What If Kanye Did It?
Because of my abiding interest in our nation’s youth, I was really happy to meet Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig and his girlfriend Sara last month in San Francisco.
Here is a picture where you can see how charming they looked, with their scarves, and also their entrance stickers from the Asian Art Museum. That is a Polo logo on Koenig’s sweater, BTW… but before you go starting the hateration machine on him I just want you to stop for a minute and ask yourself: WIKDI?
We met on a rainy day in the Mission in an under-heated café. At least, I was really cold (and so they must have been, I guess, or they would have removed their scarves).On the subject of music criticism, Koenig—who might actually start a music magazine himself, in collaboration with a member of n+1 magazine’s indefatiguable team of former interns—mentioned having read a blog entry to the effect that “just as European colonialists plundered Africa for its natural resources, so does Vampire Weekend plunder Africa for their musical tradition.” Koenig was thinking of writing them an indignant letter. (I suggested he could attach photographs of the emaciated Africans they keep working 17-hour shifts in the basement, producing funky beats.)
Impelled by a morbid curiousity, I later Googled “’Vampire Weekend’ AND apartheid” and there really is such a blog, called Neon Hustle:
…In this way, the re-appropriation of multicultural influences in faddish art rock trends may recall the legacy of western imperialism that stripped the African continent of its resources, precluding the later development of any sort of stabilizing infrastructure and precipitating decades of civil ethnic conflict.
I thought this was really funny, in a way reminiscent of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “Conversation with a Tax Inspector about Poetry”:
Citizen tax collector,/ honestly,
the poet/ spends a fortune on words…
Suppose/ only half a dozen/ unheard-of rhymes
were left,/ in, say, Venezuela.
And so/ I’m drawn/ to North and South.
I rush around/ entangled in advances and loans.
Citizen!/ Consider my traveling expenses…(Trans. Max Hayward, George Reavey)
Damn you, Mayakovsky, plundering the Venezuelans’ rhymes (and then trying to get out of paying taxes)! Steal their cacao and give them the flu, while you’re at it!
Anyway… there was one thing about this otherwise really pleasant coffee that did make me feel kind of sorry, namely: after the first forty minutes or so, Sara (a senior at Columbia) began to look desperately, inconsolably bored. Whenever I managed to come up with a question to ask her—invariably, these were boring questions, like whether she was writing a senior thesis—she would wordlessly shake her head, with a look of deep resignation. I think at one point she was sending text messages under the table.
I was truly moved by this boredom, which somehow had nothing impolite or ostentatious about it. (It was also very touching to see how quickly she cheered up when it was time to go—that’s when I took the picture.) I found myself remembering, for the first time in ages, how profoundly bored one can be at age twenty-one, and I was filled by gratitude that this is apparently one of the capacities that diminishes with age.
I’m not saying I never get bored now; just the other day I was waiting for a big pot of water to boil, while listening to an NPR interview with a journalist who had recently overcome “major depression” (”How did it feel to have major depression?” / “Well, it felt… bad”), and I was really bored. But it wasn’t the visceral, incredulous, “Am I still alive?” feeling of boredom that I remember from my youth.
I even felt an impulse to tell Sara: “Don’t worry—life will get better! It isn’t a long series of coffees with obscure writers!” I didn’t follow this impulse, partly in fear of sounding patronizing, and partly because there really is no good way of telling someone: “I’m sorry you seem to be so bored.”
I am reminded now of an anecdote relayed to me by the literary historian Luba Golburt, who taught a seminar at Berkeley last semester on Boredom in Russian literature (they read Oblomov). The end-of-class evaluation included the question: “What was the most important thing you learned in this class?” Golburt’s young pupils provided such touching answers! I don’t remembered them exactly, but one was something like: “There are different ways of being bored, and different kinds of books you can write about it”; another: “Try as hard as you might, you can never escape boredom.”
Tags: comparative literature, Luba Golburt, Mayakovsky, music, n+1 interns, poetry, today's youth, Vampire Weekend
July 18th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Hi:
I think you might be interested in a website for a new novel Reconstructing Mayakovsky. Set in the future, the novel revisits the past to make sense of the chaotic present. Inspired by the life and writings of Mayakovsky, it imagines a future where tragedy and uncertainty have been erased through technology. Like the novel, the website uses “found” objects (sound, image, text) and combines elements of historical fiction, sci-fi, poetry and the detective novel to tell the story of Mayakovsky in a radically different way. Consider it, a novel of the future in both form and content. If you enjoy it, I hope you’ll share it with friends or on your blog. thanks.