The Books: Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader; “Your Shadow Is Scared of You: An Attempt Not to Be Frightened by Nico”, by Lester Bangs

Next up on the essays shelf:

Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader, by Lester Bangs

A gorgeous and crazy piece about Nico’s album The Marble Index. I am a huge Nico fan, and so is Lester, and her music destroys him, and he can’t figure out why, and he keeps going back to it, almost fearfully, trying to understand its power over him. But he doesn’t know what is happening. He is so confused by his strong reaction to Nico that he calls up a woman he once dated, once loved, and asks her to explain it for him. That’ll be the excerpt today.

Lester Bangs loved the women he loved. He references them all the time in his writing and if you read all of his stuff, you get to know their personalities. He writes about all of them with fondness. Not all men are like that. Many assume that they can’t learn anything from women’s perspective at all, as much as they love hanging out with us and sleeping with us and even loving us. But women sometimes pick up on stuff that men don’t, and vice versa. I love hearing “what it’s like” for men, and what they pick up on based on their experiences as, duh, men. It’s when women are left out of that same conversation, their contributions dismissed, or negated, when the male response to things is seen as “default” and women are, by their genitalia, deviant, that I get pissed. I resist biological determinism, of course I do. It has been used to keep women down. But sometimes, being a woman is different than being a man, and so you’ll pick up on things that menfolk won’t. Menfolk reading: I am not criticizing you personally. It is the set-up that I criticize, the forces at work in certain critical conversations where women are purposefully left out or sidelined. Moving on. Lester relied on the contributions from the women he loved and respected. For example, below: this “cool chick” on the phone talks about Nico in terms of sex, reproduction, wombs, eggs, embryos. I’m not saying a man couldn’t make those connections. But Lester obviously HADN’T and he listens, agog, to her treatise over the phone.

All of this makes me think of this phenomenal essay I came across last year written by a random woman on Goodreads, and it’s such a good essay that I have actually searched for this woman to see if she is writing elsewhere. So far, nothing has come up. She opens her essay with this sentence:

I am paralytically jealous of every ex-girlfriend Lester Bangs mentions in his writings. Every time he refers to “my ex” or “my girlfriend at the time” or “this woman I was dating,” I clench in longing fury as though he were my own husband, writing blatantly about his mistresses.

I adore her for this! In that essay, she references the Nico essay:

In an essay about Nico’s album The Marble Index, Bangs quotes at great length a letter his ex-girlfriend (the jealousy, it burns) wrote him about the album, and then says “she’s quite a rock critic, that ex-girlfriend of mine” (oh, it burns), “but that’s not why I loved her, nor is it why I had to go halfway around the world away from her to be able to write a song about her.” Bangs knows the rules of rock n roll. His talent may have been for writing essays, but you don’t write an essay about the woman you love but can’t be with because you’re a fuck-up or she’s a fuck-up or (best case scenario) both of you are fuck-ups. You write a song. But of course, no one ever heard the song he claims he wrote for her when he got halfway around the world. His essay on The Marble Index is in actuality what he wrote for the girl.

That mysterious Goodreads woman has written a long piece, but it’s well worth your time to read the whole thing.

The Nico piece was originally written in 1976 for a music magazine that promptly folded. I don’t think it was published elsewhere, or at least not during Lester’s lifetime. The publication date is 1983, and that’s after Lester died.

Lester Bangs opens this stunner of an essay by saying that an album came out in 1968 which “changed my life” and continues to do so. The rest of the essay is an attempt to put into words what that change was, how it still operates, and why he is so frightened of it, and frightened of Nico, to the point that he can barely put his feelings into words. She reveals something to him, something mournful and despairing. Her music certainly cracks open any artifice I may have going on. Lester Bangs refers to her songs as a “domain of ghosts” and that’s what they feel like to me. I often have to skip Nico’s stuff if it comes up on Shuffle. I really need to be in the mood to “go there”.

Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader, “Your Shadow Is Scared of You: An Attempt Not to Be Frightened by Nico” by Lester Bangs

I played The Marble Index for a woman I loved about a year ago. She had never heard about Nico, never heard of John Cale, never really heard the Velvet Underground except in the context of this whole humorous but basically jive media game I set up with Lou Reed for a while. She listened to the whole thing in a state of mesmerism bordering on shock, then said of Cale, “He built a cathedral for a woman in hell, didn’t he?” I called her up again today when I was fucked up about this article and she said, having still only heard it that one time, that she thought Nico was lost in her own blackness. I said, “But there’s a pearl in there.” I could hear her shudder over the phone, and suddenly she started talking very fast, and this is what she said as I madly pecked at my typewriter struggling to keep up: “Her whole body can glisten, she’s just like a seed, the original seed of intercourse, her whole body can shine like the sun hits the water with sprays of light, and yet she’s chosen to de-create from the surface to de-create again and again until the only message is ‘I’m the life force itself, I’m the will to live,’ a human embryo without hope of maturity, just sending signals. SHE’S IN THE WOMB, and what you call the pearl is just the pearl inside Mama’s belly, the pulsebeat. She’s accomplished de-creation: ‘Let me be behind everything human, oh god, the fact to catch a star in your eye or touch another human being, to feel another human being, to touch another universe is nothing, is just a frozen borderline’ – that there is no nexus, just retreat, until the frozen borderline, until all you feel is the white light of survival and the abyss is the ocean around her. It’s one teeny star, one microstar in the macrocosm of her body, and it’s all she’s chosen to have, she’s obliterated them all, stamped them out. She is a black hole in space with one point left. And then this is what she says: ‘It’s empty, it’s black, it’s alone, it’s a whirlpool, an eddy, it’s nothing,’ but it’s not nothing, it’s her that’s nothing. And that’s why she could mutilate an insect, because that little wasp or grasshopper had more life than she ever could at all. She wants to mutilate it too because it’s another act of negation, because it snuffs more light out of her star. She’s like Beckett’s play Breath, she’s trying to find the last breath so she can negate breath, love, anything. A soft look would kill her.”

She’s quite a rock critic, that old girlfriend of mine – sometimes she scares me even more than Nico. But then, I’m scared of everybody – I’m scared of you. My girlfriend’s eloquence was one reason I loved her almost from first sight, but not why I had to get halfway to the other side of the geographical world to be able to write a song that said how much I loved her. It was because of something obviously awry in me, perhaps healing, at least now confronting itself, which is one way to perhaps not rot. There’s a ghost born every second, and if you let the ghosts take your guts by sheer force of numbers you haven’t got a chance though probably no one has a right to judge you either. (Besides which, the ghosts are probably as scared of you as you are of them.) Nico is so possessed by ghosts she seems like one, but there is rather the clear confrontation of the knowledge that she had to get that awfully far away from human socialization to be able to write so nakedly of her love for damn near anyone, and simultaneously and so crucially the impossibility of that love ever bearing fruit, not because we were born sterile but directly the opposite, that we come and grow ever fiercer into such pain that we could sooner eat the shards of a smashed cathedral than risk one more possibility of the physical, psychic, and emotional annihilations that love between two humans can cause, not even just cause but generally totally as a logical act of nature in its ripest bloom. Strange fruit, as it were. But only strange to those who would deny the true nature of their own flesh and spirit out of fear, which reminds me somehow that if you seek this album out you should know that this is a Catholic girl singing these songs, and perhaps her ultimate message to me was that the most paralyzing fear is not sin, not even the flight from the feared object/event/confrontation/who cares what – that the only sin is denial, you who would not only turn your eyes way from what you fear as I sometimes must turn my ears away from this album, but would then add injury to what may or may not be insult by asserting that it does not exist.