Pop + Politics » classic journalism

Classic Journalism: Robert Christgau, The Dean of Rock Criticism

Michaelangelo Matos — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:16:00 +0000

photo by Fred McDarrah

The first time I read Robert Christgau’s review, “Trying to Understand the Eagles,” I was 13 years-old, sitting on my great-grandaunt’s living room couch in Minneapolis. Originally published in Newsday in 1972 and reprinted in his first book, 1973’s Any Old Way You Choose It, the piece is essentially the reason I became a rock critic.

The essay begins as a relatively evenhanded dissection of the Eagles. It was a model for the way Christgau—credited with being one of the creators of rock criticism—would write in the decades to come. He always takes his subject’s signifiers seriously—thinking about what they really mean. He knew early on that the Eagles’ streamlined popcraft had real skill in it, and he also smelled the noticeably swollen egos of the early-’70s rock stars. The way Christgau connects their debut album to the aftermath of the ’60s dream’s fallout is instructive, too: folks who loathe the Eagles today tend to do so because the band’s tendency to be sappy and nostalgic only got worse. Which, as it turns out, is where Christgau thought they might be headed.

But the line that provided the revelation, the one that made me change my thinking to “I want to do that,” instead of, “It might be fun to do that,” is one of the greatest literary switcheroos in music criticism. It’s a sentence so elegant and simple, and so perfectly deadpan, that it inspired many of my peers in the field to become rock critics, as well. See if you can spot it.

“Trying to Understand the Eagles.”

Michaelangelo Matos is the author of Sign ‘O’ the Times Continuum, 2004) and has contributed to many magazines, newspapers, websites, and anthologies. He has a personal blog, Schmusic at http://m-matos.blogspot.com/. He lives in Seattle and is moving to New York again (for love, not money) in 2009.

Classic Journalism: Joan Didion’s 74 Years of Magical Thinking

emily henry — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:34:09 +0000

My first experience with Joan Didion began when I picked up The Year of Magical Thinking in a thrift store in Cambridge, England. It was her most recent book—published in 2005—and one of the most life-changing, perspective-altering, soul-calming pieces of literature I have ever mentally consumed. The novel is a memoir that begins with her husband’s sudden death due to cardiac arrest while their daughter Quintana is in a coma due to septic shock from pneumonia. Quintana dies less than a year later. Didion loses the two most important people in her life in one foul swoop from 2003 to 2004 and approximately 240 pages.

It sounds depressing. But for anyone who has ever dealt with the strange, inexplicable feelings that we label “grief”, The Year of Magical Thinking is soothing. In her usual magical way, Didion succeeds in articulating the unarticulatable. She explores her own feelings—an oscillation between numbness and shock—with a level of detail that seems much more natural than most literature written about death. There is no sugar-coating, and sometimes the world can look a little dark, but there is a surprising amount of beauty in the shadows.

Didion, now 74-years old, has written 14 books in her lifetime—five of which are fiction—as well as five screenplays and countless articles for Vogue and Time. An avid reader since childhood, she has also regularly contributed to The New York Review of Books since 1973. In November 2005, she was awarded the National Book Award in the category of non-fiction for The Year of Magical Thinking. In 2007, Didion’s “distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence” was recognized by the National Book Foundation with a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. The Writer’s Guild of America decorated her with the Evelyn F. Burkey Award that same year.

But Didion’s greatest distinction is her unparalleled connection to California. In her review of Didion’s 1979 work The White Album, Michiko Kakutani crowned Didion California’s official journalist. If Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway, Oxford, Mississippi, belongs to William Faulkner, and Honolulu belongs to James Jones—“California belongs to Joan Didion,” wrote Kakutani.

Los Angeles, too, became the property of Joan Didion when she composed the vignette “Los Angeles Notebook,” published in her 1968 essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem. It was this particular essay that fused Didion with my writer’s soul indefinitely. Very few writers can capture Los Angeles in anything more than a superficial way. Truly interpreting the landscape is like catching a glimpse of Sasquatch, or stumbling upon the crumbling top point of an Ancient Egyptian pyramid buried deep beneath the sand, or witnessing the glistening neck of the Loch Ness Monster stretch beyond the lid of a Scottish lake for little more than an instant.

Raymond Chandler captured it with ease in his short story “Red Wind,” which describes the ominous, unsteady feeling brought to Los Angeles by the Santa Ana wind. After reading “Red Wind” some years ago, I never for a moment thought that the Santa Ana wind would belong to any author other than Chandler. It takes a person of exceptional perception to capture the tone-change—the ethereal flicked switch—that accompanies the desert wind, and Chandler must have squeezed blood from his spiritual peripheral vision to do it. But exactly 30 years later, Didion squeezed too.

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio passes, blowing up sandstorms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to the flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the phone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behaviour.

The Santa Ana wind, Didion tells us, is a foehn wind—a malevolent force that causes headaches, nausea and restlessness. It is a mythological and a scientific wind. Native Indians would throw themselves into the sea when this bad wind blew. In Switzerland, suicide rates increase during a foehn. In Los Angeles, some teachers suspend classes because children become unmanageable during a foehn. “A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive and negative ions,” writes Didion. “…What an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy. One cannot get much more mechanistic than that.”

Perception is Didion’s extinguishing characteristic as a writer, but contextual detail is her forte as a journalist. She lays the scene and brings the reader to a point of hungry anticipation: I see it, the reader says. Now tell me what I should think of it. Didion is the trusted guide. She is the vital organs. She is the eyes, the brain and the heart.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” writes Didion in the opening of The White Album. But for writers like Joan Didion it’s the other way around. Writers who are able, so naturally, to capture complete moments in time and transform blank pages and blank thoughts with them—live in order to tell stories.

Slouching Toward Bethlehem

Classic Journalism: Martha Gellhorn’s “Dachau”

emily henry — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:00:51 +0000

Famed war journalist Martha Gellhorn reported from every major war zone in her lifetime. At 28 years old, she covered the Spanish Civil War from Barcelona. At 80, she was in Panama reporting on the American invasion.

She was Ernest Hemingway’s third wife, a fact which threatens to overshadow Gellhorn’s legacy as one of the greatest war reporters of the twentieth century. She died in 1998, at 89 years old, after a 60-year career in war correspondence and travel writing.

She also published 21 books, both journalism and fiction. Her well-honed writing skills and activist attitude made Gellhorn a compassionate asset to the wars she covered.
Her warfront dispatches were published in Collier’s Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly and the Guardian, as well as her most famed book of war reportage, The Face of War (1959).

It is this book that hides the gem of Gellhorn’s long career: a report from the first Nazi concentration camp, simply titled “Dachau.” It needs nothing more than this. Her writing is so intense, so perceptive, and so penetrative that it is impossible to read the story without feeling permanently altered by it.

“All I did was report from the group up, not the other way round,” Gellhorn told her editor at the Daily Mirror, Hugh Cudlipp.

This is what great muckrakers do: they rake the muck and they get dirty. Gellhorn spent her life on the ground with the people her stories were about, producing journalism that was able to explain, define, and capture the unimaginable truth.

In addition to this “in the thick of it” reporting, Gellhorn never neglected her medium; she recognized the importance of the written word as a powerful tool, and she used it accordingly.

Through reports like “Dachau,” the West was exposed to the reality of the Nazi regime and confronted with the inhumanity of concentration camps for the first time. Gellhorn was one of the first journalist’s to enter the concentration camp, and one of the last to leave. The images remained with her for the rest of her life. Gellhorn describes the dehumanization of the prisoners through malnutrition, physical brutality, and medical experimentation:

“They have no age and no faces; they all look alike and like nothing you will ever see if you are lucky.”

Gellhorn’s piece is rife with visceral and disturbing description, creating an immediacy and presence that-60 years since Dachau was abolished-is still uncomfortable to read. Despite the sameness of the prisoners’ appearance, Gellhorn tells their stories individually-ensuring that she gives enough time and attention to the atrocities that the men and women of Dachau have had to live through. One man-or as Gellhorn describes, “what had been a man”-had arrived at Dachau in the last boxcar, where he was locked inside with other men, women, and children by German guards. The people inside the boxcar “slowly died of hunger and thirst and suffocation,” Gellhorn writes, adding, “from time to time, the guards fired into the cars to stop the noise.” But “this man had survived.” Gellhorn describes her encounter with him, which is both disturbing and moving, writing with a compassion and humanity that makes the horror of the situation even more unbearable:

“He was found under a pile of dead. Now he stood on the bones that were his legs and talked and suddenly he wept. ‘Everyone is dead,’ he said, and the face that was not a face twisted with pain or sorrow or horror… ‘Here I am and I am finished and cannot help myself. Everyone is dead.’”

Martha Gellhorn captured this moment by reporting it as one human to another, rather than as an objected, disinterested party.

The “Dachau” piece is full of precious human moments, full of stories and characters, full of pain, and suffering, but also of hope. In the beginning of the piece, Gellhorn is flying away from Dachau with American soldiers when one of the soldiers says to her: “We’ve got to talk about it, if anyone believes us or not.” And so she did. And the Western world was forced to sit up and listen.

Ready “Dachau” here.