Tea With Chris is a roundup of recommended links, posted every Friday. Here are a few of our favourite things from the Internet this week:
Carl:This episode of Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm, which might be the best literary talk show ever made in North America, is a couple of months old, but I find I just keep recommending it to people. Young writer Elif Bautman, author of a playful look at Russian literary obsession, The Possessed, provides an unimpeachable list of Russian Lit for Beginners, in selected translations, with winning commentary. But the precious gem is Silverblatt’s talk with John Waters about the list of five favourite books in his recent memoir, over which Silverblatt exclaims with his inimitable enthusiasm, “They are also my five favourite books!”
This is a pretty huge coincidence considering their authors are Denton Welch, Christina Stead, Jane Bowles, Lionel Shriver and Ivy Compton-Burnett. Waters’ comments on his literary loves are endlessly endearing, but the thing I can’t stop repeating is the name of his list: “John Waters’ Five Books You Should Read to Live a Happy Life If Something Is Basically the Matter with You.”
Margaux:A good TED Talk from Ken Robinson on education reform. He makes a plea for thoughtfulness. Very good, especially if you like corny jokes.
I accidentally came across this video critique of the reality show “WORK OF ART; American’s Next Great Artist”. It’s a new “program” called “Art is Whatever”, a recap show about “WORK OF ART”. It is not ironic or arrogant, but sort of self-logical and weirdly relaxing.
Chris: My brain feels like a mass of pixels today, so these kids-table TWC contributions are about as much as I can handle right now. First, look at this cat:
I found him on Tumblr but I don’t remember which Tumblr. And now look at this video. As a friend of mine said on Gchat, “I think I could watch a panda swag for well beyond the requisite 30 second north american attention span.” I kind of want this clip embedded on infinite loop inside my eyelids.
A few months ago, I gave my dad a burnt CD for Father’s Day. It was an old compilation I’d stumbled across online: BBC’s Folk on 2 Presents Northumbrian Folk. Northumbria (or Northumberland) is the region in Northeast England where he grew up, and its location on the country’s symbolic map is akin to Quebec’s position in the Francophonie: not just poor but tacky too. The much-mocked dominant accent seems to lilt and burr at the same time. The landscape is windswept, sparsely populated and severe; one of the most popular tourist attractions is the wall Emperor Hadrian built to repel the local barbarians. It might be projection, but I sense that my dad still feels some ambivalence about the place. Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant, who was born two years later and a few miles away, wrote a song about the Newcastle Catholic school he endured: “This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave.”
The gift delighted my dad, though, and now it fascinates me. One of its strangest tracks is “The North Walbottle Rapper Sword Dance” – not, sadly, blue-eyed snappin’ but rather a Northumbrian variation on the English folk tradition of morris dancing. While the LP’s field recording sounds like a series of rapid-fire clatters and inscrutable calls, these directions for the North Walbottle version show how intricately rapper routines are structured. Several years ago I traveled to a church in Toronto’s east end semi-regularly for the English folk dances held there, and in the beginning I marveled at their heavy regimentation. But the friend who introduced me to the whole thing had grown up amongst morris men, and those guys are yet more rigorous about their crafts (choreographic, communal, libational). I blearily watched a few of them lock swords at dawn one May Day, equally theatrical in their way as the goths playing pagan nearby.
Like Christmas, Thor comics and lots of other fun things, morris dancing itself is often believed to have pre-Christian origins. When did you ever see so many people wearing bells outside of The Wicker Man? According to John Forrest’s History of Morris Dancing, however, the earliest recorded reference to any moves by that name is from 1458. Forrest writes: “Almost as soon as the idea of pagan origins was developed, competing hypotheses emerged, based on very different agendas. The classicism of the seventeenth century, for example, sought an origin for morris in classical antiquity, the commonest hypothesis being that it was invented by Pyrrhus, son of Achilles.” A Moorish antecedent was mooted too; even before mass culture, some paranoiacs viewed popular entertainments only as corrupting “miscegenation.”
The mythic pagan origin of morris feels right, at least. The dances are redolent of an ancient, ley-webbed England, a land where some druid might bless the harvest by dragging his sickle across your throat. The fact that this place is mostly imaginary doesn’t preclude its potential vividness. Scotsman Grant Morrison included stray references to villainous Morris Men in a recent Batman & Robin storyline (along with a much more prominent Northumbrian rogue, King Coal), inspiring one of the bloggers at Mindless Ones to write: “They are inescapably creepy…it is clear even to children that their treasured accoutrements and mannered, over-rehearsed and curiously arrhythmic movements are intended to carry meanings readable only by other Morrises, and the darkling gods of yesteryear themselves…Their ossified yearning for a lost, or probably entirely invented and phantasmic Merrie Englande, also feeds in to discourses about cultural conservatism, purity and superiority that personally makes me feel uncomfortable in a very concrete and political way.”
Yet an invented past doesn’t have to be a purely reactionary one, in morris circles or any other ones. Sunderland, my dad’s hometown, is intensely proud of its industrial history, the shipyards and coal mines that were long since hollowed out. There’s a monument in the shape of a miner’s lamp outside the local football stadium. My dad is an unsentimental man, though, and I bet he prefers the slyer version of this story from “In the Bar Room,” another Northumbrian Folk selection: “In the bar room, in the bar room, that’s where we congregate / To drill the holes and fill the coals and shovel back the slate / And for to do a job of work, why I am never late / That’s providing that we do it in the bar room.” If we can’t erase the traces, we can always smudge them.
That was the status update today from my friend Mike out in Portland. Yet all Mike does on Facebook is post clips of great songs. Mike’s life has been devoted to music, at least chief among the many arts to which he’s passionately committed. I read his Chemical Imbalance zine when I was in university and was astonished to learn later we weren’t much different in age; today I read Yeti with the same gratitude for his curatorial, editorial and mixtapetorial skills, his preternatural nose for artistic quality and surprise, also manifest in the pre-war gospel and other reissues he compiles. (More recently we’ve hung out, and he is at least as great a guy as he is a cultural weathervane.)
Whatever prompted Mike today to say he hated music, it resonated with me. I was on the verge of that feeling for most of the past year or two. I was burnt out on sound. I was tired of talking about music, “following” it, “keeping up,” downloading, and most of all ranking and rating. (That last part may not change.) Late last year I hinted at it, but didn’t go all the way, when I said I was losing the patience to listen to albums. My friend Ann Powers responded that she was finding it takes a lot of patience to listen to a whole song! But was that the culture, or just us, longtime pro/semi-pro listeners, hitting our internal walls?
Or maybe this is just a cycle we go through in our love affairs with art forms, especially the forms closest to us. (Rather as we go through cycles of infatuation and disenchantment with the people most intimate to us.) Because now, for no particular reason, it seems to be lifting.
I was at a wedding reception at a rock club last weekend, and the bride happened to be someone who puts on (excellent) shows, so of course she had great bands playing her nuptials: Montreal’s Think About Life, and Toronto’s Bonjay. Both of them sounded better than ever before.
Partly it was the happy occasion. Partly, I think they both had grown since I’d seen them last. But also, those last times, I simply couldn’t bring myself to care. Now I was feeling every moment heightened by rhythm and harmony, transported to places music and I hadn’t visited together for a long while.
There was a soothing cascade of relief: So the temporary separation between me and music wasn’t middle-aged bitterness finally setting in? Thank heaven.
So now I’m curious, perhaps to stave off any relapses: Have you found your affections for your most beloved artforms waning and waxing over time? What do you peg it to, the tides, events in your life, more or less vibrant periods in the form itself? All manner of speculation welcome in the Comments bullpen.
1. I would like Owen Wilson to write another movie with Wes Anderson. Those movies make the world a little bit better.
2. I would like to see “Kick-Ass” again, but directed by someone else. I would like to see it through another director’s eyes. It is one of the best origin stories I have ever seen, but maybe too sadistic to recommend to anyone. It would be way more interesting than putting out “Kick-Ass 2” and I would be curious to see if another director would create the same results. Though I think Nicolas Cage and that little girl should play the same characters.
3. I don’t think the men in Judd Apatow movies need to grow up – they just need to hang out with women who have also “not grown up”. Funnier. I think Juliette Lewis would be a good place to start.
4. Speaking of which, more movies from Charlene Yi, please.
5. I would like to watch a reality-style movie staring Kristin Chenoweth, Craig Robinson and Joaquin Phoenix. I have a feeling that they don’t need anyone to write them lines.
6. It would be good if someone made a new movie using the footage from “The Matrix 2/3”. I would like to watch that movie.
7. I think Leonardo DiCaprio needs to try a comedy next.
8. I think Hollywood should have a big awesome conference on racism, sexism, classism and stupidity. I’m not pointing any fingers, but I am saying that conferences can be fun.
(from “The Secret Slumlord of Metropolis” in Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #127, by Leo Dorfman (script), Curt Swan (pencils) and George Roussos (inks), 1970)
Tea With Chris is a roundup of recommended links, posted every Friday. Here are a few of our favourite things from the Internet this week:
Carl: Is it naive to think this thing could kinda help save the world?
If it can’t, at least Toronto performer Kathleen Phillips will help you go to your grave laughing. Her inanimate-objects-animated videos are rapidly becoming a whole genre unto themselves. See them before the copycats spoil it all.
Chris:You’re Short, Bald and Ugly Charlie Brown, a minicomic purportedly made by one Dr. Casey “Sparky” Finnegan, was published in an extremely limited print run in 1991. Shaenon Garrity has displayed some of its contents, old Peanuts strips detourned by cartoonists/friends Seth, Joe Matt and Chester Brown. (Their collective pseudonym was lifted from Canadian kids’ TV.) The shock-humour ones are alright, but what really made me want a copy of this mini is Brown’s section, which rewrites Linus et al into a magical-realist story that might have been translated into Spanish and back again, badly.
When I was in grade school, my parents were involved in a variety show at some grownup social club, group-singing the 1940s cocktail-party number “Shaving Cream”, which had recently been given a popular revival via the Dr. Demento novelty-song radio show. It must have taken a week’s worth of overhearing rehearsals before it came to me with a scandalized jolt what swear-word the song was hiding. Chuck Berry’s late-career novelty “My Ding-a-Ling” soon mounted another tuneful assault on my naivete.
The side-stepping of the content is the whole pleasure of these songs: With a childish lilt, they pretend to talk about “being nice and clean” or a kid’s toy, with a wink as loud as a rimshot to a Sammie Davis joke on stage at that grownup playground, the Sands. The late-arriving Single of the Summer, Cee-Lo’s “Fuck You,” is exactly the opposite: naughty on the surface but all kid-joy at heart.
There’s still a sidestep going on — not because it’s got a hidden meaning to convey, but because to an unusually transparent extent, there’s nothing literal in it, each element just a cog in a pleasure machine. The song is mainly about how much fun this song is. That’s what makes it so reminiscent of “Hey Ya.” It’s why it works so well to make a video that’s just the lyrics of the song dancing around.
Everything else is self-canceling: Ostensibly a middle finger to the guy who stole his girl, and a kiss-off to the girl, it’s also amicable advice to that guy (“just thought you should know”) and a shiny proclamation of love to that girl. Cee-Lo seems lucky to be caught in a love triangle because that’s a kind of community, or at least an enabling structure for desire. (Desire for the girl, for the guy, for his Ferrari and his X-Box, for OOO OOO OOO.)
The aggression of “fuck you” is completely undermined by the temper tantrum in the bridge, the hilarious bawling “whyyyy?” (wait, I thought it was because she was a shallow, gold-digging bitch? oh, so you were just making that up). By the last chorus (you know, the blue part), even “I saw you driving ’round town with the girl I love” makes me think more about the fun of cruising cars than the pain of rejection.
You could extend this switcheroo model to the “clean” radio edit’s title, “Forget You,” which seems like hypnotic autosuggestion: “Forget what you’re hearing on the radio and remember what you heard on YouTube. In fact, shout the real title over the fake title every time it comes on.”
At first the paradoxes of “Fuck You” seem to come down from its Motown ancestry, where songs of heartache were often cached in snappy, catchy arrangements. But “Heard It Through the Grapevine” (to use a close cousin) gets sadder the closer you listen to it; “Fuck You” just gets funnier.
So what does it all amount to? First and foremost, the way “Shaving Cream” nudged you with “we’re all adults, you know what the word is,” I think it’s an argument that the words “fuck you” are simply no big deal any more. It’s not a punk-rock “fuck,” a countercultural sex-revolution Fugs or Jim Morrison “fuck,” or a “Fuck the Police.” Yeah, the song says, can’t play this on the radio, I guess (so fuck the radio), but is anybody really shocked? Nah. We’ve got the web. We watch cable.
Mumbling, “like, fuck you,” at the departing back wheels of your girlfriend’s new beau’s car is no serious threat. It is not saying, as another hip-hop song might, that you are going to get a gun, blow the wheels off that car and assault the couple in it. As a hip-hop artist, Cee-Lo is using this supposedly forbidden word to say how much of a rebel he isn’t, and what a relief. It’s a regular-guy, proletarian “fuck you.” A humble “fuck you,” a “fuck you” we all use every day, a “fuck you” that can bring people together.
The drawback, of course, is the “gold digger” stereotype the song directs at the woman who’s left him. But even there it’s being used as a standup-comedy trope – the borrowing of Kanye’s “digga/nigga” rhyme is the acknowledgment of conventionality. And for Cee-Lo, the voice of superstars Gnarls Barkley, playing a poor shlub feels like a neat, antic rejection of hip-hop glitter.
One of the reasons “he’s an X-Box, and I’m more Atari” is such a great line is the silliness of using “X-Box” as an example of a luxury item, contrasted wth a format that’s so out-of-date it’s collectible. Cee-Lo’s playing a super-nerd — which matches the format of retro-soul, and the act of singing superbly (rather than barely at all, which Drake, Kanye and others have made the cool standard).
The gold-digger narrative is too easy a stand-in for misunderstanding and misvaluation between the genders, but it’s an obvious stand-in (even Cee-Lo’s mama doesn’t want to clear it up for him). I persistently hear “I guess the change in my pocket just wasn’t enough” as referring not to money but to personal change – that what he couldn’t provide the girl was a relationship worth living in, not a fancy ride.
Even more deviantly I’ve started hearing “change” as that word from Barack Obama’s campaign. Then the song starts to get crazy allegorical – “gold digger” as fickle American public (cheering for Obama’s historical win one minute and then sneaking around and Tea Partying all over his agenda), the wealthy girl-stealer as corporate Republicanism, and “fuck you” is a pox on all their houses. (Gives a whole new ring to that wild “Why????”)
That’s going too far, but the last time the phrase “gold digger” got so much pop-cultural traction was the last time the American economy was this fucked: In the series of hit Busby Berkeley Broadway fantasies, Gold Diggers of 1933, Gold Diggers of 1935, etc., escapes that gave us songs like “We’re In the Money” and “Lullaby of Broadway,” not to mention gilded-surrealist montages of shapely kicking legs as mystic mandalas. The interesting bit is that in those films, the “gold digger” was actually the heroine – she was a lowly chorus girl wrapped up in some caper meant to separate a fool and his money. And who wouldn’t? It’s the Depression.
“Fuck You” doesn’t allow for that degree of sympathy for the gold digger – its chorus still says “fuck you” after all – but beneath its knee-jerk sexism is its broke-ass bonhomie. When Cee-Lo says “I really hate you right now” in his chick-flick-pouty tone, it doesn’t mean he hates her forever. He just hopes she’ll come around.
If the song had been written four years ago, it might have been from the shallow jerk’s point of view – he would have had the money, but disliked his girl’s interest in it. Witness 50 Cent (desperate to get in on any action that isn’t, as B2TW’s Chris has documented, in a video game) with his playback version, with a weaker but amusing prelude in the voice of the girl-stealing dude:
It’s clever of 50 Cent (a man nominally made of money, while Cee is low on green) to give himself the first word here, to pre-empt everything the song’s about to say. But it’s really the ghost of hip-hop past, stepping in to protest too much: In 2010, the argument that if you’re not rich you’re not trying doesn’t fly. And he misses Cee-Lo’s whole thrust anyway – this guy likes being an Atari, and he can “take you there” without a Ferrari. It’s just “some shit” if he needs to be richer to be with ya. All he really wants is the girl to get where he’s coming from.
And if you can’t feel that, you must be playing with your own ding-a-ling.
This is not news to anyone who’s seen our sidebar, but I also have my own personal blog, the comics-centric Gutteral. It’s a few years old now, and it hasn’t seen a substantial update in…months. Too many months. So I’m very happy about the latest post there, an interview with the cartoonist Bryan Lee O’Malley. It might be a bit hard to follow if you haven’t read his wonderful Scott Pilgrim series, or are unfamiliar with comics in general – the first part of the conversation is especially technical – but there’s plenty of stylish art to look at too, if you’re so inclined.
