Rebirth amid rubble of the past
Rob Spillman ponders his life amid the light and shadows in ‘ All Tomorrow’s Parties.’
For a memoir that ends quite well — Rob Spillman’s f irst 25 years see the writer triumph over multiple car crashes, titanic drinking and the dicier corners of urban neighborhoods to go on and co- found Tin House, one of America’s most inf luential literary magazines, with an associated publishing mini- empire — it sure has a dark title. An aching dirge sung by Nico on the Velvet Underground’s f irst album, “All Tomorrow’s Parties” epitomizes art rock’s rejection of easy beauty. The book is Spillman’s account of his own search for the psychic equivalent, a place that will act as a whetstone for creativity’s blade.
We talked by phone the day his crosscountry tour for “All Tomorrow’s Parties” ( Grove Press: 400 pp., $ 25) was kicking off in New York City — “30 events in 30 days,” he said with mingled incredulity and anticipation.
Spillman grew up in Berlin, the son of expatriate musicians who eventually separated, trading him back and forth between professional postings in places as diverse
as Aspen, Colo., Chautauqua, N. Y., and Baltimore. He spent his young adulthood trying to find his way back to a place that felt like home. For a moment — an indelibly exciting one — it was Berlin again, just after the Wall came down. Spillman and his new bride, writer Elissa Schappell, knew they were present “on the cusp of something weird and quite possibly wonderful.”
Music is the beginning of his story, literally and structurally; each chapter is given its own soundtrack, a playlist of personally meaningful work heavy on the restively avant- garde ( Lou Reed, Joy Division, Public Image Ltd., Sonic Youth).
“Music has a primal effect, I think,” Spillman said. “When I heard punk, it was like, ‘ Is anyone else hearing this?’ It was everything the classical music I grew up with was not. I have visceral problems with opera” — notwithstanding the backstage perks he enjoyed as a youngster given bit parts in his father’s productions — “mainly its aspect of social privilege.”
Spillman cites the Talking Heads as being transformative. “Hearing ‘ Psycho Killer’ for the f irst time, it was as if this strange, tense, weird voice came into my room to speak to me alone.”
The 1977 song spoke to those who burned with inchoate rage, who developed a youthful taste for nihilism that new wave and postpunk met head- on. Spillman allows that now, almost 40 years later, what he feels is more a rage to instead of rage against, except where inequality is concerned: “I still rage at that, gender, racial, inequality of any kind.” In general, though, “I try to channel it more productively now.”
His chosen method is the rigorous practice of art, both his own and the work he seeks for Tin House magazine. “I absolutely love what William Gass said about his motivation: ‘ I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.’ ”
Now that Spillman has become something of a vizier of the literary world, he aims to use his stature to right publishing ’s traditional imbalance toward the white and financially secure. He heads the membership committee of PEN, is working with Brooklyn College to bring greater diversity to publishing and has just re- turned from story exchanges in Israel and Palestine.
There and in places like Nairobi, he f inds the same creative ferment he found in Berlin. “Artists are good at scenting out opportunity in the ruins. It happened in the Bombay of Salman Rushdie’s time, it happened in the East Village of the ’ 70s, it’s happening now in Africa. Throw in revolutionary politics and you have the perfect conditions for very engaged, energetic art.”
Spillman had a magnetic attraction to the fervor of a culture that was remaking itself out of the rubble of the old — and there was no more promising or ominous rubble than that of East Berlin in 1990.
“It seemed like our generation’s Spanish Civil War,” he said. “I heard a call to action, felt a sense that if I didn’t get there then, I’d kick myself later.” Creature comforts were hard to come by in the squats, but that is not what Spillman was looking for; indeed, it was a point of pride to live off discards. In return, he got to experience the transporting ecstasy of being where history was being made.
After artists have colonized a desolate neighborhood and figured out how to do without hot water ( if rarely without beer) a place is made safe for money. Having lived in Brooklyn for 18 years with Schappell and their children and having witnessed a transformation, he says, “New York does feel like home, though I worry about it.” No longer is Berlin or New York a thrilling “ground zero in the battle between commodification and artistic utopia,” as he writes.
An outsider turned insider, Spillman went to the edge to find the center.
If the f irst theme of his memoir is that peculiar power of music to pull the young into the embrace of their tribe, the second is reinvention — personal, geographic, artistic. “My favorite thing in the world is to read something I’d thought couldn’t be done. When I f ind a writer who can do that, everything feels new again.”