Tynan's Anger

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In a perfect world, Friday would be the day we stop worrying, shut off our brains, and seek the rest and relaxation we sorely need. Unfortunately, in today's world, we're using too busy getting drunk, trying to get laid, and worrying about if our jobs will be there on Monday. To help purge the bad thoughts,I will conclude every Friday on this blog with a story that will hopefully help to put things in perspective, and shut off the delta brain waves without the need for chemical enhancement, a moment Zen you won't get on The Daily Show.

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While my inaugural Maroon Voices blog is now defunct, a clip I once posted from Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azzerrad on the Butthole Surfers still stands out:

The night of the [Butthole Surfers] appearance at the huge Pandora's Box festival in the Netherlands, [bassist Mark] Kramer went to fetch [singer Gibby] Haynes for a sound check. "It is firstly most important to state that, on this night, Gibby had eaten an entire handful of four-way acid tabs and drank an entire bottle of Jim Beam before the sound check had even begun," Kramer notes.

[Guitarist Paul] Leary was furious at Haynes for getting wasted for such an important show. "Fuck that stupid-ass motherfucker," he snarled to Kramer. "I hate this fucking band. I swear to fucking Christ on a stick, I hate this fucking band more than I hate myself. And that's a lot. I don't even care if we ever play again. If you can't find him, fuck it. FUCK IT!!!!" With that, he began smashing a couple of guitars with his bare fists.

The festival featured several stages, and Kramer eventually found Haynes at a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds show. As Kramer tells it, Haynes was completely naked, repeatedly fighting his way onto the stage and charging at Cave as hulking security guards punched and kicked him off the ten-foot-high stage and back into the audience, where he would remain for a few seconds before trying to claw his way back onstage again. Finally, guitarist Blixa Bargeld came forward and kicked Haynes in the groin with a pointed German boot. This time Haynes did not get up.

Kramer pushed his way through the crowd to come to the aid of his bandmate, only to find him lying unconscious. "I bend over to see if he is still alive, but he seems not to be breathing," Kramer says. "I poke him in the shoulder. Suddenly, like a volcano, he bursts to life and swirls his fists in every direction, clipping me but good, along with a few innocent girls, and drawing the ire of their boyfriends and the enraged security guards, who are now motivated to leave Mr. Cave to his own devices, descend the stage, and join the boyfriends in administring a thorough and none-too-subtle beating upon Gibby's face, head and shoulders, until he is once again unconscious on the floor."

Or so it seemed. Actually, Haynes was only pretending he'd been knocked out, and as the hired thugs walked away, he rose to his feet and began screaming at them, "DUTCH FAGGOTS!!! GODDAMN FUCKING DUTCH FAGGOTS!!!! A WHOLE FUCKING COUNTRY FILLED WITH NOTHING BUT FUCKING TURD BURGLING FAGGOTS!!!! I FUCK YOUR ASS IN HEAVEN AND HELL!!!! FUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOOOOU!!"

"The ensuing chase and capture was the stuff dreams are made of," Kramer says. "Stark naked like the day he was born, beaten, bruised, bloody, and tripping, this icon of modern music ran like Jesse Owens through the entire complex, down the halls, up the stairs, grabbing beer bottles from people's hands as he went and throwing them down on the concertgoers below. A hail of beer cans, bottles, and miscellaneous garbage rained down upon the Dutch persons as I finally caught up with Gibby just as a throng of the biggest security guards I had ever seen caught up with him, too.

"At this time there were perhaps twenty hands upon him, holding him down, and although Gibby is completely crazy, he is not stupid. 'I'M SORRY!!!! I'M FUCKING SORRY!!!! PLEASE DON'T BEAT ME ANYMORE! I HAVE A BRAIN TUMOR!!! I CAN'T HELP THE WAY I AM!!!! PLEASE DON'T HIT ME AGAIN!!! IT'S AGAINST MY RELIGION!!!!'"

Haynes then made a successful run for the dressing room and slammed the door behind him. Kramer could hear Leary and Haynes screaming at each other inside, and when he finally worked up the courage to open the door, he found the two of them smashing guitars, bottle and chairs in what Kramer calls "the most potent example of bad behavior I have ever seen. To this day, more than fifteen years later, I have no more vivid memory of the effect a life in music can have on a human being."

Moments later a man entered the dressing room and asked if he could borrow a guitar. "BORROW A GUITAR??!!! WELL, WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU???!!! Haynes screamed, eyes flashing in delerious anticpation of forthcoming violence. But the man was totally unfazed.

"I'm Alex Chilton," the man answered calmly.

Haynes was flabbergasted. After a long pause, he methodically opened the remaining guitar cases one by one and guestured at them as if to say, "Take anything you want."

Just before they went onstage, Haynes chugged an entire bottle of red wine; moments into the set he dived straight into the horrified crowd, which parted like the Red Sea. Haynes knocked himself unconscious on the floor, to warm applause from the theater's security team. "I look down at Gibby," recalls Kramer. "He tires to move, but the collapses as vomit begins pouring from his mouth."

After the gig Haynes was irate about having been unconscious for most of the show and insisted on getting paid within five minutes or he'd be "taking it out on your Dutch testicles!" Haynes snatched up the fistfull of guilders and stuffed them in a pair of pants in his guitar case, but almost immediately forgot that he had been paid and went on yet another rampage, streaking naked through the fesival complex and screaming that he'd been ripped off.

"FUCKING DUTCH FAGGOTS!!! A WHOLE FUCKING COUNTRY OF COCK-SUCKING QUEENS!!!! YOU FUCKING BEAT ME UP AND THEN YOU RIP US OFF!!! WHICH ONE OF YOU FAGGOTS STOLE OUR MONEY??!!!! FUCKING DUTCH FAGGOTS!!!!"

Yet another chase scene ensued, and yet another pack of Dutch goons wrestled Haynes to the ground, and yet again he profusely apologized. "After which he is released once again," Kramer says, "and once again dashes through the halls screaming obscenities while grabbing beer bottles from people's hands as he runs and hurling them against the brick wall."

"Those fuckin' Dutch," Leary explains, "they kind of get you pissed off after a while, man."

"We thought we had just ruined our careers by botching this show," [drummer] Jeffrey 'King' Coffey says. "Of course, the Dutch loved it -- 'The mayhem it is beautiful, it is wonderful, every song erupted into chaos!'" The next day the local paper ran an article about how the Butthole Surfers were the sensation of the festival. "So of course, every time when we came back after that and just played music, people would be horribly disappointed," says Coffey. "'[In Dutch accent] How come you do not beat up people?'"

[Maroon Voices via Poor Mojo]

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Labels: brain detox, Butthole Surfers, drugs, gibby haynes, insantity, netherlands, Nick Cave, paul leary, pigfuckers, rock 'n' roll

Each month, I will be unrolling a top 10 list regarding English-language drama this decade. Last month, I revealed the best lines from English-language plays this decade [Part One] [Part Two] [Part Three]. This month, I will be unveiling the best characters to emerge in Engish-language drama this decade. Because of the complications of such a list; I have broken it into three categories

1. Original Characters
2. Historical Characters (a.k.a. characters based on real life people)
3. Reinterpreted characters: Characters Who Are Fictional But Have Appeared in Other Plays or Media Previously.

On Monday, I listed the Top 5 Reinterpreted Characters in English-Language Drama This Decade. Yesterday, I continued with the top 5 historical characters of the decade. Today, I will begin the countdown of the Best Original Characters, going from #10 to #6.

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10. Laurence (Shining City, Conor MacPherson). Therapy is always an exceedingly dangerous area for playwrights to cover; it can so easily fall into a playwright's own self-absorption that most New York playwrights don't even bother trying. In the case of MacPherson's Dublin, however, the social stigma that afflicts therapy outside of New York City is still visibly present, and while the guilt-ridden Laurence admits his need for it, he feels the stigma as well. In MacPherson world, Laurence is the lynch pin between modern psychotherapy and the old Irish ghost story, where facing your personal demons can be as terrifying as facing demons straight out of hell. Laurence's unassuming ability to grasp this concept made him one of the most endearing characters we've seen all decade, and one who, in a perfect world, would be a role model for fighting psychotherapy's stigmatization outside the theater universe.


9. Matt (Red Light Winter, Adam Rapp) You won't find that many Angry Young Man in today's drama. You’re more likely to find plays like Red Light Winter, an excellent, Pulitzer Prize-nominated work by Adam Rapp that outlines quite clearly the problems with the modern approach to masculinity. In previous generations, characters like Matt would be the ones raging against a corrupt social. After these playwrights were fooled once in the 60s, and fooled again in the 90s, dealing with a corrupt society has turned would-be culture warriors into neurotic messes. On the other hand we have Davis, Matt's megalomaniacal best friend who cheats on the wife he has pilfered from Matt, treats everyone he meets as an object. In previous generations, Davis would be stuffing Matt into a locker. Today, Matt envies Davis' style, but secretly abhors everything about the way he thinks. Matt is the most vivid portrayal as the modern young man theater has produced this decade; he's Jimmy Porter with a self-inflicted castration.


8. Eleanor (Rock 'n' Roll, Tom Stoppard). In Stoppard's vision of Cambridge and Prague in 1968, a world where politics, philosophy, music, history, and attitude all combine in one sordid mess, Eleanor is the smartest one in the room. She's cynical enough to know when she's being threatened ("Lenka, don’t try to shag my husband until I’m dead or I’ll stick The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance up your rancid cunt, there’s a dear.”), but also one most grounded in the basic thrust of humanity ("Don’t you dare, Max—don’t you dare reclaim that word now, I don’t want your mind; which you can make out of beer cans. Don’t bring it to my funeral. I want your grieving soul or nothing. I do not want your amazing biological machine—I want what you love me with.") There were a handful of characters make me laugh and cry with a statement cut on a dime; Eleanor, dying of cancer, was the only one of those characters at peace with herself.


7. Lincoln and Booth (Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks). If August Wilson brought the African American experience its Death of a Salesman with Fences, Suzan-Lori Parks brought that world its American Buffalo and its True West in one play taking the Mamet world of con artistry and Shephard's brother-on-brother power struggle into an area no white playwright could bring it without resorting to stereotypes. With a sense of verbal rhythm on par with Mamet, a mysticism on par with Shephard, and a social conscious that may have even surpassed both, Parks connected the con to the culture of the present day, linked it to our nation's history (the brothers' names imply exactly what they are meant to imply), and, by my guess, the highly-coveted Universal Human Condition. By putting con artistry in both the real world its most basic theatrical form, Parks may have out-Mameted Mamet.


6. Katurian Katurian (The Pillowman, Martin McDonagh). Upon visiting Soviet Czechoslovakia, Philip Roth once said, "It occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters” (a sentiment Tom Stoppard has echoed). In the nameless totalitarian regime Katurian lives in, it's easy to see why. Katurian doesn't write for personal fame; of his hundreds of stories, only one has been published. Nor does he write for a social cause; there's no current events within the Pillowman universe for him to fight against. Instead, Katurian writes simply because he has to; there's something inside his private world that brings his instinct as a writer out of him, even if it takes the form of deeply disturbing stories about murdering children. The only thing that matters to Katurian is that his work is preserved; it's more important than a book deal, his brother, or his own life. The last to be completed work of McDonagh's famed wave of creativity, all Katurian wanted was a voice in a world not inclined to give him one; it helped that he, like McDonagh, was a fantastic writer. In fact, in debating whether this list was worth it, or whether it was a kind of pointless waste of time, Katurian's plight was exactly what convinced me to go ahead with it. Katurian would have given up everything to have the kind of freedom a blog provides. Of course, if he did have it, there'd be no Pillowman.
   

Labels: adam rapp, angry young man, conor macpherson, Katurian, martin mcdonagh, red light winter, rock 'n' roll, shining city, Suzan-Lori Parks, The Pillowman, tom stoppard, Topdog/Underdog

Unless some new play ends up sweeping me off my feet in the next few months that I didn’t see coming, I think we can safely begin to wrap up the debate on the progress in drama in the English language for the first decade of the 21st century. Say what you will about the crisis facing the commercial theater in terms of profitability, but in terms of quality, there were a hell of a lot of good plays this decade. Some of these plays are as good as those from the golden age of Braodway; it would be a shame if they don’t become as much a part of our culture as Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, or Harold Pinter. I doubt that, in 40 years, I will see some future soul child of The Simpsons do to August: Osage County what The Simpsons did to A Streeetcar Named Desire, but then again, I always seem to underestimate the role of theater in American cultural life. There may be far fewer Americans, or even New Yorkers, who are aware of the works of Sarah Ruhl, Sarah Kane, Adam Rapp, Mike Daisey or Taylor Mac, but if a play makes a big enough dent on the Broadway or even high off-Broadway level, it can be seen by enough people to make a difference.

Each month, I will be unrolling a top 10 list regarding English-language drama this decade. This first month starts with the best lines from English-language plays this decade. I have admittedly taken a more mainstream angle on this list, because my aim is to gauge which lines will resonate the loudest for the longest period of time in the future.

10.

“Not many people know this, but the Führer was descended from a long line of English qveens.” – Franz Liebkind (played by Brad Oscar), The Producers, book by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan.

When Mel Brooks came up with this line, he caused co-writer Thomas Meehan to fall out of his chair laughing. He did the same to thousands of audience members of the biggest flash-in-the-pan Broadway success this decade. The line was vintage Mel Brooks, but its particular application to the musical conversion of Brooks’ first feature film was a key element of the play’s wild success. With this line, Brooks completely lightened the load of Nazi imagery that dominated the rest of the play, and validated Brooks’ controversial assertion that it was more effective to demean Hitler through mockery as rather than polemics an hour before “Springtime for Hitler,” sausage display and all, hit the stage. It was also a nod to the homoerotic connotations inherent in staging a Broadway musical, no matter how straight you may be. That a right-wing Nazi could be so blind to the inherent gayness of staging a musical only made the wink to the audience that much stronger.

9.

“You the cowboys and I'm the Indians. See who wins this war.'' – Elder Joseph Barlow (Anthony Chisolm), Radio Golf by August Wilson.

Radio Golf was the weakest play of Wilson’s decade-by-decade 20th century saga, and that was mainly because the 1990s were no place to show off what made Wilson so great. Wilson’s mix of humor, poetry, folklore, playfulness, desperation and political rage made him the preeminent voice of African-American theater in the 20th century, and this line, delivered by the only character in Radio Golf who could have fit in the rest of Wilson’s canon, pretty much summed up all of that in sentence where all but two words have one syllable. Everything went awry in Radio Golf’s second act, both for the characters and the play itself. But with this doozy of an act-breaker, Wilson showed you that, even out of his element, he could still knock you out of the park.

8.

“Jirous doesn’t care. He doesn’t care enough even to cut his hair. The policeman isn’t frightened by dissidents! Why should he be? Policemen love dissidents, like the Inquisition loved heretics. Heretics give meaning to the defenders of faith. Nobody cares more than a heretic. Your friend Havel cares so much he writes a long letter to Husák. It makes no odds whether it’s a love letter or a protest letter. It means they’re playing on the same board…But the Plastics don’t care at all. They’re unbribable.” – Jan (Rufus Sewell), Rock N Roll by Tom Stoppard

Later in his life, John Osborne would repeatedly express his disgust with the success of Tom Stoppard, who he considered “intellectual flatulence.” How surprised would the original Angry Young Man be, then, to see that Stoppard would come up with the best explanation of the Angry Young Man mentality by an English language dramatist this decade. Jan is no Jimmy Porter, he’s more a foolish young pup blinded by the transcendent power of music that he sees as conquering all politics, ideas, and words. It would all come crashing down for Jan, as it does for just about every Angry Young Man, but with Rock ‘N’ Roll, Stoppard showed he understood the mindset his detractors accused him of ignoring. Jan’s speech here has all the attitude of “I hope I die before I get old” with all the intelligence of “I’ll get on my knees and pray/ we don’t get fooled again.”

7.

“If you let a standing army stand too long...it will find something to do.” – Mike Daisey, If You See Something, Say Something.

Mike Daisey’s legacy at this point is still tied to his immensely influential diatribe How Theater Failed America, but with this line, Daisey framed the dangers of the military-industrial complex in a succinct manner better than anyone, be it Eisenhower, Bill Hicks, or Naomi Klein. The first time Daisey used the line, he was describing the Cold War change in the Presidential cabinet from Secretary of War to Secretary of Defense, and the line served to show how the military-industrial complex has created a perpetual need for global conflict over the last 50 years. The second time he used it, he put the words in the mouth of George Washington, which added a universal element to Daisey’s view on history, politics, war, and even theater. Daisey validated that the problems that plague our world today are not that different from what they’ve ever been. That Daisey accomplished this without a proper script only makes this achievement that much more impressive.

6.

“Did I send you to the most expensive university in the world to teach you how to feel conflicted, or to learn how to manipulate great masses of people?” – Caldwell B. Cladwell (John Cullum) – Urinetown, book by Greg Kotis.

No other musical would open with the number “Too Much Exposition,” nor would any other musical end with the cry “Hail Malthus!” But no line in Urinetown captured the sick genius of Urinetown creators Kotis and Mark Hollman like Urine Good Company’s robber baron Cladwell, who used this line as a sick way of consoling his daughter. In one line, Kotis combined high-minded political philosophy with Borscht-belt sarcasm and a practicality that gave it special significance to everyone who wasted their private college liberal arts education on philosophy or theater. The ridiculous circumstances that led to this line within the structure of Urinetown are about as ridiculous as those that led Kotis to win a Tony for writing the line.

Stay tuned for Quotes 5-3, to be revealed tomorrow.

Labels: august wilson, Greg Kotis, if you see something say something, lists, mel brooks, mike daisey, radio golf, rock 'n' roll, the producers, tom stoppard, top theater quotes of the decade, Urinetown

Image by armcurl via FlickrWhy the return of a once-forgotten noise rock band has the rock world crapping their pants.

Five years ago, if the Jesus Lizard had reunited, the indie rock world most likely would have shrugged it off. Never mind that, in 2003, the Jesus Lizard had only been broken up for 4 years; Pavement had been broken up for the same amount of time, but a Pavement reunion would have had music fans selling their possessions to acquire tickets back in 2003. The Hipster Handbook had just been published, a book that more or less defined the spirit the first half of the 2000s, fun, laid back, sweet but snarky hipster cynicism was in full force, and the postmodern chillness seemed like it was never going to go out of fashion. That was just 3 years into the Bush presidency, when the sentiment of the Iraq War was "Mission Accomplished" before it became an occupation. I don't need to tell you it ain't been the best 5 years since.

Earlier this year on the Electrical Audio forums, posters were forced to choose who was a better band: Fugazi or Jesus Lizard (what one poster described as Sophie's Choice.) Fugazi, need I remind you, was arguably the band that defined the indie spirit and ethos more than any other band of the last 20 years. But in a race that made Florida in 2000 seem like a landslide, the Jesus Lizard ultimately won out.

Perhaps this was shaped by a mid-poll endorsement by Steve Albini himself, who noted that though Fugazi "conducted themselves impeccably and treated everyone they dealt with generously," the Jesus Lizard "conjured up a new kind of rock music, simultaneously uglier, smarter and more perverse than anything before it. They have no peers." Albini’s sentiment summed up what ultimately swung this race among hardcore indie snobs (indie here referring to its original ethical meaning): there have been plenty of bands that did what Fugazi did musically before Fugazi and afterwards. There's never been anyone who did what the Jesus Lizard did.

In the 9 years since the Jesus Lizard broke up, the void that band left has only grown larger. The sense of danger, mixed with a strange sense of fun, intelligence, and permanence, had been replaced by a sense of permanent safety and blandness. There were noise rock bands after the Jesus Lizard, but they all had a sense of cool to them rather than danger (wasn't the point of noise to be dangerous in the first place?). None had the same sense of teetering off a 10,000-foot high brink, daring you to push them over. Over the past 5 years especially, the music scene has grown softer as the world has grown harder. By 2007-2008, with the economy no longer making apathy sustainable, the need for something urgent--something like the Jesus Lizard--had reached a fever pitch.

There's a regional element to address here too. While the Gawker culture of New York, L.A., and various other hotbeds of Yuppie allowed people to flourish in empty fun for the majority of the decade, people in the Midwest, South, and shit towns across the country still needed something to appease their never-ending sense of bitterness (Obama was more right with Bittergate than he could ever admit). In these places, and in impoverished, hopeless regions across the world, the Jesus Lizard mindset/ideal still reigned supreme. This is why come 2007-2008, we saw a slew of bands emerging from said shit towns with an axe to grind. We got the Pissed Jeans (Allentown, P.A.), Titus Andronicus (Glen Rock, NJ), The Black Lips and Deerhunter (Atlanta, GA), Jay Reatard (Memphis, TN), among others. There was also a strange Canadian contingent, helmed by Fucked Up (Toronto) and King Khan & the BBQ Show (not your Arcade Fire's Montreal). Basically, anywhere discontent in America was brewing, so was slummy, spiteful Indie Rock with a capital I-R. It was a sign that Nick Cave, who had gone soft and sweet earlier in the decade, went back to nasty mode again. It is also no coincidence that all these bands have emerged at that same time that the previously mid-American and foreign discontent has spread across the nation, coasts included.

This was the spirit that Jesus Lizard once and perhaps will always dominate. Dave Yow & co began their dominance with their Scratch Acid work (which came deep from the American Armpit of Texas), and eventually took on full dominance while in Chicago when that city's scene was exploding (backed by indie rock's greatest bittermeister: Steve Albini, a Missoula, Montana native).

In September 2006, before the economic downfall hit the nation, but when bitterness was still brewing worldwide, the Jesus Lizard briefly reformed for Touch & Go's 25th anniversary. People came from Brazil, from Eastern Europe, any little pocket of the world where spite still resonated. The mere glimpse of the greatest, most unique spite band of a generation was more than enough to justify the plane fair that five years earlier would have been spent on a Pavement reunion. With the biggest recession we've ever seen however, who gives a fuck if Stephen Malkmus and Steve West start speaking again?

Hence, with spite brewing in the world like very rarely before (certainly more than in 1992), the Jesus Lizard's finely-tuned bitterness is about to explode. Think the Pixies were big in 2004? Think Mission of Burma was big in 2006? You ain't seen shit yet, mouth breathers. The kings of bitter are back, and they're taking names.

UPDATE: Anya kindly points out to me that it was Scratch Acid, not the Jesus Lizard, who got back together at T & G 25. My apologies.

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Labels: bittergate, indie rock, Jay Reatard, Jesus Lizard, life after bush, Nick Cave, rock 'n' roll, spite, Stephen Malkmus, Steve Albini, Steve West

Concert Review (NYC): Galactic at the Fillmore at Irving Plaza, October 17, 2008

The New Orleans jazz funk greats hit New York, with horns and hip-hop in tow.

Labels: concert review, funk, galactic, irving plaza, jazz, rock 'n' roll

A tipster informs me that the Hillary Clinton DNC video I analyzed earlier didn't feature the Van Halen cover. While it doesn't disprove any point I made in that piece, on closer inspection, the tipster is correct. It's obviously done in a heavy metal style inspired by the Van Halen cover, but the voice is not David Lee Roth. Consider:




Which version is it then?

I went through over 100 covers of "You Really Got Me" on iTunes--they ranged from calypso to techno to Devo-inspired to punk. The only two versions that came as close to the Van Halen version as the Hillary video did were the Guitar Hero cover by Wavegroup and a version by some band called Studio 99.

Wavegroup - You Really Got Me (Guitar Hero Version)

Studio 99 - You Really Got Me

Neither of these versions seem right. The Hillary Clinton Video featured a pronunciation of "girl" as "girl-aaa," which neither of these versions have. Can anyone find the answer?

Labels: hillary clinton, rock 'n' roll, the kinks, unsolved mysteries, van halen, you really got me

This was my first post on blogcritics, which can be found here.

Tom Stoppard has built his career on dramatically inverting or actualizing highly theoretical subject matter into a wholly entertaining dramatic work. Rock ‘N’ Roll, his most recent play, is no exception, dancing around the relationships among the personal, political, and aesthetic aspects of life.

Rock ‘N’ Roll is spliced between the worlds of Cambridge University and Soviet Prague, and the lives of protagonists Max and Jan. Max, one of the last remaining members of the Communist Party on the Cambridge faculty, desperately sticks to his ideological viewpoints despite a barrage of opposition and the realities of Soviet communism. Max's wife Eleanor is a classical philologist and romantic idealist who is Max's intellectual and social foil in just about any endeavor. Jan, however, develops a rebellious political conscience around his love of music, even preferring aesthetic rebelliousness and paradoxically subversive inactivity to more direct political action.

In one particularly striking scene, Max confronts his wife Eleanor, who is dying of cancer, over the traditional mind/body problem as a tangential point to a discussion of Sappho. Max argues from a Marxist materialist viewpoint, while Eleanor comes from a classical idealist viewpoint. The discussion turns from philology and classics to the basic tenets of materialism and its relation to culture. The scene, which contrasts sharply with Jan’s preceding defense of the transcendent power of musical rebellion, centers on Max’s key hypocrisy: his belief in the ideals but not the realities of Communism, despite the inherent materialism in Marxist philosophy. Max turns to biological determinism to deflect the larger contradictions between Marxist theory and practice after Stalin in the Soviet bloc.

Rock 'N' Roll depicts a world where the role of culture and art becomes indistinguishable from politics, and in many ways surpasses outright ideology in importance. While Max is a lackadaisical Marxist, Jan transcends politics and philosophy through his love of a rock band, the Czech dissident group The Plastic People of the Universe. Jan is a Czech native raised in England—modeled in part on Stoppard himself—who leaves his studies in Cambridge to return to his homeland after the Prague Spring. The play is heavily influenced by Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and like that book’s protagonist, Jan refuses to sign a petition against those imprisoned by Husák’s “politics of normalization.”

Yet Jan does eventually put into motion a petition to free The Plastic People of the Universe after the band is imprisoned. Jan’s acceptance of this distinction comes from what Stoppard describes in his introduction as the inability to “separate disengagement from dissidence.” When Jan begins a petition to free the Plastics, his political activist friend Ferdinand berates him for caring more about music than politics (in early drafts of the script, Ferdinand’s full name was Ferdinand Vanek, a recurring character in the plays of Václav Havel). Jan counters with a monologue explaining what separated arrests of political dissidents from the arrest of Plastics ringleader Ivan Jirous over insulting a policeman:

JAN No, because the policeman insulted him. About his hair. Jirous doesn’t cut his hair. It makes the policeman angry, so he starts something and it ends with Jirous in gaol. But what is the policeman angry about? What difference does long hair make? The policeman is angry about his fear. The policeman’s fear is what makes him angry. He’s frightened by indifference. Jirous doesn’t care. He doesn’t care enough even to cut his hair. The policeman isn’t frightened by dissidents! Why should he be? Policemen love dissidents, like the Inquisition loved heretics. Heretics give meaning to the defenders of faith. Nobody cares more than a heretic. Your friend Havel cares so much he writes a long letter to Husák. It makes no odds whether it’s a love letter or a protest letter. It means they’re playing on the same board…But the Plastics don’t care at all. They’re unbribable. They’re coming from somewhere else, from where the Muses come from. They’re not heretics, they’re pagans.

The larger significance of Jan’s defense of the rebel-without-a-cause line of reasoning is his conviction that there is a realm that no politics of normalization can touch: the distinct individuality of the human spirit as expressed through art. While the politics of normalization is a politically oppressive offshoot of the Marxist notion that intellect derives from the social and political relationships between the laborer and the ruling class, Jan’s argument goes back to Schiller’s idealism, which not coincidentally was devised by a dramatist in the face of an intellectually oppressive regime. In On The Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller noted, “Art is the daughter of Freedom, and takes her orders from the necessity inherent in minds, not in the exigencies of matter.” To Schiller, no materialist account of freedom, be it through the emphasis on utility or on pure reason, could fully grasp the political as well as personal freedom of an aesthetic education.

Back in Cambridge, we get a discussion between Max, Eleanor, and Czech student Lenka on, fittingly enough, the role of the Muses in the consciousness of Sappho. Max, uninvited to the lesson, interjects himself into the conversation, and Lenka, a Czech graduate student who is infatuated with Max, is only happy to oblige against Eleanor’s objections. The discussion of Sappho’s “Poem of Jealousy” stalls on the question of whether the poet’s experience of “love, desire and jealousy” comes from her body or from the god’s interjection into her soul. What should be a lesson on Sappho quickly turns into a more general discussion of free will versus determinism, with Max arguing in favor of a brain “which you can make out of beer cans,” Eleanor defending the mind/body distinction on the grounds that “experiencing love is different from experiencing a bee sting.” Lenka, though the only student in the scene, becomes the Socratic moderator of the discussion.

Max’s defense of biological determinism is quickly exposed as a necessary extension of his lapsed Marxism. Lenka has read one of Max’s books (either Class and Consciousness or Masses and Materialism), and notes that Max’s only acceptable definition of the mind is the collective mind, which makes him hesitant to support the concept of an individual mind except as a uniform brain. Lenka accuses his stance in the mind/body debate as having a “materialist agenda.” After Lenka leaves, Max quickly confirms her larger points, as he defends the original idea of the Communist Party, which was “made from a single piece of timber. The struggle…for socialism through organized labor.” Max dismisses the current Western European manifestation of Marxism as scattered, namely the Social Democratic missions of “anti-racism, feminism, gay rights, ecological good practice.”

Max maintains a rather idealistic perspective on Marxism, one that flies in the face of the materialist implications of Marxist philosophy. It’s interesting that Max would use such a biological approach to defending Marxism, particularly since, in The German Ideology, Marx lumped consciousness with religion and all the other social structures that derive from the base relationship of man’s ability “to produce their means of sustinence,” where “men are indirectly producing their actual material life.” To Marx, the biological approach to the mind was secondary to the social and political relationship between man and his labor. To Marx, consciousness derives not from the beer can machinery of the mind, but from social relationships, arguing, “the phantom forces of the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material-life processes, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.”

Max’s relationship to biological determinism, like his relationship to Marxism, is fleeting at best. Eleanor, his intellectual foil who has heard this argument many times before, breaks down Max’s determinism in an extremely moving passage where she describes Max’s determinism as being “in cahoots” with her cancer:

Eleanor They’ve cut, cauterized, and zapped away my breasts, my ovaries, my womb, half my bowel, and a nutmeg out of my brain, and I am undiminished. I’m exactly who I’ve always been. I am not my body. My body is nothing without me, that’s the truth of it.
She tears open her dress.
Eleanor (cont.) Look at it, what’s left of it. It does classics. It does half-arsed feminism, it does love, desire, jealousy, and fear—Christ, does it do fear!—so who’s the me who’s still in one piece?

What’s particularly striking is that, faced with this plea, Max immediately sacrifices his stance on the mind/body debate, even if it is only out of respect for his wife. He tells her that “I know your mind is everything,” a notion which Eleanor quickly rejects:

Eleanor Don’t you dare, Max—don’t you dare reclaim that word now, I don’t want your mind; which you can make out of beer cans. Don’t bring it to my funeral. I want your grieving soul or nothing. I do not want your amazing biological machine—I want what you love me with.

Max’s lack of absolute conviction to biological determinism is inextricably related to his half-hearted loyalty to the Communist Party. At the beginning of the play, Max maintains that he has stayed with the Party based on his belief “that between theory and practice there is decent fit.” But in this scene with Eleanor he exposes a fundamental flaw in that line of reasoning: the practice of Communism, in Stalin, Husák, and most other actualized forms, did not match the goals of the theory. He can’t reconcile the material form of Soviet Communism with the grand ideas of Marxist Communism. Whereas Marx sought to liberate the masses from the shackles of their labor-based relationship with the ruling class, the ruling classes of the Soviets used the awareness of that relationship to exert totalitarian control over their subjects. In biological determinism, Max finds a safe, supportable materialism that can be substituted, however poorly, for the ideological materialism of Marxism that can no longer be justifiably defended. It is not all that surprising, then, that later in the play we learn that Max had actually left the Party in secret several years before the time he still claimed to be a member.

It should be also no surprise that the kind of subtle cultural resistance that Jan takes up with the Plastic People of the Universe is utterly foreign to Max. When Max learns that Jan has been arrested for petitioning for the Plastics, he can’t believe Jan would get arrested for “some pop group thing.” When Max learns that Jan had taken a record from his daughter Esme on his last day in England (instead of her virginity), he calls it “bourgeois.” Max is utterly oblivious to the more nuanced ideology behind Jan’s political vagrancy, and the disparity becomes realized in the painfully awkward reconciliation the two share when they meet in Rock ‘N’ Roll’s second act, which takes place after perestroika.

It is at least not Stoppard’s active intent to dismantle Communist ideology with Rock ‘N’ Roll. While Jan is a vaguely autobiographical character and Stoppard is a self-declared political conservative, Rock ‘N’ Roll fairly appraises the flaws of the Soviet regime while still showing the sympathetic side of Max’s reasoning behind his desperate allegiance to Marxist ideals, though it is debatable whether Max is a sympathetic character or an old, stubborn bully. Like most Stoppard plays, the larger ideological points translate into the more personal themes of hypocrisy, personality flaws, and fractured relationships. Max’s materialism is countered by Eleanor’s cancer, and Jan’s love of rock music translates to his political conscience. Such a dynamic allows Rock ‘N’ Roll to meditate equally on the dramatic and theoretical levels.

Labels: marxism, rock 'n' roll, schiller, the plastic people of the universe, tom stoppard