The Thing I Owe Garrison Keillor

So I hear that Garrison Keillor has a retirement plan now. The author and radio host will be phasing out of performing duties on his traveling stage program Prairie Home Companion and turning things over to a musician named Chris Thile.

Keillor's art is not art I like. I don't have a lot of patience for the kind of humor and sketches that his show provides. I don't like the surface qualities of most of it, its construction and delivery, and I reject its underlying message of a superior Midwestern Anglo-Saxon temperament and way of looking at the world. While Prairie Home Companion features talented musicians, it doesn't do so in a particularly flattering way other than the size of the audience to which they're delivered. My dad had me read a couple of his books maybe 25 years ago, and I cared for them even less.

Garrison Keillor was useful to me, though, when I was trying to sort out my own relationship to art. Keillor is nearly universally hated and ridiculed in both my age group and in those below; he is equally despised in what is probably my most accurate placement on the alt-culture tribal landscape. He's a great punching bag, too: pompous-seeming and omnipresent within his world, but also insulated and mega-successful. I've taken my fair share of shots and I bet some of them were funny.

The thing is, my mom's a fan. A great thing about the last ten years of my life is I got to hang out some with my mom as an adult. This meant a lot of things, its own essay's worth, but it included taking her to movies occasionally and maybe driving her someplace after church. There was a PHC movie we saw together. I didn't care for it; she loved it. And of course Keillor's show is all over the radio airwaves on Sunday afternoons so driving in the car in the mountains to a restaurant we both liked or down the highway to Las Cruces and its clothing stores there was a lot of that show we listened to together.

I liked it less the more I listened, but the bile and kind of easy, alt-culture triumphalism with which I lorded over the show as a cultural object seemed increasingly silly and labored and ungenerous given my Mom's honest, not thought-out pleasure in the man's work. So I checked myself. What I found out is that over time my opinion didn't change of the work but it was nice to be free of the expectation that I would punch the performer right in the kidneys every time he lumbered out onstage. I even came to respect the fact that he was employing multiple "dead" forms of media (prose, radio, concert-hall performance) to personal advantage even if I cringed a tiny bit in aesthetic displeasure every time I heard the name "Guy Noir" (I cringed just now typing it).

We say "some art isn't for you" a lot. We say it mostly, I think, in order to justify the consumption of frivolous art for which we have an appetite even though someone else -- sometimes an imaginary person -- might disapprove. It's a gift we provide others so that we may receive it in return. We rarely flip that phrase around and explore what it means for the people who are simply not on board for certain kinds of art, that have values that run contrary to the work of specific artists. The big thing for me over the last ten years for which Keillor was illuminating was in my being able to uncouple my personal presentation -- this kind of consumerist stance where I'm defined in certain public spaces by my collective likes and dislikes -- from my interactions with art itself. Those interactions as a whole have become sharper and I think less dependent on cultural shortcuts; the opinions accumulated and the insights collected are more entirely my own. I did this with a lot of things, not just Garrison Keillor, but he was in there, too. I'm grateful, and wish him a happy transition into the retirement of his choice.

image from the Chris Monroe comic strip, an intersection of interests that I think is justified for use here; any objection and I will gladly take it down; you should go read the strip
 
posted 9:10 pm PST | Permalink
 

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