The Cool School (55 page)

Which, actually, is in his favor. Because now, and only now, when everybody in the Western world has written him off as either a bad joke or a drug casualty, is he free to finally
make
a record that feels, that hurts, that might be real and not just more jokes. Because he’s kicked up such a dirt storm that everybody’s blinded anyway, they’re just waiting for the old lunatic to speed himself to death and they positively
would not notice
if he made a record with the depth and sensitivity of his best work for the late Velvet Underground. Now, I
hope that
Coney Island Baby
, which as of this writing he has realigned again back into the Valentine’s Day package originally promoted, might be that record. Of course, I don’t believe it will be, or that Lou will write anything but loony toons ever again, because a few too many brain cells have took it on the lam from that organism that treated them so hatefully. But all that’s okay too, because I live for laughs, which is why I love Lou. As far as
Metal Machine Music
goes, I listen to it all the time, but I’ll never forget what Howard Kaylan told me Lou said to him after unsuccessfully trying to sell the layers-and-layers-of-sonic-frequencies concept (which was only a speed trip in the first place) to Flo and Eddie: “Well, anybody who gets to side four is dumber than I am.” So, slimy critter that he is, we’re right back where we started from. The joke’s on you, kid. And if I were you, I’d take advantage of it.

Creem
, February 1976

His real last name is Meyers, but Richard Hell seemed better for a student of the French Symbolist poets and revisionist rocker. He cofounded Television with Tom Verlaine (another fan of French Symbolists), and when the band discovered a bar with a good PA system called CBGB they set the tone for a movement with a jagged beat, spiky hair, and ripped duds. Hell was also writing poetry and published a collaboration with Verlaine under the pseudonym Theresa Stern. After leaving Television, he briefly joined Johnny Thunders in The Heartbreakers, then founded Richard Hell and the Voidoids, whose promising debut was derailed by lifestyle issues or, perhaps, ennui. Hell has continued to make music on and off, but since the nineties his main focus has been writing lively poetry, fiction, and essays.

I was saying let me out of here before I was

even born. It’s such a gamble when you get a face.

It’s fascinating to observe what the mirror does

but when I dine it’s for the wall that I set a place.

I belong to the blank generation and

I can take it or leave it each time.

I belong to the ________ generation but

I can take it or leave it each time.

Triangles were falling at the window as the doctor cursed.

He was a cartoon long forsaken by the public eye.

The nurse adjusted her garters as I breathed my first . . .

The doctor grabbed my throat and yelled, “God’s consolation prize!”

(Chorus)

To hold the TV to my lips, the air so packed with cash

then carry it up flights of stairs and drop it in the vacant lot.

To lose my train of thought and fall into your arms’ tracks

and watch beneath the eyelids every passing dot.

(Chorus)

1977;
Hot and Cold: Essays Poems Lyrics Notebooks Pictures Fiction
, 2001

Lynne Tillman came up in the punk /New Wave era but she wasn’t a punk, more a “Pictures Generation” classical novelist
(Cast in Doubt, No Lease on Life, American Genius)
adept at exploring the new art world and downtown paradigms. With her persona Madame Realism (not to be confused with Sir Realism), Tillman created a feminist narrator who pulls no punches in describing the chaotic world and maze of mixed signals she finds at Culture Central.

M
ADAME
R
EALISM
,
like everyone else, had a mother, and her mother had bought and hung two prints by old masters in her home. One, by Van Gogh—a bearded man sucking on a pipe. One, by Renoir—a red-headed girl playing with a golden ball or apple. Since there were redheads in her family, Madame Realism assumed that the girl was a relative, just as she assumed the bearded man was one of her grandfathers, both of whom had died before she was born. As a child Madame Realism thought that all pictures in her home had to do with her family. Later she came to understand things differently.

With some reluctance Madame Realism went to a museum in Boston to look at paintings by Renoir. By now she felt a kind of despair when in an institution expressly to look at and judge something which she could no longer feel or experience as she once had. Boston itself was a site of contradiction and ongoing temporary resolution. She knew, for instance, that in Boston the arts were led by the Brahmins, the Irish dominated its political machine, and the black population was fighting hard to be allowed anything at all. But in an institution
such as a great museum, where lines of people form democratically to look at art, such problems are the background upon which that art is hung.

Madame Realism was moved along by the crowd, and in another way she was moved by the crowd. “Sinatra is 70 this year,” she heard one woman say to another as they looked at a picture on the wall. There’s nothing of Sinatra in this picture, Madame Realism thought. Not the skinny New Jersey guy who made it big and for a brief moment was married to Ava Gardner, also thin, then. On the other hand (one has so many hands these days), he did rise like cream to the top, not unlike Renoir, whose father was a tailor. The crowd swelled, especially at the paintings whose labels had white dots on them, as they had been chosen by the museum for special auditory instruction through machines. Madame Realism loitered in the clumps and listened as much as she looked.

In front of a nude, one young woman asked another: “Do you think that’s how fat women really were?” Automatically, Madame Realism moved her hand to her hip. She strained to hear the answer, but the crowd advanced, and she completed it as she thought it would be. Women were allowed to be fatter, it was the style. You’d be considered more desirable, voluptuous. There’s more of you to love. Diets hadn’t been invented. Madame Realism felt self-conscious standing alone, if only for a moment, in front of that nude, her hand resting on her own 19th-century hip. And she thought again of Frank Sinatra and supposed, whatever other troubles he’d had, he’d never had a weight problem. Quite the reverse, she thought, giving the phrase her version of an English barrister’s accent.

She didn’t like these paintings. They were almost ridiculous when they weren’t bordering on the grotesque, and then they became interesting to her. What had happened to this guy on his rise to the top? Was he so uncomfortable that what he painted reflected his discomfort by a kind of ugliness? The women were all flesh, especially breasts, and the faces of men, women and children were notably vacant. Madame Realism imagined a VACANCY sign hanging in
front of
Sketches of Heads,
like a cheap hotel’s advertisement that rooms were available.

In the middle of her own mixed metaphor, which unaccountably made her think of
The Divine Comedy,
Madame Realism followed a museum instructor, whose students were trailing her with the determination of ducklings after their mother. The woman was saying something about the differences between the 18th and 19th centuries, but became confused as to whether the 18th century meant the 1800s, or the 19th century the 1800s. Madame Realism’s heart went out to her on account of this temporary, ordinary lapse, and she wondered how this might affect the students’ imprinting. The instructor recovered quickly and said, “You have to look for the structure. The painting, remember, is flat.” It wasn’t hard to remember that these paintings were flat, she thought, and stood in front of a painting of onions. Renoir’s onions are flat, she said to herself. His onions. It’s funny that in the language of painting what someone paints becomes his or, sometimes, hers. His nudes. His people. Madame Realism recalled a still life of peaches by Renoir that she’d seen in the Jeu de Paume. Years ago she stood in front of the painting and thought they were perfect, just like peaches. The peaches of Europe, her grandmother was recorded as having said, how I miss them. And there they were. In a bowl. His peaches. Nature at its best. Not vacant like those happy faces. His happy faces.

Two women were deep in conversation, and Madame Realism eavesdropped with abandon. The first woman was saying, “He had an apartment near his dealer’s, and his wife didn’t know about it, and he had to distort her face so that she wouldn’t know who the model was. So he made the faces like penises and vaginas.” “The
faces?”
the second woman asked. “Yes,” said the first, “like the nose coming out? That’s a penis.” They were talking about Picasso, Madame Realism figured out, because whatever else you might say about Renoir, his noses didn’t look like penises. Although, upon viewing a late painting of nudes, she wanted to rush over to those women and tell them that a Renoir elbow looked like a breast. Or like a peach. Peaches
and breasts. Peaches are much more like flesh than apples, or for that matter, onions. A bowl of breasts—a still life. She looked again at the masklike faces of children, the hidden faces of men dancing with women whose faces and bodies were on display. If masks, what were they hiding? she asked herself, moving closer to the painting as if that would reveal something. Instead, she saw brushstrokes. Disappointed, she walked on and thought about D. H. Lawrence and how the flesh and its passion refuse education and class, are, in a sense, used to defy them. She wanted to look at these paintings with something like sympathy rather than indifference. But somehow this evocation of the simple life and its joys, the contented family, the gardens of Eden, did not produce in her pleasure, but she did become aware of how hungry she was. Madame Realism was not one to discount this effect, and couldn’t wait to sit down and eat. But there was more to see.

Facing
Sleeping Girl with a Cat
Madame Realism heard two young women agree that the cat looked just like theirs; it was so real, down to the pads on its paws. But, said one, “Doesn’t that girl look uncomfortable?” Madame Realism agreed, silently. The sleeping girl had been positioned so that the light would hit her bare shoulders and partially exposed chest. This was supposed to be a natural position, though any transvestite could tell you that naturalness wasn’t easy to achieve. Although, according to one of the writers in the exhibition’s catalogue, Renoir had “an instinct” for it. Naturalness, that is, not transvestism. Shaking her head from side to side, Madame Realism followed the crowed to
Gabrielle with Jewelry
. Women are home to him, she thought, big comfortable houses. And if representation has to do with re-presenting something, what is it we repeat over and over but our sense of home, which may become a very abstract thing indeed. She imagined another sign. It read: Representation—A Home Away from Home.

Wanting very much to leave and eat, to go home, tired of the insistent flow in front of paintings, of which she was very much a part, Madame Realism was entrapped by another conversation, carried on by two men and a woman. The first man to speak was waving
his arms, rather excitedly, saying, “The washerwomen were square. He was painting things as if they were rigid, fixed in a space that wouldn’t move.” The woman responded, “You can see why his paintings would appeal to the common man and woman. His people are just so unselfconscious.” The first man countered, “But his talent was remarkable.” The second man asked, “In his notes and letters, is there a more cerebral quality?” The first man answered, “No, and he wasn’t a happy person.” The woman exclaimed, “But his paintings have such joy.” Both men said “vitality” in unison. “It’s often true,” said the first man. “He was a very cranky guy from a poor family. The sensuality in all his paintings . . . Just wishful thinking.” The woman said, “He was like Mozart, a basic talent, but without intellect.” The first man threw his arms out again and implored, “But he was a natural flowing talent. It just flowed out.” The second man said, “Genius.” At genius, Madame Realism walked out of the exhibition to the souvenir shop. He sounds more like a fountain than a painter, or more like an animal who holds a paintbrush. If, according to that same writer in the catalogue, Renoir’s brush “was part of him,” then maybe he didn’t even have to hold it. Madame Realism bought five postcards and thought the paintings looked better in reproduction than as originals, just as a friend of hers told her they would. Maybe that’s why he’s so popular, she thought.

Back home, Madame Realism surrounded herself with the familiar: her cat, cheese, beer, the television. She turned it on, a public service broadcast which just happened to be about investing in art. She sat up in bed, dislodging her sleeping cat from her lap, and moved closer to the set. The host asked the art-as-investment expert: “The oldest cliché in your business is, ‘I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like.’ You’ve suggested that that attitude is a sure loser for an investor in art.” “Exactly,” answered the expert. “The word is appreciation. I don’t care what you like, if you don’t learn how to appreciate art, you’ll never become a collector.” The host smiled and said, “If you don’t appreciate art, it won’t appreciate for you.” “Exactly,” said the expert.

Madame Realism switched to another channel and turned the
sound off. Her cat returned to her lap and she fixed the reading lamp as best she could. Often it burned into the top of her head and gave her headaches. Robert Scull had just died, an art collector of some notoriety. When asked, it was reported in his obituary, if “he bought art for investment and social climbing, Mr. Scull responded, ‘It’s all true. I’d rather use art to climb than anything else.’” Madame Realism put the paper down and the day’s words and phrases bounced in front of her eyes. She turned off the light, got comfortable and fell into a deep natural sleep, undisturbed even by the screams in the street.