The Modern Hater: Let’s Not Do The Time Warp Again or The Culture War Is Real

Regression is now less the shameful refuge of the contemporary babyman than a foolproof political technique. Nostalgia has always been at the core of any pitch to the American people, even though our country has so much less spent time for which to yearn. I don’t think any of the haircuts in the current election cycle really believe the America they’re selling ever existed: a time when the streets were safe, jobs grew on trees, and Mad Men was good. And I don’t begrudge any politician an appeal to nostalgia. The present is too close and the future unknowable. The past is what we have.

But indulging in nostalgia while functioning in the present requires a keen sense for what it elides. I’m shocked by the recent amnesia that’s seized public discourse in the past few years. The Help wins Academy Awards like it featured a radical thesis about civil rights. Women get compared to livestock on the floor of the Georgia House. Rick Santorum nearly calls the president (of the United States!) a vile racial slur that I would love to see him try to say to his face. Why are we recapitulating 40-year-old (and older) debates in the innermost spheres of our government? Is an election cycle a good excuse to challenge the most basic rights of women, minorities, and homosexuals every four years?

I’m so tired of this. Most people I speak to are absolutely beaten down by a political-media complex that starts spinning up too far in advance of the election and brings every soundbite and bit of political minutiae into its orbit. I would be exhausted and scared if I thought any of the bleak company of Republican candidates had a real shot, but I’m reasonably sure they don’t. I think Santorum is nostalgic for a time when he only had to interact with white people, Ron Paul is a malignant little free-market elf, and  I can only imagine Mitt and Ann Romney have a weird sex game in which she gets aroused watching him embarrass himself on TV.

But of most immediate concern to myself is the way it makes me feel. I was at dinner listening to a conservation about politics when a thought distinguished itself from the others: the culture war is real. I used to think it was something fabricated by pundits to feed an insatiable news cycle but I feel it now. I feel polarized. I know my position on Occupy Wall Street, abortion, corporate subsidies etc. etc. before I know any of the details of an individual case. I know what I feel when I watch Fox News: rage, but also, pleasure. That I’m so much smarter and more progressive than any of them. I am no better. I dream of conciliation. I’m nostalgic for a time that never existed when my relationship to half of my country wasn’t one of shame, arrogance, and frustration.

And The Crowd Goes Mild: The 2012 Grammys

(Mark J. Terrill/AP) Justin Vernon searches for, and finds, impurities in his Grammys

It is impossible to watch the Grammys. I maintain that in the face of overwhelming evidence, not the least of which is the fact that I turned it on for twenty minutes last night. Not twenty sequential minutes, that would be dangerous, but enough to see backwoods bro Justin Vernon win two, to realize the Foo Fighters are still a thing, and to get totally exhausted by Nicki Minaj’s demon child gimmickry. The Grammys are objectively unentertaining, but they serve an important function, disclosing an appetite for pop that’s almost Zen in its avowal of an Eternal Now, when the only music worth listening to is playing right now on this revolution of a radio dial. The Grammys have no sense of any future except one in which Adele keeps selling a billion albums forever, and a feeling for the past so distant it has an unearthly cant, like it’s not even ours. This allows us to apply all our powers of snark towards a massive star-killer blog ray incinerating all the out of touch suits who presume to arbitrate tastes for us (we’re 16-24 DAMNIT). YEAH! Little Jimmy punts his radio and rides off, listening to some unholy Lightning Bolt CD-R, bleeding from the ears all the way.

But this is what we’re listening to, even if it won’t be a month from now. And the model of the record executive somehow young or savvy enough to find the ley lines of youth culture seems totally outdated at this point. Sure we’re bombarded with more marketing and advertising than we are stellar radiation, but we do the bulk of it ourselves. Some people out there still listen to Chris Brown (stop it by the way). For them he is an artist of great personal and musical charisma. His conduct is inexcusable and entirely his, but his career is our fault.

Beyond that, the Grammys have a necessary leveling effect on people like Nicki Minaj and Paul McCartney, whose lifestyles eat and shit out a thousand of mine in a day. At the Grammys their behavior can still seem “normal person” embarrassing; I had to flip back and forth from Nick Minaj’s performance I was wincing so hard.

I felt some affinity with the Grammys this year because I am also growing out of touch. Dubstep was the first youth oriented musical upwelling to completely confound me, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. When I turned 23 I made this 100+ track mix that was a big sloppy love letter to pop music, as I was certain I would only listen to “art” music thereafter. I failed, but now I think I just started too early. After 25+ years, you’ve witnessed the cycle repeat enough to gain some perspective. Now I feel closer to 12 minute high-hat drones, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Philip Glass, The Field etc.: little afterthoughts of dynamism against an undertone of geologic insistence. The worm turning in a constant soil.

But I’ve been wrong before. What pop music knows is that the method of life is seduction, and its movement is back into the fold.

For now: a little Keith to go out on.

Keith Fullerton Whitman – Stereo Music For Yamaha Disklavier Prototype

Blood From A Stone: Lana Del Rey, Authenticity, and Scare Quotes

A blogger's muse

A couple of days ago the Judge Dredd of pop music Sasha Frere-Jones fielded reader questions as part of a live chat about the authenticity of Lana Del Rey, the ostensible trailer park chanteuse who’s actually (gasp!) a vague composite of aggressive marketing and outsourced songwriting. I was impressed with the intelligence Frere-Jones brought to bear on the subject (probably more intelligence than it deserves), and I enjoy reading his column in every New Yorker I can steal, but I took issue with a particular strain of bewilderment that kept popping up in the Q&A:

“Artists promise us nothing specific. Songs can be terrible or badly conceived or embarrassing but I am still not sure what ‘inauthentic’ ever means. It feels like a Sasquatch nobody ever finds. It’s also possibly euphemistic and fancy way of saying ‘I don’t like this,’ which is always a valid response.”
-Sasha Frere-Jones

Frere-Jones seems willfully puzzled for the sake of aesthetic principle. It’s common among critics to forget how people without graduate degrees (a condition for which I’m bitterly nostalgic) approach media. Now that everyone loves Rick Ross and couldn’t possibly care whether anyone’s art is grounded in first hand experience the furor over LDR’s image might seem regressive. But Americans are good at this. Our one inarguable talent is consuming media. I don’t find it unsophisticated for listeners to grasp at the intent and worldview of artists who, at least formally, are communicating with them.

Frere-Jones draws an analogy to acting, noting that no one gives Meryl Streep a hard time for not actually being a prime minister, but this strikes me as a distortion. It might depend on whether you view pop musicians as essentially interpreters (or actors) or as generative, creative artists. Very few critics will agonize over what Rostropovich (genius that he was) thought or intended in recording a symphony but they will sure as hell want to know what was in Shostakovich’s dome when he wrote it. You might think of Lana, perfectly coiffed with a suite of on-call producers and songwriters, as just the interpreter of eminently available song structures and melodies but then you’d have to concede the same of Bob Dylan, to a lesser extent.

I don’t miss the indie pissing contests of the 90s or hip hop message board flamewars, but the author function doesn’t mean forgetting about the author and cavorting in a clear stream of pure sound. It means acknowledging the tendency to cobble together biographical detritus, images, and postures into a putative author who looms over the work and acknowledging that that tendency is at work when we talk about art. If we could fold LDR’s “inauthenticity” into an authorial figure that actually enriches our feeling for the music, then we would have something and could get off the internet for a while. But that would require an art equal to our patchwork mythos.

The reason we’re having this conversation at all is a) LDR is a attractive woman whose attractiveness is somehow a feature or theme in her music, with all the attendant gender complexities I have no authority to write about, and b) she fucked up. Here’s how:

1. Born to Die is a shit album guys. The fact that “Video Games” exists shines a harsh light on the other songs here, because the persona LDR cultivates in its ebb and flow of irony and sincerity somehow becomes gaudy and embarrassing on the rest of the album. When she sings “Heaven is a place on earth where you/ tell me all the things you want to do” I get that it’s withering sarcasm but can’t help but take pleasure in how beautiful it would be for someone to actually mean this. Born to Die is presented as more than a big, dumb, overwrought pop album, but the stabs at lyrical weight are weak everywhere but on “Video Games.” If you’re making an Important Statement with your music, your lyrics have to be either really good or just artless enough to be perfectly ignorable. But aggressively dumb and totally humorless is not a winning combo. Bottom line, what Born to Die is missing is pleasure, “the liquid tool” in the words of Brigit Kelly, which animates everything else. If we enjoyed this album, we wouldn’t have to entertain ourselves with this endless game of Guess Who?

2. The marketeers got overzealous and showed their hands (not necessarily her fault). If you’re trying to engineer a pop phenomenon you either hide that artifice  in plain sight or play it straight. No one thinks Lady Gaga is actually whatever the hell she plays on TV, but there are pictures of her in pre-breakthrough years being Lady Gaga. With LDR we’re talking about three people: the theoretical “real” Lizzy Grant, Lizzy Grant A.K.A. Lana Del Rey, and Lana Del Rey. The sleight is anything but seamless. Riding the hype lightning, LDR’s ad copy pushed too hard, protested too much. You’re not supposed to say you’re a “gangsta Nancy Sinatra.” The critics will say that about you for free! Elvis never called himself a sex bomb he just exploded in a horrifyingly sexy shower of sweat and pomade. By the time we saw the timid girl on SNL, the ad men had expertly taught us how to disassemble their product.

Open and Shut: The Book of Disquiet

This book is fucking deadly

“I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me – this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we’re mean-hearted but because we don’t feel like unbuttoning our coat.”

“I’ve never loved anyone. The most that I’ve loved are my sensations – states of conscious seeing, impressions gathered by intently hearing, and aromas through which the modesty of the outer world speaks to me of things from the past (so easily remembered by their smells) giving me a reality and an emotion that go beyond the simple fact of bread being baked inside the bakery, as on that remote afternoon when I was coming back from the funeral of my uncle who so loved me, and I felt a kind of sweet relief about I’m not sure what.

This is my morality, or metaphysics, or me: passer-by of everything, even of my own soul, I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing – just an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a fallen sentient mirror reflecting the world’s diversity. I don’t know if I’m happy this way. Nor do I care.”

-Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

I actually finished this book about a week ago but I haven’t had the strength to think and write about it until just now; believe that this nearly killed me. It’s a totally plotless, endlessly repetitive five hundred page manifesto arguing, in essence, that reality sucks but imagination sucks a bit less so the only thing to do about it is sit on your ass and create countless wan, bloodless “dreams” and fictions of no interest to anyone but yourself. The only real character is a Portuguese clerk with few recognizably human feelings, no common sympathy, no compassion, only a sense of his relative superiority. This book blows on a metaphysical level. Please suffer through this passage as an illustration:

“Whether I like it or not, everything that isn’t my soul is no more for me than scenery and decoration. Through rational thought I can recognize that a man is a living being just like me, but for my true, involuntary self he has always had less importance than a tree, if the tree is more beautiful. That’s why I’ve always seen human events – the great collective tragedies of history or of what we make of history – as colorful friezes, with no soul in the figures that appear there. I’ve never thought twice about anything tragic that has happened in China. It’s just scenery in the distance, even if painted with blood and disease.”

What this book does above all is transmute everything human, contingent, or real into a pure and tiresome aesthetics, and it would be horrifying if it wasn’t so boring. It’s modernism’s slow nightmare.  Jameson repeated the idea in Archaelogies that rather than a Joyce or an Eliot, Stalin is the ne plus ultra of the modernist artist, and you can hear the bell truth of that idea on nearly every page here. If this Bernando Soares wasn’t so impotent and convinced of failure in all of his endeavors, I could see him being history’s greatest monster. Unsurprisingly, it’s hard for such a person’s suffering (a sociopath’s, really) to have any gravity for a reader.

What Pessoa does is create avatars and instead of attempting to write through them, he writes the book they want to write (a fatal error in this case). According to Pessoa himself, Bernando Soares is the most similar to Pessoa of all these avatars because he is a “mutilation” of his personality and not a transformation. Soares is Pessoa with a sense of irony but not a sense of humor, a catastrophic deletion. And his irony is savage but incomplete: it only extends to some of his thoughts and only for the purpose of deepening his suffering.

But for all that, Pessoa does not succeed in eradicating his gift. Disquiet has charms of both thought and language, and some of my favorite passages read as parable:

“Everything we are is due to chance and trickery, and this height we boast isn’t ours; we’re no taller on the summit than our normal height. The hill on which we tread elevates us; it’s the height we’re at that makes us higher.

A rich man breathes easier; a famous man is freer; a title of nobility is itself a small hill. Everything is artifice, but not even the artifice is ours. We climb it, or were brought to it, or we were born in the house on the hill.”

This whole passage is sublimely controlled, not a tone out of place, like Mozart. A later one describes a harrowing night and the surgical whiteness of morning with all the bleakness of Larkin’s “Aubade”. If nothing else, this book is supremely quotable and we have a fine translator to thank for that. If only this commonplace book had some kind of lifeforce, a vision, one true character, it might succeed as fiction rather than fail as a diary.

Now it’s time for some beach reading.

Two Minutes Hate: Orson Scott Card

Allergic to money

Why is there no Ender’s Game movie? I’ve been hearing that it’s “about to come out” since I was thirteen and the book first blew my mind and convinced me that it was possible to save the world with video games and internet forums. I know I’m not the best predictor of youth trends but this movie would make a billion dollars. It could score the Harry Potter crowd off the rebound while lovingly ministering to the nerd boners of millions of Nietzchean manchildren who always thought the book was really about them (damn, friendly fire, I made myself sad.) Cast the girl from Kick Ass as Valentine, Vigo as Mazer Rackham, Stanley Tucci as Ender’s dad, pull some Tron-style de-aging CGI on Elijah Wood for Ender, then fill the rest of the cast with brooding tweens (kill off Peter and Bean in the first 5 minutes). Boom. Where is this movie? Is Orson Scott Card too busy being an inept right-wing jackass to make Gaga money?