Great Jones Street

Great Jones Street

WHO IS HE?

Bucky

Wunderlick

Blackness is...

• Heavy
• Funky
• Fearsome
• The absence of whitness
• Bad?
• Deep

"Blackness is s street thing...it's more the history and the badness of the vibes. Black is badness in the best sense...you have to push through all that streetness and weight and terror..."- Azarian, pg 123

Violence

Government

drugs

• Travel
• "lost souls" (Opel)
• "bodiless" (Hanes)

By Don Delillo

"Things to be figured out...I went into the bahroom

And looked in the mirror, counting eyes, nostrils and teeth"

p. 177, "Buck, there's a craving in my breast for the uncharted territories of the human mind. Energy. I want to tap untapped fields of energy."

The super drug within the novel temporarily inhibits function of the language center of the brain. How do drugs that physically inhibit the body enhance, or "expand the territory,' of the mind? Or do they at all?

HANES, OPEL AND AZARIAN-LIVES SOLD FOR DRUGS

As a rockstar, Bucky is expected

to kill himself with drugs

The "product"

Bob Dylan

"submit all questions in dwiritn go tmy personal manager care of transparanoia inc rockerfeller center

Rockerfeller cene

NEW YORK, NEW YORK, NEW YORK, NEW YORK

The masses want the "mystery product"

knowing that it will turn them into

idiots

(cc) photo by Franco Folini on Flickr

(cc) photo by Metro Centric on Flickr

Productivity

Who/What is a product?

• CAPITALISM
• COMMERCIALISM
• PRODUCTIVITY
• BUILDING UP

Monarchial figures controlling the masses with drugs

Buddhism

Buddhism

"lamesary in Tibet"

Death

(cc) photo by Metro Centric on Flickr

• Environmentalism
• The flow of "death in to life"
• Three stages (The street, the word, the soul)

Natural

Great Yogi Milarepa

Tibetan Monk

Microdot

Limousine is a Hearse

Not To Be Resucitated

Suicide

p.221 "There's a tremendous lure to becoming bodiless. I see it but I fear it. It's like a junkie's death. A junkie's death is beautiful because it's so effortless."

Bucky's girlfriend, Opel, dies from what doctors call "neglect."

She failed to care for her organs and they in turn failed her. How is a junkie's death more or less desirable than a "regular" death. Do you agree with Neil Young's words, "It's better to burn out than to fade away"?

Basement Tapes

And

Mountain Tapes

Language

A THREAT

"NOTHING TRULY MOVES TO YOUR SOUND...The true underground is the place where power flows..."

Happy Valley's attempt to silence Bucky's artistic voice

APHASIA

Azarian's throat is cut

Both

• an impairment of language ability
• difficulty remembering words
• difficulty forming words
• inablity to speak, read or write

Rumors: "perhaps he can elude teh proliferation of echos and simulcra by dying...the rumors imply that even death can be subsumed by the hyperreal. It scarcely matters whether he or his fascimilie dies"

Osteen

Extremely valued for the fact that

the public couldn't have them

Silence

Supposedly the artist's best work

Dylan

Therapeutic value

"There was always something to hear,

even in that shaved air, the earth roiling into a

turn, cells in my body answering to war" Bucky, 122

Released in 1975

Inexistent

Recorded in a state of

confusion and identity crisis

Its own language

Bucky

studio equipment

The public's response

to Bucky's silence

Recorded in complete

isolation, without eequipment

Recorded in a remote location never meant

for human consumption

Silence, exile, cunning and so on," [Delillo] said. "It's my nature to keep quiet about most things... When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery, in part. Here is a new map of the world; it is seven shades of blue. If you're able to be straightforward and penetrating about this invention of yours, it's almost as though you're saying it wasn't altogether neccessary. The sources weren't deep enough."

CHILDHOOD

INCANTATIONS

Lyrics admittedly

are incoherent

and without artistic

value

• Pee-pee maw-maw
• "YOU'RE BUYING YAPPLES I'M BUYING YAPPLES
• "Blank mumble blat

Babble song babble song

Foaming at the mouth

Won Ton Soupie

"Bucky's movement toward babbling represent a Thoreauvian idea of purity", Mark Osteen

Value put on words

the book is Bucky's path back into the public life, as the "Real' Bucky

His image alone can mean several millions of dollars for the network, and so the representative comes close to begging for Wunderlick’s ten minutes outside of isolation, “Your power is growing, Bucky. The more time you spend in isolation, the more demands are made on the various media to communicate some relevant words and pictures” (Delillo, 128).

p. 164 "I knew I'd never be able to reproduce the complex emotional content of those tapes, or remember a single lyric."

Bucky realizes that he could never re-create, or even perform the songs he came up with during the recording of the Mountain Tapes, insinuating that raw art comes from raw emotion.

Art and

travel And

Rock and roll

He is analogous to the coveted “product” so many characters in the novel vie for. Not only is his music and his image for sale, but so is his being, as the power monger Globke says, “They want you out there. They want your words, they want your arms and legs an unmentionables”. (Delillo, 144)

Which do you value more, art that happens spontaneously, or art that has been toiled over for a long stretch of time?

Furthermore, what do you value, if anything, about performance art?

p. 181, Azarian tells Bucky that the band is broken up, he heard it on the radio. Because their music was a commodity to the public, they effectively assumed the power to kill them when they wanted to.

p. 186. Bucky's Mountain Tapes are demanded of him, he owes them to his company and to the public. His most personal work has been turned into a commodity, and he no longer owns the rights to his own expression. On page 199, Bucky's Mountain Tapes are edited and cut and titled without his input. The process of turning his expression into a consumable product is complete.

Darby Crash, the late frontman of punk band, The Germs, stated once that he never wanted to live off of his art. Living off of your art, he claimed, compromises the inherent qualities of it being art. Do you agree with Mr. Crash's view, or do you think that an artist should be supported by their art?

DELILLO'S GENERAL ATTITUDE

in "GREAT JONES STREET"

When you go to a concert, do you go to hear songs you know played the way you know them, or do you go in hopes of glimpsing the artist's artistic core?

"There's nothing more boring than a well-traveled person...People who travel a great deal lose their souls at some point, All these lost souls are up there in the ozone....people who travel talk about nothing but travel. Before, during, and after."

-Do you agree with Opel's conjecture? Have you ever been bored to tears with a friend who just got back from a study abroad? Or do you feel that travel makes you more well-rounded and more interesting?

p.188, "The effect of the tapes is that they're tapes. Done at a certain time under the weight of a certain emotion. Done on the spot with many imperfections. The material can't be duplicated in a concert situation."

p.210, "I've been through so many time zones, I'm almost bodiless."

-The novel continually relates bodiless-ness and travel. Does submerging oneself into a foreign environment allow one to lose themselves? Do you think that Delillo is insinuating that travel is an effective way to escape from minor problems?

The presidents and prime ministers...are the ones who make the

underground deals and speak the true underground idiom.

The coorporations. the military, the banks.

It’s not the tightest sort of plotting—more like drug fantasies, seeing dead relatives come out of the walls. What we finally have is a man in a small room, a man who has shut himself away, and this is something that happens in my work—the man hiding from acts of violence or planning acts of violence, or the individual reduced to silence by the forces around him.- Delillo

Those were the days when the enemy was some presence seeping out of the government, and the most paranoid sort of fear was indistinguishable from common sense. I think I tried to get at the slickness connected with the word paranoia. It was becoming a kind of commodity.

-Don Delillo, Interview

• TO PROMOTE FEAR
• A MAN MADE THING
• A PRODUCT OF
• ABSTRACT THOUGHT

• "Dr. Pepper represents an

alternative monarch"

• Attempting to control the

masses using "The

Product"

• Inspires fear and confusion