Word: talismanic
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Peter Case, a wondrous songwriter and singer whose recent album The Man with the Blue Postmodern Fragmented Neo-Traditionalist Guitar is good enough to carry like a talisman into the uncertainties of the '90s, sees the difficulty in broader terms. "Rock 'n' roll has just become a new form of Disneyland," he says. "The whole thing has got mythologized to the point where it's just a bunch of rubbish." Greil Marcus, who writes formidably on popular and radical culture (the recent Lipstick Traces), talks about the "suicidal nostalgia" surrounding a lot of contemporary music: "People have been sold...
Then flag down an astonished cabbie ("White people!" his face says) and go back through Sugar Hill to 145th Street and Broadway. The character of this area, with its many Dominican immigrants, is raffish and polyglot. One store, the House of Talisman, is downright polytheistic. In the window of this religious-goods mart, wooden Indians rub elbows with statues of the Madonna and an ebony St. Martin of Tours; inside, Holy Seven Spiritual Good Luck Bath Oil and the ever reliable Gamblers Drops are for sale. Next door is a nice place for early dinner: Copeland's, which speaks...
...Brezhnev's reign, held that a work of art should fulfill the criteria of partinost (party spirit), ideinost (firm commitment to prescribed ideology) and narodnost (true portrayal of the life, soul and spirit of the people). It has now been undone. "Dissident" modernism became a talisman only because it was repressed; once tolerated and encouraged, it becomes politically harmless...
...younger artists squat. Some work in crumbling tenements scheduled for $ demolition, dank shells with tangles of extension cords carrying bootleg electricity up their gapped stairwells. Here they agonize about the "spiritual crisis" with which glasnost has confronted Soviet artists -- the sudden conversion of "dissident" art from a talisman to a commodity. One hears 28-year-olds, too young to remember the '60s, waxing nostalgic over the "purity" induced among artists by former repression...
Because it is the only meaningful talisman remaining to him after his father's death, every detail of its history becomes sacred. He constantly tries to recreate the letter's origins, to determine whether his mother knew about its existence before he found her with it, and to trace its journey from the safe where it was first kept to the desk drawer where it was after his father's death. He says, "I did not see my mother actually find the letter. Come across it; locate it. I'm building backwards again." Toward the end of the novel...