Richard Hell’s new book is not unlike the music he’s made: intermittently stylish and exhausted, mostly working around fashion, and sometimes very boring. In fact, Hell's continued refusal to work new themes, new ideas, new concepts, place this book in the category of diminishing returns.
In this anthology of previously published essays and articles, Hell revisits the touchstones of his previous work—the grimy era of NY punk’s downtown heyday, a so-called "golden age" epitomized by Burroughs, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Carroll. There are scant references to those who are not male or pale, maybe half a dozen in almost 300 pages. The unrelenting sameness of his obsessions abuts the reactionary lack of diversity, and between the two problems, reading this is harder work than it should be. For example, there is an essay on the photographer and painter Marilyn Minter, the high femme filth queen of too-high heels and too much makeup, but he seems confused and it descends into a list of all male artists, none of whom resemble her at all. He makes the same mistake in a republished film column on Sarah Silverman's film Jesus Is Magic, not fully understanding what other people are working through. Aside from these two scant essays, there are passing references to Nan Goldin (but not an extended study—though Goldin would fit perfectly in his milieu), Patti Smith (of course) without any serious cultural engagement, and Kathy Acker. Hell on Acker, especially considering Acker's critical revival, would be a treat, but we get a line or two, and he moves on.
The references to people of color are more scant. There is an essay about the Rolling Stones as Hell's favourite blues band, which gives the impression that Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf only existed so that this white band from England could blow Hell's mind. He mentions Elvis in the same essay, but does not mention Big Mama Thornton, and he doesn't seem to have any notice of any of the great female blues singers.
There are places where he moves a little bit away from this parsimony. A tight, small essay on Wong Kar-wai suggests a kind of geographic isolation, but he breaks the spell with his continued habit of inserting a list of names that may or may not have anything to do with the art or artist in question. Hell hints at Kar-wai’s history of diasporic exile, but then he says the movies are like Douglas Sirk or Jerry Lewis or Martin Scorsese, and he doesn't tell us why he thinks that, except for perhaps a kind of vague romanticism about being lost.
How can one be romantic about being lost, if the writer never leaves homebase? Frustrated by politics that seem dated as much as aesthetics that seem stale, every so often there is a line or a passage which indicates there is something left in those old tropes. The myth of CBGBs is less interesting than the articulated simulacra of Dollywood, but when Hell writes: "It only took three or four years for the place to acquire the garish veneer that's become its distinguishing mark: not the places deathless overall wino-dive griminess, not the long procession of compact neon beer signs dangling like corrupt flags or coats of nasura us arms above the bar stools, not the blunt, ribbed, white tunnel roof of canvas overhead outside with its innocuously ugly CBGB & OMFUG logo," he almost convinces. When he talks about Christopher Wool's paintings, he reduces his aesthetic to a blunt aphorism, something that he returns to when he talks about the poet Robert Creeley: "He still writes poems that feel like certainties struck from the entirely uncertain, that teeter on the edge of sense while being indisputable, but now they are more complex and explicit…" That Hell can write compellingly, but often chooses not to, compounds the ongoing frustration.
Creely might be complex and explicit, but those virtues are absent here. That absence might provide a through-line to the book. Writers should have obsessions they return to, and for a writer to be working for as long as Hell has, it might seem disingenuous to fault him for these thoughts or processes. If Hell is familiar, then the work and essays are familiar. It might be useful to have them in one place. Consistency is a virtue and he is nothing if not consistent. The problem is that he wants readers to think he is a prince of vice, but both his virtues and his vices have a familiarity that lacks surprises—personally or aesthetically.