Never has disappointment felt so satisfying.
Like expecting a used single of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” in the mail, and meeting Keith Richards on the doorstep instead.
Last week, I contacted the former editor of a journal of “Literature and Rock & Roll,” called Radio Silence. I was trying to track down the third installment of a series of articles, “Origins of the Creative Class,” by the critic Scott Timberg.
Lo and behold the editor, a man who goes by the auspiciously rock-&-roll name, Mr. Stone, responded to my request. He graciously mailed me the entire run of Radio Silence—all three, 200-page copies, in print. They arrived on the doorstep this morning.
Timberg’s articles were nowhere to be found.
Apparently, the magazine’s output was more prodigious than my memory. I’d forgotten that many articles and issues were published online only, including Timberg’s.
But what a surrogate Gift.
In 1925, pioneering anthropologist Marcel Mauss wrote the foundational study of gift-giving practices, in an essay called The Gift (Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies). In cultures without markets or currency, Mauss noticed, the exchange of objects is what holds society together. Like the potlatch—where ritual giving, receiving, and reciprocating are the social glue of tribes in the Pacific Northwest.
In 2007, a culture critic named Lewis Hyde published his reinterpretation of Marcel Mauss’ essay, this time based on aesthetic practices. The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World—a “modern classic cherished by many of the great artists of our time.”
Hyde must’ve been onto something—his book was blurbed by wunderkind novelists like David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith, author Jonathan Lethem, and Margaret Atwood (creator of The Handmaid’s Tale), who wrote the foreword.
As the cover explains, “Lewis Hyde demonstrates how our society—governed by the marketplace—is poorly equipped to determine the worth of an artist’s work.”
So poorly equipped it will pay $6.6 million for this…
“…another way is possible: the alternative economy of the gift, which allows creations and ideas to circulate freely, rather than hoarding them as commodities”—or worse, NFTs.
This doesn’t mean artists shouldn’t be compensated for their work. It just means that the current model for artistic compensation is often a mysterious hoax (think of the random exorbitance of the Manhattan art market, or on the other end of the spectrum, paltry Spotify residuals). By “gifting” useful creations to the world, even for free, artists will eventually find an audience to determine what their work is worth. They may even pay good money to support it—the reason I support Substack authors when payment is optional.
Radio Silence is such a Gift. A labour of love, the people who created it worked mostly for free, for over three years. Last week, I paid thirty dollars for three print issues, while the editor went through the cost and trouble of expedited shipping.
Here are a few of the little-known artists and thinkers who contributed to Radio Silence, for free…
Three-time Grammy-winner Lucinda Williams, who wrote a memoir for issue no. 3.
Carrie Brownstein of Slater-Kinney, interviewing Daniel Handler, better known as A Series of Unfortunate Events author Lemony Snicket (aka my son’s favorite writer), who interviews the Portlandia star in return.
An interview with Ian MacKaye, founder of Fugazi and Minor Threat.
PEN/Faulkner Award-winner Tobias Wolff, in conversation with his brother Patrick (who I now know is a saxophonist and composer who toured with the Glenn Miller Orchestra).
An essay on Beyoncé and the 2008 Obama campaign by the first reviews editor of Rolling Stone, Greil Marcus.
A poem contributed by Paul Muldoon, Pulitzer Prize winner from Ireland.
A short story by David Ives, Broadway playwright.
An essay by Thao Nguyen, bandleader of Thao and The Get Down Stay Downs.
That’s less than half the contributors to the third issue alone, which also includes reprinted works—a poem by “Empress of the Blues” Bessie Smith, another by Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay, a short story by Willa Cather.
Each piece, new or old, is illustrated by artists who have designed posters and album covers for Sonic Youth, the Black Keys, and Flaming Lips.
Other issues include a conversation between Bruce Springsteen and U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky; the Poet Laureate of California, Dana Gioia, discussing Ray Bradbury; and his brother Ted discussing Robert Johnson.
Myla Goldberg, Tim Riley, Rick Moody, Kyle Morton, Edith Wharton, Edna St. Vincent Millay… et al.
And there were many, many more articles issued online, like Scott Timberg’s, now lost to an abandoned URL.
Having barely cracked the cover of the first print issue, I randomly turned to an essay by the guitarist of indie-pop duo the Submarines, writing about her great-grandparents, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
It was preceded by a rare version of a Fitzgerald short story, containing seeds of The Great Gatsby.
Not bad for a former bartender from Portland, Oregon—which, as the editor, Dan Stone told me, is where the magazine “has its roots.” (Though it flowered in Oakland, along the same shores as Rolling Stone.)
I know very little about Stone, other than that he somehow managed to pull together some incredible talent to create Radio Silence, and he’s very generous to people who inquire after it.
The opening editorial for issue no.1 may be the greatest overture in the annals of music journalism. (It soundly defeats Jann Wenner’s “It’s difficult to say what we are trying to do at Rolling Stone…sort of a magazine, sort of a newspaper. To describe it any further would sound like bullshit, and bullshit is like gathering moss.”)
Stone strikes up the first run of Radio Silence, as nonchalantly as the striking of a match: “One morning Gore Vidal and I drank scotch in his bedroom in the Hollywood Hills.”
The editor was there to interview the world-famous historian and literary talent about novelist Henry James, for the National Endowment for the Arts. But the two mostly ended up drinking Macallan 12 on ice, while Gore Vidal…
spent a good deal of the conversation trying to provoke me with ridiculous statements. (“Hemingway didn’t write any good novels, let alone great ones.”) He wore a bathrobe, huddled in an enormous recliner that filled the doorway of the room. I sat on the edge of his unmade bed with a shotgun mic.
For those unfamiliar with Gore Vidal, he’s one of the most colorful public intellectuals who’s ever lived—certainly in our time. As a case in point, take one of Vidal’s stranger projects, a frontrunner for the most unlikely film in the history of cinema—Caligula (1979).
Vidal wrote the screenplay, his cinematic history of Rome’s most decadent emperor. Malcolm McDowell (the A Clockwork Orange lead whose brother managed The Who) plays the title role, alongside Triple Crown winner Helen Mirren and Peter O’Toole.
The unlikely part? Caligula was produced by Bob Guccione, founder of Penthouse adult magazine. The film is 156 minutes of historical drama featuring unsimulated sex scenes with Penthouse Pets alongside Academy Award-winning actors, written by a renowned historian. (Vidal didn’t script the explicit sex, and withdrew his screenwriter credit when he realized his play had been turned into the highest-production porn film ever made).
After discussing Henry James with Dan Stone for the National Endowment for the Arts, Gore Vidal poured another scotch, and they watched the Democratic primary between Obama and Clinton on CNN.
At some point, CNN “switched to news of the recent inductees to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Gore had said he hated rock & roll, claiming to be too much of an elitist, but I ribbed him about it anyway, asking his opinion on that year’s inductees—Madonna, Leonard Cohen, John Mellencamp, and a few others. He grumbled into his scotch glass.”
“Later that day,” Stone continues, “I met with Aimee Mann”—the musician and Big Lebowski actress—“for an interview on Marilynn Robinson’s Housekeeping—a quiet, ethereal, and somewhat difficult novel.”
It’s all there—literature and rock & roll—shown, not told, in the first two paragraphs, before the editor names his subject. The high and low of it—Henry James and John Mellencamp. (Or if you prefer, Tony-winners and Penthouse Pets.)
“Simply put,” Stone reflects on his recollection of Gore Vidal, “I was discussing books with people who liked to read, but what I was often seeing was how their art was affected and inspired by genres not their own.” He points to Jonathan Lethem (the author who said, “Few books are such life-changers as The Gift”)—whose essays discuss topics as varied as Bob Dylan, Marlon Brando, and superheroes—as someone who demonstrates this variety of generic influences.
I’ve never bought into the argument that culture is either high or low. Pizza can be just as satisfying as foie gras. Our only gauges should be excellence and personal taste. I loved Vidal, and I loved listening to the Sex Pistols at high volume as I sped away from his house in a rental car. I started to imagine a place where these seemingly disparate parts of our culture could not only coexist, but converse. Radio Silence began to take shape.
To Dan Stone, Literature and Rock & Roll “felt like a natural pairing,” because “the traffic of inspiration and influence between the two genres has a long and important history.”
(A traffic longer than history itself. Language, as Scott Timberg and Literary Darwinists suggest, probably began as music.)
“But there are also fundamental differences that make the tension between them even more compelling,” Stone says.
A pop song is short and ephemeral. Though it has a mnemonic quality—a favorite song can bring back old memories years after the bloom is off—rock & roll is young at heart. Literature is for the ages, “a lodestar by which we might navigate our path over the passage of years”—over a lifetime, or several hundred lifetimes.
Both have the ability to collapse, or dilate, time.
As Stone’s favorite playwright (who would appear in a later issue of Radio Silence), David Ives once said:
A good rock & roll song can be three or four minutes long and when it’s over, if it’s been made right and played right, you feel like you’ve gotten in a bar fight, had a love affair, and ridden a convertible down Pacific Coast One on the most beautiful day of the year, all in three minutes… As far as I’m concerned, all plays, short or long, should aspire to the conditions of rock & roll, whose purpose is to make us aware of our mortality and the fact that we had better get with it before the song ends. Not a bad rule of thumb for art as a whole.
The opening salvo of Radio Silence aspires to the condition of rock & roll, and the magazine’s brief run is a reminder that we better get with it, “before the song ends.”
You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you Gift you need.