Dave Hickey: Air GuitarThe conversational writing style and lively tone of this book pulled me into reading its memoir of essays by American art and culture critic Dave Hickey, (published in the 90’s). A few chapters didn’t appeal to me, but I found most of the book really interesting, particularly his childhood recollections and his popular culture observations. He’s an author who doesn’t lock you out with the usual type of critics ‘learned opinion’, and I was encouraged on reading the book to seek out and learn more about the man himself.
Hickey has a talent for making connections in culture, and taking leaps from the highbrow to the lowbrow and from the elitist to the populist, en-route finding relevance as he considers his subjects to be of the extraordinary rather than of the obvious. Whether its apprising and understanding the politics of the art market by exemplifying it with his previous obsession with building and selling custom cars in his youth, or in praising the virtues of the appeal of a magic show with its tigers and bouffant-haired entertainers, his essays aim to show that our deep rooted cultural dreams are illuminated within diverse avenues.
As a previous resident of Las Vegas he wrote about the deeper meaning of the Mirage Hotel stage show extravaganza with Magician and Tiger-Tamer duo Siegfried and Roy, (no longer playing since 2003 due to Montecore the tiger taking a fixated interest in a female audience members big hairdo, resulting in Roy being unintentionally and severely injured by the tiger). In the
‘Lost Boys’ Hickey paints a picture of the two German cabin boys whose perfect idea of combining magic with tigers saw them spectacularly elevated into twin cat-faced man-boys living out the success of the American Dream, (still today their bronze effigy with tiger stands sphinx-like at the entrance to the Mirage). He describes their show as the pinnacle of the ‘saturnalia’ celebration that is Las Vegas, a staged mythological fantasy of death and resurrection. At its climax a tiger emerges from out of a spinning mirror ball bombarded with lasers, the tiger leaps on top of the ball, then Roy climbs onto the tiger, and ball, tiger, and man go floating off up into a laser-dazzled darkness, while the music of the Siegfried & Roy theme plays out, sung by Michael Jackson…
Born in 1939, there’s a particular occasion in post-war Texas that stands out for Hickey, when as a child of eight or nine years old his father took him to a friend’s house for a jam session with fellow Jazz musicians. As he recounts that time and considers it from the perspective of today - or taken at face value - Hickey concedes that this was a meeting involving people of different cultures which could nowadays be insignificantly summed up, or even dismissed as merely: ‘a gathering consisting of four Irish-Americans, a Latino, two African-Americans, and a German Jewess, all of whom represented an international underclass of that time’. But for Hickey it was an everyday moment of ‘ordinary eccentric citizens coming together, to play some extraordinary music in a little house on the edge of town’, It has remained in his memory as the ‘best concrete emblem’ he has of ‘America as a successful society’, an enjoyable afternoon of a happy jamming session where every member was integral to the composition of the music, and each one got to play their ‘solo’.
When contemplating the answer to being asked does he have any religion, he usually responds with “not yet”, “but there are things I do religiously”. In the essay entitled:
'The Little Church Of Perry Mason' he writes about being an adult without a day job, home alone and addicted to watching daytime reruns on television of the fictional defense lawyer Perry Mason - a TV show that becomes linked with the experience of being out of work for Hickey.
Realising that whatever we spend a great deal of our mind and time on, that thing can gradually become a kind of ‘church’, in Hickey’s case, the Perry Mason show became the sacrament in ‘the Church of Unemployment’, with Perry and his two onscreen colleague’s constituting a trinity of the ‘Professional Family’ filling the vacuum left by the schism of love and work.
Hickey also had an addiction to the Mission Impossible TV show, which he identified as being ‘the Church of the Small Business Guy’, where for one hour, every week, there was a task to be performed, and by God those guys got it done!
(As a previous shift-worker myself, I once spent devotion in the ‘Church of Jeremy Kyle’, or, the ‘Church of putting Societies Miscreants to rights’ on mornings, and with the double repeat on ITV2 afternoons, and then it became the ‘Church of Star Trek Voyager’, or, the ‘Church of putting the Galaxies Aliens to rights’ on SKY afternoons. But these days I’m happy to report now that all that has been replaced with the online ‘Church of Metamatic’
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