Greg Tate: Critical Everything Theory
At its best, critical writing gives you a living, breathing encounter with a work of art. Not through adjectives, terminology, or impressionistic prose but through the fabric and weave of the writing itself. Not mimetically, either—like some ritalin-Kerouac prose striving to “sound like bebop”—but intrinsically. Certain critics extend a poet’s or improviser’s reach for whatever handy words will encode a human experience into their argument. Peter Schjeldahl still does this about fine art, and Greg Tate did this so well and so consistently about form as new and explosive as ‘80s-90s hip-hop that whenever you saw his name atop a column of text in the Village Voice, it was less like spotting a new article than cracking open the jewel case of hype CD or opening an illicit bindle at a party that was now about to truly jump off. Greg Tate’s writing brought that dopamine spike, and it lasted long after the initial high.
He was just a blast to read, on anything, and, given that he was writing about ’80s hip-hop in ’80s New York City, he had this kind of terrifying authority that it’s hard to even assess now. To a generation of budding writers, academics, and artists, Tate was also the first intellectual to convey his ideas in a completely unaffected mix of critical theory, hip-hop street talk, folksy dudespeak, and hype-man glee—a style as unreproducible as Monk’s or Nabokov’s, with their kind of palpable erudition. Imitate it and you sound like a braying jackass. That voice was probably too blazingly literate to exist in any real-life space besides the page, but there it was a universe.
After hearing that Tate had died, I found some quotations where he described his seminal Village Voice writing as an attempt to sound like hip-hop on the page. I get what he means, and with something as verbose, free-form, and multi-referential as hip-hop, it makes sense. But if that’s all it was, a generation of budding writers wouldn’t have hung on every single word Tate wrote about James Baldwin, the Bad Brains, Basquiat, Sun Ra, Nirvana, or any other subject he took on, subjects that either preceded or followed the creative and intellectual peak of hip-hop that Tate effectively co-produced himself. Some might call him Clement Greenberg to rap’s Abstract-Expressionists, but those people wouldn’t have commanded Tate’s readership.
“Somebody once explained the difference between the minds of Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk as Powell being more likely to drop a heavy insight on you about the state of the world and Monk being more likely to lay something deep on you about Monk.” This, from a 1988 piece on Eric B and Rakim. And check the off-hand schooling in this piec on Jean Michel Basquiet a year later. “My maternal grandfather used to say, Son, no matter where you go in this world and no matter what you find, somewhere up in there you will find a Negro. Experience has yet to prove him wrong, especially where the avant-garde is concerned. In Wilfredo Lam we had our Cubist adventurer. Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, and LeRoi Jones bopped heads with the Beats. The British Invasion got vamped on by Jimi Hendrix while Arthur Lee and Sly Stone were spear-chucking protopunk and funk into San Francisco’s psychedelic Summer of Love. Bad Brains reclaimed Rasta and hardcore rock and roll from the punks.” And this, from an aside in a ’91 piece about ’60s Black Nationalism: “I’ll be stunned if Spike overcomes his immaturity as a storyteller and makes a film with anything approaching the complexity of Malcolm’s world and worldview, but c’est la vie. Ain’t nothing but a movie y’all, and after those two hours in the dark are over, we’ll all still have to get up the next morning and deal with being Black men and women in America. Which at the end of the day is about what? Learning to love and struggle with one another, end of story.”
Half the time, you were eavesdropping on Tate’s counsel to righteous intelligent Black America, half the time he was explaining why you loved what you loved so much. I spent a day wondering why Tate’s death felt like such a personal loss to me, a 50-something whiteboy recovering critic/writer who’s one of thousands who considered him the absolute pinnacle of critical, or even non-fiction writing. But when I spotted a glowing review of his group Burnt Sugar Arkestra’s last album — in fact, a rare A from Christgau, awarded pre-humously — it clicked: Greg Tate was also that rare, often suspect thing that I was and still feel like, a musician-critic.
For most of my childhood, I read and wrote academically and privately, and studied and played music the same way. By late high school, jazz-nerddom connected me to one community while, in my 20s, academic and journalist criticism connected me to another, and there was a Chinese Wall between them. Participation in both got you vibed as a traitor to the cause of one. I wonder if Tate was also on bandstands or recording sessions where fellow musicians, slagging the published ignorati, caught his eye, and said some version of Whatever, man, y’all know critics are bitches. Or if heard some version of that from the white intellectual rock-crit massive, where one post-punk tenet has it that a corrupting, over-facility on an instrument means you’re covertly in league with Kenny G. (And btw: forgive me if I skip that new doc about himself; I spent enough time in ’90s laundromats and DMVs to know dude’s oxygen-depleting sound as well as I know that tons of people love it.) A guitarist and band leader, Tate cofounded the Black Rock Coalition and has led Burnt Sugar Arkestra in its conducted improvisations for two decades, years I often wish he’d spent more time writing. Ten years ago, my editor at Riverhead Press was trying to enlist Tate for what would clearly be the definitive book about James Brown. I read that he signed on to the project but doubt we’ll ever see it now.
But Tate was clearly thriving creatively, as a quick listen to “Angels Over Oakanda” tells you. That’s all I’ve given it so far, but saying that it sounds like a contemporary version of In a Silent Way- or Agharta-era Miles isn’t exactly faint praise. And it’s unlike those records in that it sounds organically created rather than patched together in post, the product of a large, blended family of avant-New Yorkers listening to each other, respecting each other’s space and voices, playing openly, bravely, lovingly.
I bet that part of what made Greg Tate such a powerful writer is that he listened and wrote like a musician, by which I don’t mean more intelligently or more knowledgeably. I mean he did it with a certain focus and patience, an attentiveness to different details, maybe a deeper sympathy. Playing jazz-adjacent music takes so many years of devotion before you rise to the level of doing it badly. I know, I rose to that level. Writing about the music doesn’t, not really. Not even in the age of editorial gate keepers like the hallowed ‘80s-‘90s Village Voice. Writing is also hard, tedious, and lonely, and it feels that way most of the time. Playing music with people never does. Neither does reading writers like Tate. He’s one of those writers who gave you a lifelong practice, a way of relating to whatever the world offers or foists on you, and I can’t thank him enough.
Bill Murray, on his 71st.
Reprint of “In Bloom,” Film Comment
Film Comment
© 2005 by Chris Norris
If the last 50 years of Western culture can be summed up with one facial expression, it’s the deadpan. History is unclear about its origins (although some cite Buster Keaton), and its exact mechanics remain mysterious. As an emotive gesture, it’s uniquely contextual: a work in negative space, a non-reaction to a reaction-begging event. It’s a look for a seen-it-all age and, as the default pose for a generation of would-be ironists, the most debased gesture in current usage, a gimmick for instant cool and wised-up superiority. But even now, on the face of a master, the deadpan can still bloom with life—revealing longing, love, sympathy, desire, or terror, all while establishing an odd kind of complicity with the viewer, an almost metaphysical acknowledgement that audience, character, and actor are in this thing together. A world-class deadpan takes more than acting ability and it’s best borne by a face with a story of its own. And if there’s one single living virtuoso of this strange and dangerous form, it is without a doubt Bill Murray.
From the start in the Seventies Chicago comedy scene, Murray was known for his strangely kinetic stoneface. As he moved from "Saturday Night Live" to film, Hollywood gave him an ever more splendid array of spectacles to underreact to. From an actor roommate’s wig-doffing reveal on a daytime soap in Tootsie (“That is one nutty hospital,” he quipped) to the giant marauding Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters (“There’s something you don’t see every day”), Murray’s shrugging, unflappable, crypto-stoner mien—an almost Zen-like acceptance of all—formed a linchpin of late-century American comedy.
But it wasn’t until the ascendance of next-generation hipsters like Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola that Murray got to refine this minimalism into something more poetic, allowing the baby-blue eyes and pockmarked mug to reflect autumnal melancholy, sage poignancy, or some other complex of finely burnished emotions. As the despairing millionaire in Rushmore and the burnt-out Hollywood star in Lost in Translation, Murray offered a wry, tender warning to his younger co-stars, who were greeting adulthood as he was on its downward slide, each meeting in a zone where adolescent and adult roles are mixed up and confused—an epochal condition never expressed better than in these films.
After these masterful turns, though, Murray’s magnetic aura of whimsical profundity became a kind of hazard. Once he acquired the Murray mojo for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Wes Anderson more or less left the filmmaking to the star, wardrobe, and a few Bowie covers—plot and character development fell by the wayside. And when someone as laissez-faire as Jim Jarmusch landed Murray for a segment of Coffee and Cigarettes, the result was almost inert, saved from absolute torpor by Murray’s laconic riffing with Wu-Tang Clansmen RZA and GZA. Mix deadpan acting with deadpan directing and you risk ending up with just plain dead.
None of this bodes well for Jarmusch’s latest, Broken Flowers, which stars Murray as, yes, an aging success, unhappy in love, who is looking back on life. But this time, actor and director seemed to have met each other at a perfect moment. While Murray gives one of his most understated performances in a career full of them, Jarmusch, who wrote the film with Murray in mind, has refined his own repertoire into a spare, solid kind of storytelling for this tender, funny musing on memory and loss.We meet Don Johnston as we met Murray’s Stripes character John Winger: on the day his exasperated girlfriend (Julie Delpy) walks out on him. The fact that this dumping, again on groundsof his arrested development, happens 24 years later adds a certain tragic dimension. This time, Murray’s jilted cad offers no endearing pleas or wisecracks. He just looks mildly penitent, slumps over on the couch, and lies there.
Don, a software entrepreneur, is an aging lothario—lest we miss the point, he’s watching Douglas Fairbanks in the 1934 The Private Life of Don Juan on TV. We pick up on the pink envelope we watched drifting through the mechanized currents of the postal system in the opening credits. The typewritten letter arrives through Don’s mail slot, like another thorn in his side, its anonymous author informing him that he has a 19-year-old son who may or may not be coming to visit him.Although he seems content to toss the letter aside and resume brooding, Don is urged by his Ethiopian neighbor Winston (Jeffrey Wright, in another flawless characterization) to seek out the author and discover the truth. An amateur detective, Winston helps Don narrow the possible mothers down to four ex-lovers, tells him what clues to seek (a typewriter, pink decor), and even makes his travel arrangements for him—sending Don off on a singularly reluctant mystery hunt and beginning one of the most elegant, spooky, and quietly affecting journeys in the Jarmusch oeuvre.
In a rented Taurus, with only the sinuously eerie Afro-funk of his friend’s mix CD for company, Don drives from barren interstate to dusty back road, visiting these four exes. Jarmusch has been working this general concept on and off since Stranger Than Paradise in 1984, and most of his trademarks are here: a strange cross-cultural duo, a hipster-epicurean soundtrack, an episodic structure, a permeating sense of isolation, and a panglobal vision of the people on America’s margins. In revisiting these different loves of Don’s, Jarmusch also revisits gestures and moments in his own oeuvre.
Don’s first stop is a one-story clapboard house in some unspecified rural burg where a baby-faced and pathologically flirty teenager (Alexis Dziena) answers the door in a nightie. This is the first of the deadpan tours de force Murray offers, registering genuine disquiet at this clearly fucked-up girl-woman named Lolita—tract-home dysfunction imitating great art. Soon her mother Laura (Sharon Stone) comes home, a gorgeous but careworn survivor and literal NASCAR widow who’s raising Lo on her own while making her living as a professional closet organizer. Though initially unsettling, the reunion ends amicably with Laura kissing Don’s hand, freeing him to resume his search. He’ll never get off that easy again.
The director’s famous patience for studying uneventful moments works well in Broken Flowers, establishing the strangeness of each life Don encounters and building the tension as we too are sucked up into Don’s state of apophenia—seeing patterns or connections in possibly random or meaningless data. Pink decor, a typewriter, family clearly suspicious of Don’s intentions. And at a backwoods biker outpost Don is met with open hostility by Penny, played by Tilda Swinton in black-dyed, white-trash Jodie Foster mode.Back home Don has a final tantalizing encounter outside his local diner, this time with a young male backpacker (Mark Webber) about the age of his putative son. Like the girl from Lost in Translation, this young traveler is a would-be philosopher, and he asks Don for any wisdom he might care to impart. Don thinks for a moment. “The past is gone, I know that,” he says slowly. “The future isn’t here yet… So all there is is the present.” Thus he reveals the true fruits of his detective odyssey—something Murray’s deranged groundskeeper Carl in Caddyshack might call “total consciousness.”
At 55, Bill Murray may have taken deadpan into its more classical form, the rhetorical figure litotes, in which deliberate understatement is employed for either comic or tragic effect. This feels like the only appropriate term to describe his performance in the last of Don’s visits, a brief scene that nonetheless anchors all that follows. As with Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (or Murray's Scrooged), the concluding reunion is also the scariest and yields one of the most moving moments in Murray’s entire career.
Don’s—and Murray’s—casually self-conscious, affably raffish charm doesn’t work on this last woman. And this time, when he offers one of those self-consciously lounge-lizardly greetings, he does it softly, tenderly, against choked-back tears. “Hello, Beautiful,” he says, to no one, and lays a bouquet of pink flowers at a headstone. There are laughs still to come in the film, but they’re a bit sweeter and warmer after this gorgeously composed little scene at a rainy cemetery. Filmed by Jarmusch without condescending to the obviously shopworn trope and played by Murray with an understatement that couldn’t be further removed from sarcasm, it’s a reminder that some breakups really are forever.
No, it was not “like a disaster movie.”
20-year-old photograph, at the real dawn of the digital age.
Have the types of screen we have erected in our minds detached us from the nakedness of experience itself? — David Thomson, Film Comment
This Wednesday night, I was streaming the bravura sequence in sci-fi disaster film Cloverfield. It’s that electrifyingly digital set piece, shot with hand-held video camera, where the POV roams a New York City loft party as it gets rocked by a city-quaking impact. The screen judders as the POV runs with the crowd downstairs and onto the street to see a building ten blocks away struck by soaring chunk of debris, then operatically cascade to earth, sending a tsunami of soot, ash, and debris to the camera. Which is where, for the first of a dozen times I’ve rewatched this, I abruptly felt sick, scared, angry, then pushed “STOP.” I had a nightmare that night and the next, which, given today’s date, feels a bit too on the nose. But here it is.
Twenty years ago today, I was in a crowd of people, 20 blocks above the World Trade Center, watching as a wacky New York story abruptly switched genres. I’d been a print journalist for ten years — recently, staff writer at New York and SPIN magazines — living in New York City for the previous six. I took photos and notes that day, wrote about it in scores of ways, but there’s one basic point I want to make today. That what we video of that event is as much like the real thing as a video of a lake’s like jumping in it.
“Those in the middle of historical events most people only know from TV can feel they missed the thing,” wrote the British novelist James Meek. “Because their memories don’t conform to whatever iconic thirty-second clip comes to stand for the event in most people’s minds.” Part of this is scale, part’s history, part’s the altered nature of our media.
Of the many things “9/11” was, one was clearly an inflection point. The moment the analog world went digital. No spectacular act of violence was ever captured on video from so many angles, by amateurs, or looped so endlessly on media channels. Cut-up, rewound, re-edited, rewatched, paused, rerun. Our culture digested and excreted it without tasting. Seeing, hearing, or feeling. This are things that print can help with, so here goes.
As you were walking south before 10 am, the event changed about every 10 blocks. There were no smart phones, no Twitter, no streaming video. Updates came “War of the Worlds”-style, by radio through word of mouth. At East 14th Street: small plane, freak accident. Houston: jet plane, freak accident. Eighth Street: two jets, hijacking. At Washington Square, you saw something else.
From the top of Washington Square, the monument’s inner curve framed a Renaissance painting hellscape: The Twin Towers spewing ash-gray billows, cut by brilliant streaks of fire. The spotless sky made it look closer than it was and there was an electric giddiness in the crowd. We were too far and low-tech to see bodies fall from upper floors.
A dozen blocks further south, a crowd filled an intersection at Houston Street, spreading out to store windows. In the standing, swaying, talking crowd, I took photos with an actual camera: a compact, chrome point-and-shoot Canon Elph ET, with a 23mm lens and 4x6 aspect ratio. You dropped the film cartridge in the back and retrieved it after exposing the roll. I was doing this at one point when, after slapping the back shut, I looked up.
I blinked twice at what I saw. A sudden bloom of orange, 20 stories from the top. I started to talking my girlfriend as I shot. “What’s — that’s,” I said, eye in the viewfinder. “I mean, that’s really — Oh!”
In two days, journalists would report that what happened south of Vesey Street looked “just like a Hollywood disaster movie.” This is true except for those details that make it utterly, existentially wrong.
I don’t mean this morally — that films are fake and this is real, these were people not actors, how dare you. I mean it experientially. I say it having witnessed both the event and disaster films, as well as films of this disaster. Within an hour, I was watching them with everyone else, hourly on several channels, and feeling much less than I was meant to. But I spent a solid decade trying to unsee what was against that stark blue sky just before 10 am.
No one in the intersection with me saw a disaster film. I don’t know what they saw, but it wasn’t a film. This film had no frame around it. This film happened just once. This film had no teaser preview outside our nightmares.
Here’s what I saw: a rift in the sky, breach in reality. This is not exaggeration, it’s reporting. An explosion near the top gets answered by something below our sightline. Then, what you see makes your guts drop right out. A 1,000-foot fixture in reality’s topography becomes a waterfall of glass and steel. Then a column of umber smoke. In two-point-five seconds. The first half I see through my eyes. The rest through a viewfinder, where it remains, in perspective, proof it’s not what I thought I saw.
Twenty years before this, I’d to terrorize myself listening to a song I found on the left-hand dial, “O Superman” by Laurie Anderson. This minimalist synthesizer pop song became a horror film when the genderless vocoder speak-sings “This is the hand, the hand that takes. Here come the planes.” That’s what I saw that day, for a split-second: the hand that takes. I saw a malevolent god — always there but never seen — reach out a massive paw and slam a skyscraper to the ground.
My photos made a sequence. Exploding tower. Shorter tower. Tower being swallowed up in smoke. Thick black-umber column. Broken faces. Welling eyes. Hands over mouths. Hugs, cinches, clutches, spouses, friends, strangers. My first photo is of two thousand people dying, 20 blocks away. The others are of witnesses: sobbing, howling, collapsing. One raising a hand to sky. Another putting hers to her mouth. The last photo on that cartridge is a striking young woman, 30, her face much closer than the others, one hand to her mouth. Tiny brilliant rivulets along her fine features. Aqua eyes gaze off toward a colossal afterimage, now just out of shot.
This was my girlfriend at the time, the photographer and filmmaker Cat Del Buono, and she knew what she just saw. She said she saw a thousand human deaths. We turned away, aghast, ashamed, and joined the slow-moving current of people heading north, in an eerie quiet.
We regained Washington Square, we weren’t halfway across the plaza, the crowd beyond obscured by trees, when this crowd’s sound hits us. A human sound I’ll never forget. One I’d only heard in nightmares. I had these nightmares in the Cold War ’80s, when kids my age were catching on that they could vanish in a mushroom cloud. I never saw the cloud in my dreams, I just heard the human sound of people who did: a wail-gasp-scream somehow compressed into a single noise. One survivor of the Titanic, on a lifeboat when the ship’s hull split and plunged remaining passengers into the sea, compared the sound they made to a home run in Yankee Stadium, only different. That’s the sound you heard on New York’s streets when the second tower fell.
My friend R was 54 at the time, and worked as satellite coordinator for one of the three major news networks, gathering raw video and audio feeds — all one-beat scenes — and beaming them out to the network’s 300 U.S. and foreign news affiliates. By the night of September 11, he was receiving hundreds of clips from random people whose cameras were trained on the doomed towers. By the time the second jet that hit the North tower, every camera in the Tri-State Area was there to capture the spectacle.
By October, R’s feeds were coming from cameras set up atop buildings surrounding the former World Trade Center: fixed and trained down on the crater’s active worksite. It was a non-stop feed of hardhats in a construction pit: hoisting iron beams, cutting them up, hauling them out , spot-lit but unobserved. Every so often, one or two hardhats would stop work, straighten up to stand, and wave the others over. They’d gather around the unearthed body or body part, remove their hardhats, stand still for a moment, then go back to work. R is among their very few eyewitnesses to these silent, spontaneous memorials. Today, he describes an internal shift he felt watching them in terms of media technology.
“Digital is one step removed from being alive,” he told me. “Analog is alive — it’s up and down, up and down. Digital just streams numbers.” Each time he saw the men stop work to gather and stand vigil, some part of his internal fabric re-knitted itself. “It’s like I regained a connection to organic human life.”
In 1945, scientists produced a light in New Mexico’s desert that had never been seen on Earth. It was “golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue,” one witness, a US Army general, remembered, with a “clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined.” Movie cameras there shot plenty of color footage. It’s just that their subject destroyed the film. Environmental physicist Jack Aeby produced the one successful color image, shooting with a 35mm Perfex 33, on Ansochrome film, at 1/100, f4. His photograph shows a brilliant orange carnation blooming at the bottom of a 50-gallon oil drum.
Despite 10,000 times more witnesses, many shooting color video, the destruction of the Twin Towers was, in its way, unfilmable. All these clips, from so many different angles, gesture at an event that’s defined by singularity. It happened once, in human time, its meaning dissolves in the infinite loop. WW II’s most famous photographer, Robert Capra, came upon piles of naked bodies at a newly liberated concentration camp. He didn’t take any pictures because, he said, the sites “were swarming with photographers. And every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect.” Capra was a professional war photographer. The World Trade Center attacks were filmed by amateurs.
In a way, every video clip eroded it a bit more as it spread spectacle around the world. The contrast was so stark within the city: inside, TV showed one reality. Outside, the air choked us with another. It’s a bitter, complex smell of some impossibly massive modern failure: concrete, glass, steel, granite, and other unburnable substances burning. Melted transformers, turbines, drywall, paper, human bones, hair. I know why people talk about the permeating smell, that pungent metallic odor with notes of synthetic chemicals and burning peat. It united us all and was gone by winter, unsearchable on YouTube. My TV news friend R went to the site two weeks after September 11, bringing a 35-millimeter Canon EOS to document it. When he came out of that subway, the wind shifted and he was hit by smell so intense that it permanently damaged his olfactory organs. He’s still largely unable to smell.
I’d lived in the city for nine years prior to September, 2001. I only felt like a New Yorker that October, and, in some says, I’ve felt less and less American ever since. Five years later, I no longer had to suppress a snarl at visiting relatives who said “Ground Zero” was their top tourist site. But I’m still amazed at how quickly, appallingly, the media branded that tragedy into a three-digit tagline, effectively made it a corporate sponsor. The one that brought the world U.S. military hellstorms for the next 20 years. Branded content of a digital world, “9/11” produced all-too-analog wars very few digital Americans either heard or saw.
Any talismanic significance that “9/11” might have had was lost on me nine years ago, when my wife and I had our first and only child. When she went into labor, it was unclear if his birthday would be the 10th or 11th. A friend asked if I was glad it was the 10th, I realized I didn’t care. No tragedy gets to own a date.
As far as I know, my son hasn’t seen “9/11” video coverage on YouTube. But when he does, I can’t imagine what sense it will make. How shocked can he be by the collapse of a tower he’s never seen just standing? To him, they’re only jpegs, mpegs, gifs, stories. For me, they were irrefutable parts of hard reality. Their construction began a year before I was born.
Last night, I scrolled through back through the massive cache of digital images I have stored in what’s too aptly called “the cloud.” I watched my wife get younger, foxier. I watched our son get smaller, chubbier — now a kindergartner, now a baby — and then softly vanish. All these images of my former life seemed continuous with present day: all in the same bright, saturated glow of backlit digital photography. Then I hit the scans of analog photos, shot 20 years ago, which is when life became a dream.
Also published on medium.com