excess and orbison
Music: Channel 12 News (Phoenix NBC Affiliate)
Yesterday I gave a talk to some folks from the ASU communication department/school, mostly grad students from Dan's rhetorical criticism class and a number of faculty. I think it went ok, although I'm one of those folks who usually hasn't much of a clue until weeks later whether or not I looked or sounded too much like a fool. I'm not great at reading unfamiliar groups. Regardless, the questions afterward were excellent and interesting; different groups of people have different interests and concerns, and I heard some new ones. I gave the "love is for shit, and therefore, so is communication" talk, and one woman asked about the role of narcissism in love.
"It's all about me," I said in jest, and then went on to explain the necessity of a modicum of narcissism for "self" and that love was fundamentally narcissistic: I want to be loved, my lover wants to be love, and it is the collision of two self-interested people that becomes "love," at least from a Lacanian vantage. I then continued that psychosis is when that narcissism becomes too strong and represents a regress to primary identification, and so on. It then donned on my how terribly narcissistic/psychotic the presentation probably seemed, as well as the overly-loving thank-you's and shout outs with which I opened my talk. If paranoia's motto is "everything relates to me," then worry about my own excesses must seem classically, narcissistically, neurotic.
Now, with that set up, I can move to discuss the "not-me" of yesterday, the Roy Orbison tribute concert. Cheree, her husband Peter, and I had a marvelous dinner at an Irish pub, and then made our way to the impressively designed Tempe Center for the Arts for the tribute. A rockabilly band, the Truly Lover Trio, played about an hour or so set of Orbison tunes, and then some "awards" were given, and then there was a commissioned symphonic medley of Orbison's music. The evening was interesting, but at times Lynchian in its excess: there were opening speeches, then more speeches, lots of university send-ups, then speeches. Video montages were shown, then some speeches. A lifetime achievement award was given posthumously to Roy, and his widow (apparently a powerful executive in the music businesses) was given a "legacy" award for keeping Orbison's music in the public eye through remasters, DVD documentary projects, and so forth. Then a dean announced that a beetle from south Asia was named after Orbison and an artwork of the beetle was presented to the widow. Then there were more speeches.
I remember saying to Cheree that this was obviously not about Roy Orbison, but the center that sponsored the event. The speeches and wind-ups were longer than the actual thing we were supposedly there to see---which is fine, because I understand the need to plea for more donations, to shout-out to donors, and so on. Even so, I remember whispering to Cheree that anyone who was not an academic in the audience would have their stereotypes of academic long-windedness and self-importance confirmed.
Orbison, of course, was excessive when he sung, so this all makes sense in a sense. Today is the third and final day of the tribute and symposium. There are a number of "seminars" on the ASU campus about Roy and his music. I am giving a fifteen minute talk on the excess of Roy's voice, the "sublime wretchedness" of the grain, as I put it (think objet a). I framed my paper more as a tribute and personal reflection, which is exactly the right frame if last night was any measure.
"Excess" was yesterday's theme---that of my own, overly dramatic and at time obsequious presentation, and that of others. I am ambivalent about this excess, which is related to another good question I got yesterday: "is kitsch a strategy for combating the culture industries?" Is embracing the overly sentimental a way in which one can embody an ironic stance that helps to create some (critical) distance between self and object? As I strung out the answer by thinking aloud, I arrived at Benjamin's important observation, that fascism is perilously close to kitsch and the obsequious brand of excess it asks one to embrace.
Hence my ambivalence: where do we locate sincerity in excess, the appropriate balancing point between me-ness and you-ness? Can in be located? Can the (academically) excessive be hospitable?