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This is another installment of the world’s premier

Post the first: Dave Hickey, That Queer, by

The original title of my book on Dave Hickey was Dave Actually. This was suggested by Dave himself, though he later disavowed it, telling me that I should instead call the book Laptop (?!). Everyone else other than me disliked Dave Actually, but I still think it was a good title—just a stupid goof on Love Actually but also a statement about earnestness, love, culture, pleasure, and lack of pretension. I fancied that it even went so far around the bend of corny it came back around to hipness. Oh well. I lost that battle, as I lost the battle for the title of my first book, Exit Right, which I wanted to call (wait for it) … Eminent Americans.

Publishers always want the books they’re publishing to sell lots of copies, so they push you to give them titles that are clear about what the book is about and not overly gnomic, ironic, or deep cut referential. If the titles aren’t clear, the thinking goes, then you can’t trust the readers to know whether to buy them or not. I find this reasoning persuasive if you accept the premise that a given book has a decent chance of being purchased by readers. My books were clearly never going to sell, however, so it wasn’t obvious to me why we should subordinate other aims to the fantasy of great sales. What my books more plausibly might do, instead, was elicit reviews in high prestige publications and gain notice from the kinds of people (high prestige writers and editors) whose esteem I valued both on its own terms and for what it might do for me down the road career-wise. From that perspective, better to have a title that signals coolness or hipness or inscrutability than a less cool title that marginally increases the likelihood of sales. 

The Invisible Dragon is relevant, here, because the original edition of the book has long been my gold standard when it comes not just to cool title but to the whole gestalt of what a book-as-object can be. It is just about the coolest book you can imagine, with its matte off white cover and its smudgy Ed Ruscha image of the L.A. County Museum on fire and its title enveloped by a lick of dragon flame. Is it a chapbook? A manifesto? Was it printed in small batches by a collective of bearded ex-art school students who constructed their own printing press from recycled bicycles? Yes? No? All of the above? 

The book was so cool that when it came out, it wasn't even available for sale. Its whole first run was sent, gratis, to the thousand or so people who subscribed to Art issues., the hipster indie L.A. journal for which Hickey wrote most of his best essays. If you weren’t already in the know, in other words, you couldn’t even get your hands on it. After the book went viral (in an early '90s, art world sort of way), Art issues impresario

The title I finally landed on for my Hickey book, Far From Respectable, isn’t bad. It’s taken from one of my favorite passages in Dragon, when Dave is talking about the effect of exhibiting Robert Mapplethorpe’s seamy X Portfolio photos on the “ice-white walls” of institutional settings. Dave writes:

I saw Robert's X images for the time scattered across a Pace coffee table at a cocaine dealer's penthouse on Hudson Street. In that context they were just what they would be -- a sheaf of piss-elegant snapshots, photos the artist made when he wasn't making art -- noir excursions into metaphysical masochism and trading cards for cocaine. Handsome and disturbing images, to be sure, but as long as they remained in private circulation, cladestine artifacts, and peripheral texts at best--like Joyce's diaries or Delcroix's erotica. Today the images in the X Portfolio are "fine photographs" and better for it. They as authorized images alongside their pornological predecessors and ancillaries, and that work is richer and rougher for their company.

Even so, hanging there on the wall amid their sleeker siblings, these images seem contingent, their artistic legitimacy so newly won that you almost expect to see sawdust on the floor as you would at Spike. They seem so obviously to have come from someplace else, down by the piers, and to have brought with them, into the world of ice-white walls, the aura of knowing smiles, bad habits, and rough language in smoky, crowded rooms with raw brick walls, sawhorse bars, and hand-lettered signs. They may be legitimate, but like my second cousins Tim and Duane, who have paid their debt to society, they are still far from respectable.

The phrase works as a title for my book because it has a nice rhythm to it and is in fact more or less apt for the subject. Dave has been at times embraced, and at other times rejected, by the same types of institutions that have embraced and rejected Mapplethorpe. It’s a good title, then, but not a great one. There’s no mystery or withholding to it, no strategic absence onto which the reader can project his fantasies. It also fails to pull off what is perhaps the key rhetorical maneuver in Dave's arsenal, which is to emit a scent of roughness and disreputability in prose that is staggeringly controlled. Look at the excerpt above, which is so “piss elegant,” so artful in its syntax and adjectivally precise, and yet also leaves in its wake an almost sense memory of seediness and grime: the cocaine dealer’s penthouse on Hudson, the sawdust on the floor at Spike, the rime of grease on Tim and Duane’s mullets.

When I survey the major work that’s been done on Dave over the past few years—my book, this new edition of Dragon, Jarrett Earnest’s sort of (not really) review of my book in The New York Review of Books, Julia Friedman’s collections of Dave’s social media posts, my essay on Dave's Austin art gallery of the late 1960s, the Substack colloquium of which this essay is a part—I see two things that are ostensibly but not really in tension. One is people making rival and irreconcilable claims on Dave and what he represents (I think Jarrett and I, in particular, have very different notions of how Dave should be remembered). The other is a shared urgency about liberating Dave’s work, and to a lesser extent Dave himself, from the representation into which he has been corralled by his critics, and into which he far too often corralled himself. We’re trying to break down, overwrite, or evade the story of Dave as macho asshole cowboy, Dave as conservative, Dave as Las Vegas high roller and endless cigarette smoker and compulsive consensus poker.

Dave was all those things to some extent, of course, but the best of his writing, and in fact most of his writing, was of a different register. It was elegant and musical and often quite delicate. When it was masculine, it was often in the service of the feminine (John writes about this in his recent post) and the queer (Gary’s argument, from which Blake dissents) and in active opposition to what he saw as the veiled misogyny and homophobia of much of contemporary art criticism and art history. When it was extolling hard drugs and rough sex and noisy rock and roll, the prose was tight and clean and on the beat. As philosopher Alexander Nehamas once said to me about Dave, “he was one of the masters of nonfiction prose of our time.”

This is what can be so difficult to convey about Dave, despite all the talk that has circulated around him since Dragon was first published in 1993. Because he was so brilliant at saying things that took the form of arguments—about art, music, sports, culture, politics, beauty, literature, celebrity, fashion, and surfing—discussion around him has tended to gravitate in one of two directions. One is toward his persona, the hard-smoking Vegas cowboy critic brand. The other is toward those arguments. Was he right or wrong? In what ways? What does it mean for Where We Are Now?

The first approach seems pretty shallow to me, though certainly Dave is partially to blame for it. It’s the writing the matters, not the dude who wrote it. The second I think is entirely valid. He made really interesting arguments, arguments whose force hasn’t diminished all that much, if at all, in the last few decades. We absolutely should take seriously his critiques and explore their flaws and nuances, nooks and crannies. What both approaches obscure, however, is what seems to me by far the most important aspect of his writing, which is that it is extraordinary to read.

This is evident in long, wonderful stretches of Invisible Dragon, but it’s in his subsequent book, Air Guitar, that you get Dave at his most electric. I always return, in particular, to “My Weimar,” his short essay on professor Walther Volbach, who fled the Nazis and ended up teaching theater to undergraduates at Texas Christian University.

Consider this passage that begins with Dave’s memory of the day when Volbach brought an old pre-war pistol to class, leaving it on the table in front of him, its muzzle pointed at the students:

The pistol lay there on the table throughout the afternoon. About halfway through class, however, Volbach noticed that the muzzle was pointed in our direction. He shook his head, as if to reprove himself for his carelessness. Then he reached down and carefully turned the weapon so the muzzle pointed out the window—and that was just perfect. 

It was a piece of theater, of course. Volbach taught his Weimar seminar every year, so he could hardly have been surprised to find that pistol in the box. Still, I don’t think we cared or even noticed, because it was such great theater—that ominous German firearm in that beige American classroom. It gave you the idea of art for high stakes, and I cannot think of Weimar today without calling up the image of that gun. The physical fact of that pistol on the table opened a window onto a world of unimaginable glamour and evil that I would not rediscover until I wandered into Warhol’s Factory one afternoon, looking to cop some speed.

Volbach’s seminar, however, took place before that, during the heyday of Hemingway, Pollock, and Kerouac. So, the issue in those days was the conflict between masculinity and commerce—between the tragic condition of the heroic artist and the ludicrous spectacle of the effeminate sell-out. The issue kept coming up in the seminar because a couple of fledgling Brandos were as deeply concerned with their putative masculinity as my sculpture professor, Mr. Olivadetti, who reminded us about once a week that “an artist—a real artist—is not a god-damned sissy!” I found this daunting: As the product of smash-mouth Texas, I was looking forward to a long career of unrepentant sissydom. 

Thankfully, old Volbach set things straight, casually dismissing all this heroic posturing as misty bullshit. “These muscle-bound whiners,” he said, “they do not want to make the new world. They want their power back. They want to turn back the clock. You should not let them do it.” He then proceeded to explain to us that, in case we hadn’t heard, there had been two great wars in this century, and a number of smaller ones, into which most of the able-bodied and apparently heterosexual men in Europe and the United States had been drafted—excepting those in critical industries, in government, or in education. Moreover, he pointed out, the arts—theater, dance, music, painting, and sculpture—were not critical industries, nor were they government, nor were they education. They were little businesses, so all the heterosexual men were drafted out of them. “So who is left?” Volbach asked, thrusting his finger into the air and swaying behind it, “Queers and women and a bunch of old Jews! Suddenly, they are the arts! They do a little business in the night. They get paid a little for it and do their best, while the government and the goyim are out killing one another.”

“Then the war is over, and all the big, brave soldiers come home—feeling very angry and very heroic—and what do they find? They find the world has changed. This was true in Weimar and it is true again today. All these soldiers look around and see the culture of their nation being run by effeminate, Semitic, commercial pansies! And they are shocked! For the first time in history, the songs we sing, the pictures we see, and the plays we attend are not being dispensed by over-educated, Aryan muscle-boys, and these muscle-boys are very upset. But what can they do? Business is business, after all. Even Aryan muscle-boys believe in that, and as long as pictures are being bought and plays are being attended and songs are being sung . . . ?”

“Well, you might think they can’t do anything,” Volbach said slyly, “but you would be wrong. Because the muscle-boys still control the government and the universities. The professors and the bureaucrats, they were not drafted. They are cozy in their little Bunde pleasing no one but themselves. And they tell themselves that even though business is business, culture is culture too, and culture is public business. So all the muscle-boy artists and writers, they will become professors and the darlings of professors, and they will teach the young to revere their pure, muscle-boy art, because it is good for them, and they will teach women and Jews and queers to make this muscle-boy art, too. And it will be very pure, because they are muscle-boys and they don’t have to please anyone. So there will be no cabaret, no pictures, no fantasy or flashing lights, no filth or sexy talk, no cruelty, no melodies, no laughter, no Max Reinhardt, no Ur-Faust, no A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And nobody will love it. And nobody will pay money to own it or to see it, but that will not matter.”

“The government will pay for it, and the universities, because paying your own money for culture, and making your own money out of it, this is a Jew thing, a queer thing, and a silly woman thing. It means you are not satisfied with what the professors provide, with what the Reichsminister tells you is good. It means you want more and that is unpatriotic . . .” Here Volbach paused for a moment, and even though I hadn’t said a single word, he fixed his gaze on me and continued. “So all you Aryan muscle-boys down there at the end of the table, Don’t be Aryan muscle-boys! I have seen enough official culture. I will teach you how to hit your marks and set the lights and make the tempo float. The rest you will have to learn from women and queers—out in the dark. Also, don’t be too artistic to count your own receipts. Also, carry your pistol. There are thugs out there.”

You don’t have to agree with Volbach/Hickey’s take on art and politics and muscle-boys, of course, but I’m not sure how you can read it and not want to spend more time with the writer who drafted it.

Back when I was title hunting for the book on Dave, I remember scouring the essay for potential titles: “Don’t Be an Aryan Muscle-Boy,” “A Little Business in the Dark,” “I Have Seen Official Culture,” “A Long Career of Unrepentant Sissydom.”  Nothing quite worked, but it felt like the right title was somewhere in this region where all these ideas and history and poetry collided. 

I haven’t quite given up, actually. There’s a small chance that I’ll someday sell enough copies of the hardcover version of my book to justify a paperback edition, at which point there’s a chance (a small one, I realize) that I can sub in a new title. So suggestions welcome.

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