The Devil and Daniel Johnston set for release on Sony Pictures Classics?!?!

it's brutal but there's no shortcut --- art is alchemy with real tears. even stage tears aren't gonna convince you unless the actor knows from sorrow ----

I am all for mental health and not gonna romanticize madness or creativity either one but there's clearly a connection in terms of dissociation from shared reality --- a creative mind is the tightrope maybe and madness is what happens when you fall. Some people walk it more gracefully than others and we're impressed, we think: damn that dude is slick. --- but DJ is slick too even though he's playing a much different hand than say -- shit I dont know --- Gershwin.

Seems to me that artistry and madness are pretty commonly associated --- and that this association cuts a pretty wide swath across eras and cultures --- it's a big fat cliche even. and that might make it massively boring but probably not massively wrong.

The apparent similarity, in fact, might be as simple as the idea that contemporary art creates a space in which people can act out processes that resemble madness -- a space in which those processes are deemed appropriate and interesting and controlled in their meaning, and therefore not actually "mad." A space in which mad acts are allowed (and presumed) to signify.

Part of that deal would be the assumption that every mad act on an artist stage really does signify. We make this assumption all the time, despite the fact that it's a massive one and we don't always have good evidence to back it. When a rock star smears himself with peanut butter on stage, we like to imagine that he means to signify something -- something intentional enough to differentiate his act from the homeless schizophrenic smearing himself with peanut butter on the street outside. Even more simply: it's art when an actor plays Napoleon, madness when a layman thinks he is Napoleon.

So: it's art when a singer deliberately inserts the sound of suffering and tears into his song. But what about when the suffering it uncomfortably real? This would explain our discomfort with people like Daniel Johnston -- or, as a better example, Wesley Willis. With Willis on a stage, we are confronted with just how unable we are to differentiate the intentional, signifying actions of art-space from the diseased, non-signifying actions of mental illness. And once we start dwelling on that fact, we begin to realize that the same is true on different levels of every artist, right up to the most canny and "intentional" among them (Madonna! Bowie!). With something like our tears and suffering, there must obviously be a spectrum -- how do we know, when a soul singer wails, how much of it is artifice and how much of it is pain? At what point does it become too much pain for us to be entirely comfortable with? It's in the mid-ground where it seems most curious: how much of what we enjoy about Iggy Pop comes from his deliberate artistic intentions, and how much of what we enjoy about him comes from personal characteristics that could be seen as "problems?"

Rock in particular fucks this up, because while the definition of art I'm describing here involves its being ARTificial, rock is filled with the pretense of reality -- it puts incredible value on authenticity. It frequently asks that the things expressed aspire to be non-artifical, lived experience, actual speech that's tenable outside the artspace as well as within it.

One way out of this worry is to decide that "intention" is not strictly at issue. If an artist's actual "problems" (dumbness, delusions, etc.) are part of what makes the music work -- and not even through any informed decision on the artist's part -- we can let that go: we decide that the important part is simply that the music expresses something. All we ask is that what's expressed is not "evil" -- that it's an honest and informative expression of what life is like for a person with qualities both good and bad, including things like dumbness or delusions.

There are situations in which that option runs into problems, but Daniel Johnston is not one of them. For one thing, it's easy to identify the intentionality in his work -- like I said before, he's musically skilled and informed, and his lyrics have a structural coherence. He makes precise, non-sloppy points. For another thing, his songs seem fundamentally generous and "good." It's actually somewhat rare that what he presents to us seems like a full-on account or product of mental illness. But in the rare cases that it happens, I think we can take that route where we ignore intentionality a bit: they're honest (and technically informed!) accounts of what it's like for Daniel to be mentally ill, the same way our songs will be accounts of what it's like to not be mentally ill.

I don't really feel like following that one through anywhere, actually.

But I will note that while I think there's a lot of practical stuff to think about in terms of Daniel Johnston and his relationship with his fans, most of this stuff I'm talking about here strikes me as totally off the mark with him. Like I said, his songs make sense, and people appreciate them in exactly the way they're intended -- when he writes a sad song, it makes us sad. The intentionality is all there -- it's not as if he's writing sad songs and we find them funny. He succeeds in communicating.

And to be honest, Daniel's way of seeing the world is not significantly more different than mine than that of certain gangsta M.C.s or religious singers or etc. -- in other words, the emotions he communicates are not particularly foreign.

1) def need to be careful about reading "art" as an abbreviation of "artifice" ---- I mean the latin word means "skill" right? that whiff of deception that 'artifice' and 'artful' have isn't necessarily there in 'art' I don't think -----

2) yeah I'd say being appropriate and controlled is pretty much exactly what makes you sane ---- and money helps too. mental health is about socialization --- you can be as nuts as you want and as long as you keep on washing and making it to work/school, paying your bills, not scaring anybody too much then nobodys gonna sit you down and open up a Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ----- and if you have plenty of money then well shit, you're just Eccentric ---

3) I know that in the debates around here rock is supposed to have some special connection to an authenticity ethic but I mean shit ---- as you've sort of suggested here --- take a look at rap!

I mean in the original jazz singer movie the heroine falls for Al cause he's not like the other singers.... why? because he has a "tear in his voice"!

4) It'd be dumb to say that all good art comes from pain. There's happy shit too ---- but that comes from innocence, right? I just can't shake the feeling that there's something sacrificial about that shit too.

5) anyway I think good art is always high-stakes. and the stakes are high with daniel johnston ---- we shudder for him but he wins a lot!

I just saw this. I drive past a big "Hi, How Are You?" frog every day on the way to work, but I'd never heard Johnston's music before seeing the doc. Incredible stuff.

Louis Black came off looking like a clueless old hipster. It's depressing to know he's the guy that runs my alt weekly.

When a rock star smears himself with peanut butter on stage, we like to imagine that he means to signify something -- something intentional enough to differentiate his act from the homeless schizophrenic smearing himself with peanut butter on the street outside. Even more simply: it's art when an actor plays Napoleon, madness when a layman thinks he is Napoleon.

So: it's art when a singer deliberately inserts the sound of suffering and tears into his song. But what about when the suffering it uncomfortably real? This would explain our discomfort with people like Daniel Johnston -- or, as a better example, Wesley Willis. With Willis on a stage, we are confronted with just how unable we are to differentiate the intentional, signifying actions of art-space from the diseased, non-signifying actions of mental illness. And once we start dwelling on that fact, we begin to realize that the same is true on different levels of every artist, right up to the most canny and "intentional" among them (Madonna! Bowie!).

This is Matthew, Mark, Luke & John, btw.

that's a very witty way to say otm, big hoos

i do what i can

<i>Louis Black came off looking like a clueless old hipster. It's depressing to know he's the guy that runs my alt weekly.</i>

More black people and less white college dudes with guitars on the cover of the Chronicle please.

Speeding Motorcycle
A musical drama based on Daniel's music by Jason Nodler
at the ZACH Theatre, Austin, Texas, Feb 14 - Apr 13

totally going to this

This was actually disappointing. No mention of the Kids soundtrack, anti-semitism, Mark Linkous-produced 'comeback' album, etc, very light on the Jad Fair stuff, too many detours into personal stuff that ultimately didn't amount to much. I don't really give a shit about K MCarty or Louis Black.

aesthetic masterpiece >>>>>>>>> complete biography

Yes, but was it an aesthetic masterpiece? Really?

yeah. i don't think it's that it's dissatisfying because it omits parts of the story, just that it doesn't link everything together or deal with everything "holistically". it's a really difficult story and fundamentally difficult to reconcile the art with some of the biography (like the woman jumping out of the window), and i don't think the film ever got there. it's obviously good in some sense, and is ridiculously privileged in being a documentary that actually has handheld, subject-authored footage of a lot of the main points of the story to call on (ie going missing in ny &c). just a difficult story i think.

also it kills me how great, how absolutely enduringly zaprudingly classic, super eight blow ups look on screen, whenever you see people old home movies etc. how anyone can object to dubbed lo-tec film-shot footage mystifies me.