The Stones notoriously preferred what they imagined as the soul-killing junkie destitution of the Blues over the little-ditty silliness of country. i guess the line seems much finer, or at least differently demarcated, if your familiarity with the players is more local, but i get the point.  Some Girls, their “country” disco album, was released in 1978. It was hugely popular–somehow inhabiting punk’s insouciance without having to sound punk. Jagger says it’s an album about New York. It is also deep melancholy, but this is how they stayed “relevant”–by getting, and cashing in on, the joke. The video is absolutely necessary.  They have made the leap from high modernist sincerity to the permanent smirking onslaught of the posts. My first memory of Mick Jagger as performer comes from the “Dancing in the Street” (1985) video with David Bowie, but this one also feels vaguely familiar.  i had to discover the tragic heartthrob Rolling Stones stuff on my own much, much later. In other words, flipping the classic maxim from the 18th Brumaire, i knew them as a joke first. This is how most things seem to have come–i’ve had to really shuffle time lines to make them matter.  My parents. Rock and roll. Gender roles. Cars. New York. Lovers. San Francisco. David Bowie. Poetry. Meat. Dylan. If i know you haven’t always been this lame, i can figure out how to love you.

“Miss You” is the first track. “Shattered” is the last. “Beast of Burden” is penultimate. Remember the Bette Midler cover? It was my favorite video for weeks back in 1984. The context was, of course, completely lost on me–the video starts with Mick coming into her dressing room and telling her they have to end their love affair because he can’t stand the publicity.  She convinces him to stay and watch her perform “his song,” which in her version substitutes the catchy “pretty pretty girl” stanza with the brazen and ominous: “My little sister is a pretty pretty girl. My little sister is a pretty pretty girl. She loves to ride and she loves to crawl. They love to take her out behind the garden wall. And when they’re done they just throw her away.  And she don’t have an awful lot to say.  It hurts her so bad to come to the end. I remember all the times she’s been so, easy.” The message is clear: her little sister may be a beast of burden, but not the Divine Miss M. Jagger seems like, well, a shadow of his younger self.  At the time, Bette’s hotness seemed objective to me, and his seemed like a great, puny joke. They end up on the stage together, but his little moves are lifeless and silly.  They are both performing young Mick, but she does it better.

For some time now, i have been puzzled by Elizabeth Freeman’s essay on Elisabeth Subrin’s film Shulie.  The essay exists in a couple of incarnations: first as “Packing History, Count(e)ring Generations” in New Literary History (Autumn 2000), and recently as the “Deep Lez” chapter in her new book, Time Binds.  What i am most confused by is her reading of Judith Butler in order to articulate her proposal for something i find very compelling called ‘temporal drag’.  Freeman argues that Butler’s theory of gender performativity creates a slippery valorization of gender performances that attempt to shake off the past, and necessarily makes those who choose to inhabit allegedly retrograde identity-subject positions umm, less cool? This is where i start to get confused. ‘Repetition with a difference’–what has become Butler’s ‘always historicize’–in my reading, is precisely an attempt to inhabit the citations we are bound to with both an understanding of how we represent and a hope that repetition is not a fatalism.  No annunciation is possible without citing past conversations and conventions.  Here is the line in Freeman that always stumps me: “Moreover, to reduce all embodied performances to the status of copies without originals may be to ignore the interesting threat that the genuine past-ness of the past–its opacity and illegibility, its stonewalling in the face of our most cherished theoretical paradigms–sometimes makes to the political present” (63). The beauty of Butler’s work is the way she troubles the line between copy and original. Each copy is a singularity. Originality is not necessarily the question.

What i can’t quite understand is, what is the genuine past-ness of the past?  When someone we love is really gone–when he or she becomes a physical impossibility, maybe that is the genuine past-ness of the past? This is why mourning is the healthy response to loss. It indicates an understanding of the natural flow of things.  But why accept nature for some things and reject it for others?  If we are really trying to undo teleological time, why reify something as alive as the past?