorker colleague Karen Durbin writes, she was "that wondrous creature, an intellectual who deeply valued sensuality". Even when I disagree with her, which I did more often later in her career as she became more of an apologist for Israel and even (to some extent, ambivalently) for the War on Terror, she's one of my most important role models as a writer and an intellectual.

(Which reminds me, I need to do a post about Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism, and when I do, I want to address Willis's review of it.)