Link here to Marlene Creates’ great internet performance/ tour through The Boreal Poetry Garden (Portugal Cove, Newfoundland & Labrador)
Larch, Spruce, Fir, Birch, Hand, Blast Hole Pond Road (2007–)
excerpt from Sleeping Places, Newfoundland
Category Archives: TV/video
Margaux’s Friday Pictures – Marlene Creates, opening tonight at Paul Petro in Toronto
Filed under Friday Pictures, poetry, TV/video, visual art
Movie Stars and Buffy the Vampire Slayer – A Summary
by Margaux Williamson
My friend Sheila send me this link this morning, with the subject header “this is kinda fascinating (a TINY bit)”.
It’s a “news” clip that attempts to make a story about a rivalry between two serious young female movie stars.
Then she sent me another one with the subject header “and then this”.
It made me think of the end of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Knowing my friend hadn’t seen the show and probably never would, I emailed her a summary which I’ll post below. If you are saving Buffy the Vampire Slayer television for the future, NOTHING BUT SPOILERS AHEAD.
_________
The hole of Hell (in California) is getting too big and all the hell creatures are coming out. It’s too much for Buffy (the vampire slayer) to handle alone. If she can’t handle it, the Earth will turn to Hell.
She uses a magical device to meet with the ancient men who gave the first young girl (the first One True Slayer) all the power to fight evil. The ancient men initiate a ritual that will give Buffy more demonic power. She’s in chains I think. She’s so mad at the men. She’s mad that they made her the slayer, ’cause she never wanted to be. She’s mad that she has to fight and that she’s lonely ’cause no one’s like her. She’s distrustful of the men. She doesn’t want to lose more of her humanity. Her temper makes her lose the vision and abruptly stop the ritual.
Back at home, her and her friends try to be positive: “It’s okay, Buffy, we’ll find another way.” But everyone, including herself, suspects they blew the one chance of getting enough power. A few episodes go by. People are miserable, there’s fighting, no one’s trusting Buffy and she’s starting to hate everyone.
During this time, they have gathered as many of the “potential slayers” together that they could find (15 year old girls who are not powerful but could be someday if Buffy dies) and they’re all (with Buffy’s crew) staying at Buffy’s house. The “potential slayers” are there because the people who want hell on earth had started to kill them one by one to ensure the end of the line for these ONE TRUE SLAYERs that keep the earth from turning into hell. The potential slayers are kind of useless and they don’t like Buffy since she’s never around and is kind of miserable and bossy.
The Hellmouth is getting bigger and will open fully in two days. Buffy and her friend Willow, who is a witch, have a plan. Willow will override the original spell that the ancient men cast and attempt to give the power to all the latent slayers. They don’t think about it too much other than that if those girls also have power, they might be able to stop hell. No one wants them to do this, to override the ancient laws laid down by these men, but it’s their only chance and they have nothing to lose. Everyone is leaving town, normal people and demons alike. No one wants to be near the Hellmouth.
Willow casts the spell just as Buffy and the potential slayers and their friends all enter the Hellmouth. It works: the potential slayers become powerful and strong enough together to fight the Hellmouth and stop it from becoming big enough to devour Earth.
The side effect of Willow’s spell is that all the potential slayers all over the world are suddenly woken up and given power - the ones that they couldn’t find or didn’t know about, hundreds of girls. The characters don’t know about this side effect, but the camera shows all these girls all over the world “waking up.”
They win and ride away in a school bus with their town collapsed like under a meteorite. And Buffy’s lonely problem of being completely alienated from others because she is so strong is gone too. All (the ones who survived) her equals around her.
Filed under margaux williamson, other, TV/video
Memories of Memories: Nine Cultural Favourites from 2012
by Chris Randle
As Carl noted last week month, we like our year-end lists untimely here. We also like them extremely long – scrolling backwards now, to the tune of thousands and thousands of words. I don’t mean to abandon that tradition, only to get a little pointillist, and focus on isolated textures, moods, moments. Why the conceit? It was a pleasantly messy 2012. There is no order.
Future, “Same Damn Time”
Motivational rapper and outer space enthusiast Future had such a surfeit of material last year that he was able to release an actually good bonus album, but my favourite song was this ode to multitasking, recorded in an idiosyncratic tone of frustrated triumph. And what’s more integral to hip-hop than polysemy? “I am fluid, mercurial.”
The Clock, by Christian Marclay (2010)
I saw less than half of Christian Marclay’s celluloid stopwatch during its run at a local gallery, but completism would be missing the point. Spliced together from thousands of film clips that display or mention or unwittingly pun on the moment in time when you see them, The Clock is a mesmerizing totality, grandly incidental. There are countdowns from action movies – the kind of plot hinges that Barthes called a narrative’s “cardinal functions” – and clocks ticking away in the background, details captured accidentally, like fossils. There are ornate towers and eerie chimes and blearily regarded alarms. Marclay’s piece moves in overlapping polyrhythms: amidst the march towards some climactic stroke, one notices little repetitions, hourly patterns, images connected with a nimble cut. People get most excited about noon and midnight, because who doesn’t love a good reckoning?
I didn’t witness either. On Nuit Blanche, I lined up for The Clock well before 12:00 but only got in long minutes after that. In retrospect, though, I think missing the big culmination gave me a greater appreciation of what followed it. Beyond midnight, the film drifts ever further into unreality. Diners and bars grow desolate. Ominous things happen at parties. If people managed to fall asleep at all, they’re woken up by unpromising phone calls. The sex becomes increasingly desperate, and sometimes hotter. Vincent Price puts in multiple appearances. Around 3 or 4 am, harmonizing with its exhausted audience, The Clock turns luridly hallucinatory – I still remember a sequence of impalement via levitating ornamental pyramid. As dawn broke, I jerked my head up from the flicker-lit sofa and saw Margaux crossing the room to relax in front. I left soon afterwards, almost felt like I needed to, to complete the moment. It was as if Marclay’s meticulous, monumental reworking had begun to synchronize the very universe.
Jacob Lusk & The R. Kelly All-Stars at Pop Montreal
I saw R. Kelly himself last year as well, and while if it was a screening rather than a performance, he did lead the audience in an a capella rendition of “I Believe I Can Fly,” after which we triumphantly ascended into paradise. Several months before that, however, Jacob Lusk left a more lingering mark on me by rescuing Kells from irony. Some subset of the fans who made Trapped in the Closet a mid-2000s Internet phenomenon gave the unsettling impression that they were laughing at its creator, as if a black R&B singer couldn’t possibly tell jokes he was in on. Eschewing that material for earlier cuts such as “Bump N’ Grind,” his pants evoking gaudy temple walls, Lusk paid Chicago’s horniest a giggly respect. The former American Idol contestant even got a very white, very Montreal crowd to two-step. It was fitting that he and his backing band (local indie types) dwelled on their inspiration’s gospel leanings, because the covers set was equally buoyant and reverent.
I Love Dick, by Chris Kraus (published 1997)
So far I’ve told “our” story twice, late last night, as fully as I could, to Fred Dewey and Sabrina Ott. It’s the story of 250 letters, my “debasement”, jumping headlong off a cliff. Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement? Why do women always have to come clean? The magnificence of Genet’s last great work, The Prisoner of Love, lies in his willingness to be wrong: a seedy old white guy jerking off on the rippling muscles of the Arabs and Black Panthers. Isn’t the greatest freedom in the world the freedom to be wrong? What hooks me on our story is our different readings of it. You think it’s personal and private; my neurosis. “The greatest secret in the world is, THERE IS NO SECRET.” Claire Parnet and Gilles Deleuze. I think our story is performative philosophy.
Not the world’s greatest, but a secret nonetheless: this book is, among other things, really fucking funny.
Shoshanna, woman of Girls
I think my appreciation of Lena Dunham’s one-woman WPA for cultural writers is more complicated than Carl’s or Margaux’s, but the pinkish anxiety cluster played by Zosia Mamet is one part I do love without ambivalence. Over the course of 2013′s second season, she developed from an innocent-naif caricature into this emphatically self-possessed neurotic, a comic persona that felt entirely new. You could see it in embryo last year, though, when Mamet’s timing was briskest or her awkwardness extra-expressive. I always think of the early scene where she’s watching some shitty reality series called Baggage, and Dunham cheerfully asks what her baggage would be (for that is the conceit of the show), and Shosh replies: “That I’m a virgin…obviously…” So much nervy restiveness in a single adverb.
The Capsule, a film by Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2012
For its high-fashion fantasy, its juxtaposition of Gothic cruelty and sudden dance sequences, but perhaps most of all for its pompadoured goats. (Hoofed animals are a B2TW year-end-list favourite.)
James Adomian at the Comedy Bar, Toronto
The list of male standup comedians I can watch talking about gender/sexuality/etc without cringing every few minutes is a lot shorter than the number who’ve made me chuckle at some point, so it was nice to expand the former last year. That’s partly because James Adomian is gay, I’m sure – he has a hilarious bit about homophobic beer ads co-opting straight women for their watery purposes – but not as much as every single profile of the guy suggests. His focus on impressions seems integral, in that he considers famous or memorable people not only as challenges of mechanical imitation but as cultural signifiers too. Mimicking Sam Elliott, Adomian captured both his laconic rumble and the pantomime of American masculinity it represents. (“He sounds like a dad who ate another dad.”) By the time he reached a virtuosic climax, channeling all the caricatured gay villains he loves – Kaa the python as reptilian Truman Capote, Vincent Price introducing his “curious associate” Raoul – I was laughing so often that it wasn’t really laughter at all, just an open-mouthed ache.
Carly Rae Jepsen, Kiss
The thing about getting involved with somebody from the Internet, as I did more than once last year, is that the situation foregrounds its own absurdities. (I don’t mean Internet dating, which is weird in its own way, just more standardized.) The thing about Carly Rae Jepsen’s album is, not to diminish indelible #1 2012 single “Call Me Maybe” or those sprinting strings, but it has nine other songs that are almost as good. The thing about those tracks was how their liminal relationships and uptempo uncertainty and omens of kisses all matched the cartoon emotions of romance filtered through social media, with its constant yet selective flow. And the thing about “This Kiss” is that it sounds like a marginally less horny “Little Red Corvette.” Before you came into my life I missed you so bad.
Building Stories, by Chris Ware
I mean, look at it:
A graphic novel is of course much more than its physical dimensions – and less, too, because Building Stories collects a decade of comics into 14 different segments of varying formats and possible configurations. Whatever narrative you form with them, it follows the lives of residents in the titular Chicago edifice, the structure itself, and one neurotic, sexually bipolar boy-bee. The central character is vivid enough to make her wistfulness infectious: a failed artist but fulfilled mother, only occasionally delusional, whose dark humour dwells on her imperfect body. The story she ends up writing is her own, a memoir pieced together from haltingly remembered moments, and I found it so moving that I tried to produce a minor tribute. You’ve just finished reading it.
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Filed under books, chris randle, comedy, comics, literature, movies, music, TV/video
Carl’s Tuesday Musics (belated): Jim Guthrie, “The Rest Is Yet to Come” (2013) (Animation by Dan Berry)
From the upcoming album Takes Time.
“Fire all the hired guns -
I know I’m not the only one.”
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Filed under carl wilson, music, Tuesday Musics, TV/video
Can We All Get Along!? (By Steve Kado)
Margaux Williamson: Steve Kado is one of my favourite artist people in town – who is sometimes not in town. He has startled and delighted me while standing on stage with a microphone and he is also very fun to talk to while not on stage. He doesn’t write often and I asked if he would write something for Back to the World. He sent a post from L.A.
By Steve Kado
My friends and I were driving from Los Angeles to Tijuana to go to an art opening. Everyone in the car was involved in art to different degrees. One of our number was actually in the show we were going down to see. Three were from Australia and New Zealand; I was/am from Toronto. In San Diego we picked up Scott, a genuine American, who was in town visiting his mom – normally he lives in the desert where he builds his own house and designs books. At the same time, that weekend, there was a massive manhunt on for Christopher Dorner, the disgruntled victim of discrimination and racism within the LAPD who had had enough and gone on a cop-killing shooting spree. Confusingly, he did not exclusively kill cops, but also family members of cops.
Being that everyone in the car was from the arts, news-awareness was not always a strong point. Also, some people were travelling in America, not residents or even one-time-residents, and we all know how hard it is to keep up with the news when you’re on vacation. Unable, somehow, to bear listening to any news on the radio, we heard no broadcasts or music and tried to discuss the issue amongst ourselves. Earlier I had read that manifesto Dorner wrote. I would say that it was very easy to be sympathetic to him until he got to the killing part, and especially when he broadened the killing part to include family members of cops.
We were fuzzy on the excesses of the LAPD reaction. We had all heard something to the effect that they had shot up several (one? two? three?) different trucks, all because they feared Dorner was inside. In every case they had been wrong – Dorner was not in either of the vehicles they did in fact shoot at, neither vehicle was the make, model or colour of Dorner’s, and in one case the occupants were not even the right gender or number, being instead two Latina women doing a paper route. The asymmetrical and seemingly random armed response by the police force towards “trucks” as a category did, regrettably, seem to support aspects of Dorner’s manifesto.
Reflecting on it all now, one must also say that the silence about what happened to the police officers who reacted so excessively towards widely varying vehicles and people (at least in the news I’m getting) leads one to believe that perhaps nothing has really changed since the Rodney King and Rampart division scandals that Dorner mentions in his screed.
The mantra-like repetition of the phrase “cop killer” by others in conversation, before the car trip and during, led to the first attempt to hear music – Amy put John Maus’ Cop Killer on her phone. Playing out of the tinny speakers, all we could hear over road noise was the incessant repetition of the phrase “cop killer.” Scott put on the Body Count song of the same title but somehow it didn’t stick, despite arguably being more relevant to the specific situation and police force in question. All that night and the next day we would gloomily intone, a la John Maus, those two words.
After the opening we went to a very democratic dancing area. All types, ages and sizes were out there, giving it to the parquet flooring. We got very drunk. Then, around 2 am, a group of men with camouflage balaclavas, assault rifles and (perversely) GoPro cameras strapped to their heads trooped in. Taking one look at our half-antipodean gang the armed men (who seemed to be police) decided that we were of no consequence to them. They proceeded to ignore us while many of the other patrons in the bar were spread out against the walls, searched, forced to empty their pockets and line everything they owned up in neat lines on the ground and other such things. Finding nothing of interest, the armed men left, the music came on again a bit louder than before and things continued as if nothing had happened.
Back in LA, days later, Travis and I are walking from the Gold Line up to his house on a hill in Lincoln Heights. Every yard on the street he lives on is fenced in and contains between 2-4 dogs. These dogs are never walked, vary widely in size and do nothing but run in their yards and bark. The first day I arrived and woke up at Travis’, the first living animal I saw was the chihuahua across the street vigorously humping the terrier across the street. Choral waves of barking follow the passage of anything human or mechanical up or down the street. Acoustically, it is close, for me, to hell. Tonight, however, the dogs are quiet. “Cop killer,” we confide to each other, awed by the night’s silence. Almost immediately, a slow moving police car cruises by, checking us out with its search light. Neither of us match the profile of Christopher Dorner: Travis is a six-foot-something white beanpole and I am a less tall half-Asian person wearing a large backpack with huge glasses. Neither of us is an ex-reservist, neither of us seems interested in killing cops. The cops drive off but then circle back a minute later, just to make sure that we haven’t somehow merged Voltron-style into a cop-killing ex-reservist.
Later that week, the entire saga came to an end. Dorner was killed in a fire started by incendiary smoke grenades lobbed into the mountain cabin that he was hiding out in. He shot at and killed some more police before the fire got him. This was, more or less, how we all expected this to end. Watching CNN’s coverage of the minute details of one of Dorner’s police victims’ funerals in a Vietnamese restaurant, Travis and I try and make sense of a military ritual where a horse is led around with a pair of boots lodged backwards in the stirrups. It looks like someone had been riding a horse backwards and then vanished, leaving their boots behind. Neither of us can hear the CNN anchors explaining this over the din of noodles and slurping that fill the air. Everything from the emergence of a disgruntled ex-cop on a killing spree to the excessive reaction of the police once threatened and the inevitable Waco-like showdown felt grimly pre-recorded. But no one told us about the boot-thing that would happen at the end.
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Filed under events, guest post, music, other, TV/video, visual art
Carl’s Tuesday Musics: Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band, “Hot Head” & “Ashtray Heart” (SNL 1980)
by Carl Wilson
For un-b2tw reasons last week I was looking for Captain Beefheart’s appearances on David Letterman in the early ’80s but then wondered if I could dig up this even rarer clip. Via a misleading for-devotees-only pitch-dark live clip, I landed here. Shhh. Both from Doc at the Radar Station, which unfashionably might be my favourite Beefheart record, no doubt just because it’s got the new/no-wave-vertical-horizontal-flip-nervy-shakes that are my personal national rhythm. And maybe a lyrical economy compared to what he was doing in the previous decade.
For those who don’t know Capt. Beefheart, maybe it just sounds perfectly banal by now, and not like something illegal is happening on your TV.
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Filed under carl wilson, music, Tuesday Musics, TV/video
Carl’s Tuesday Musics (on Wednesday): Young Snakes (Aimee Mann), Me & the Girls (demo), 1981
by Carl Wilson
Ever since I talked about her in my best-of list last week, Aimee Mann references have seemed to turn up everywhere, by my skewed definition of “everywhere”: She was on WTF with Marc Maron telling a seriously fucked-up story about her childhood, and she had a song last weekend on Girls. Then today a friend posted on Facebook, “When I die, I will probably come back as a lesser Aimee Mann album.” I went to look at a list of Aimee Mann albums to figure out which would be the lesser ones, and it included something called Bark Along with the Young Snakes from 1982. This turns out to be an EP put out by Mann’s pre-Til Tuesday band, a kind of experimental post-punk trio that built up a small Boston following, then quit in frustration. And next I found this song. (There are more if you look.) Happy Aimee Mann Week.
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Filed under carl wilson, music, Tuesday Musics, TV/video
Carl’s Baker’s Dozen of Things He Loved in 2012, Not Previously Discussed Here, in Alphabetical Order
By Carl Wilson
The slogan of B2TW is “Untimely Talk About Culture,” so while we like doing year-end best-of lists, we like to wait a while with them, like till after Chinese New Year so everyone’s more on the same page. Sorry that’s so inconvenient for Christmas shopping. Margaux posted hers last week, Carl’s is today, and Chris’s will be next week. Hope you enjoy.
1. BackStory podcast
I’m pleased this list begins with maybe the geekiest thing on it – what’s more, not produced in any conventional cultural capital but at the University of Virginia.
The M.O. of the weekly podcast and public-radio show BackStory is simple: It seizes on a topic in the recent news (or an occasion such as Thanksgiving or the election) and squeezes it through the wringer of American history. The chatty and casual hosts are three UV history professors, the “American History Guys”: “18th-Century Guy,” “19th-Century Guy” and “20th-Century Guy.” The latter has the rawest deal because the other two are kinda automatically fascinating. Though they are all white men, they invite female historians most often as their guest experts and they are highly conscious of the racial dimension of American history, as how could you not be.
Drugs, gun control, voting, infectious disease, the postal service, attempts to control the weather, presidential inaugurations, courtship, public education – just start with whatever most gets your attention. You will find out that colonial Americans were basically drunk all the time and Christmas was illegal. You will fill up your store of “Did you know?” stories for any dull moment in conversation. And you will be trained painlessly in historical thinking: that it was never “ever thus,” that most stories have so many sides that they are smooth ungraspable spheres and that common knowledge is often neither. This should comfort you in the bleakest moments and vice-versa.
2. Borgen, Season 1 (TV series, Denmark, 2010)
The glut of great Danish television is no secret by now; the country seems to be picking up from HBO’s 2000s in the 2010s. This drama about Birgitte Noyberg, who nearly by accident becomes the first Danish female prime minister (which proved prescient), is tense, enlightened, funny and human. The acting is as good as the furniture and the political analysis better than most journalism. (“Borgen” means “the Castle,” which is what Danes call the main government building.) The episode in which Noyberg has to deal with a scandal in Greenland – which is basically to Denmark what Nunavut is to Canada – treated aboriginal issues more perceptively than I could ever hope for on a Canadian series. It was wrenching.
3. Dead Authors Podcast, Chapter 12, with Laraine Newman and Paul F. Tompkins
Character comedian Paul F. Tompkins is the single funniest person to hear on any of the endless flood of comedy podcasts that come from L.A. now. I was disappointed at first with this literary-history series, in which the conceit is that H.G. Wells (Tompkins) uses his time machine to kidnap writers from the past (played by other comedians) and interview them in the 21st century. It seemed flat and mumbly early on. But then I heard this episode, with a live audience, and with first-generation Saturday Night Live comedian Laraine Newman impersonating Mary Shelley, discussing feminism and Frankenstein and what pricks the Romantics were. And more recently, the latest one with Jen Kirkman gender-bending into the role of Abbie Hoffman going on endlessly about “pigs.” Again, with a live audience.
It seems difficult to do really good improvisation without an audience or at least more participants – it’s difficult to keep a two-person feedback loop going in a vacuum unless you are Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, or having sex (or both). In any case I love the tension between mockery and respect here. Kids would get more out of books in school if we told them their writers were not only great but also nuts, and had lives that were amazing and also ridiculous. Just like theirs.
4. James R. Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment (published 2005)
I’m excited about the upcoming first book by my friend John Shaw in Seattle, which is about the intertwined histories and meanings of the songs This Land is Your Land and God Bless America. He told me many times that Evening in the Palace of Reason is the best book about music he ever read. This summer, I finally started it, on a stay at my friend Julia’s cottage. I read it all night and all day; I don’t think I even stopped to go swimming.
Like John’s book, it’s a double-threaded story: It weaves together the backgrounds of two Prussian dynasties, the Bach family and the Hohenzollern line of rulers, leading of course to J.S. and Frederick the Great, climaxing in the famous “Musical Offering” in which Bach composed a series of ever-more-complex fugues on a theme supplied by the hobbyist-musician king (which Frederick had assumed would be impossible).
You might see why I didn’t rush to read it when John suggested it.
But it’s about so much more. For one thing Frederick’s father and grandfather were insane assholes – his grandfather, for instance, literally had a collection of “giants,” tall men whom he had abducted from their home villages and held captive so that he could fetishistically enjoy watching them walk up and down the courtyard. The Bachs were strange in a whole other set of ways. And James R. Gaines has the most compulsively readable prose on Earth. But along the way he also makes subtle arguments about the relationships between faith, art and the Enlightenment. I think the implication is that art is a bit like A.A.: It doesn’t have to be a god, but it helps to serve a power higher than the self.
5. Title cards of Girls, designed by Howard Nourmand
There are many other things I could name to admire about Lena Dunham’s inexhaustibly discussable HBO show – Adam Driver’s performance and character arc is the first to come to mind for me; Margaux pointed out several others – but they all coalesce at the beginning of each episode when after some pungent set-up, the screen clears and we see, for a brief moment, the stark colour-on-colour card that says GIRLS.
It has so many simultaneous pleasures. I can think of one for each letter.
G: It respects the way we often watch television now, in multi-episode saved-up or downloaded or streamed bunches of episodes, which means you don’t want to sit through some long credit sequence repeatedly. (When I rewatched all of The Sopranos in the early winter – it held up remarkably well by the way – I couldn’t fast-forward through the credits quickly enough, even though I love that theme song.)
I: Instead it’s like a silent-film title card, a cheap solution, a low-tech necessity. It could be held up on a square of construction paper. Girls does have a silent-comedy feel, if a silent film were really, really talkative; Lena Dunham is a little like Charlie Chaplin, if Charlie Chaplin were naked all the time. It’s a rebuke to the expectation of realism, a tip of the bowler to the potential for farce.
R: Of course it’s also a hashtag-style punchline to whatever’s just happened or is about to happen: Hannah is eating a cupcake in the shower? #girls. Shoshana is describing a reality show where people reveal their “baggage” and saying hers would be “that I’m a virgin of course”? #girls. Or, best, Ray and Charlie, rehearsing their stupid indie band, ransack Hannah and Marnie’s apartment and steal Hannah’s diary? #girls. It’s self-deprecating and disarming but simultaneously sardonic, kissing the stereotype off blithely.
L: It’s oddly soothing and utopian. The colour contrasts pulse like an orb from space or a Brian Eno iPhone app or a pricey sex toy. This goes nicely with the theme music, composed as far as I can figure out by Michael Penn (Sean’s brother btw), which is just slightly more elaborate than the sound your computer makes when it powers up. So it is like the show, like Girls as a technology, is powering up. (On Windows the startup sound was of course itself composed with Brian Eno.)
S: Finally, there’s also a cumulative effect: The trivial-but-felt suspense of wondering what the colours will be this week. The instant-dopamine rush of familiarity and celebration: Yes, it’s here, it’s on, it’s that time again, the all-too-short season has not ended. And the anticipatory awareness that soon you will be echoing it in some conversation or another: “Did you watch this week’s G I R L S yet?”
Here’s a nice set of pictures from the designers showing all the stages they went through to get there. I don’t like a single one of them better.
6. Aimee Mann, Charmer
In the past I’ve always liked but perhaps underrated Aimee Mann, former singer for 80s Boston synth-pop band ‘Til Tuesday, married to the aforementioned Michael Penn, and composer of the main music for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. I might have compared her unfavourably for instance to Sam Phillips, who makes equally pretty (you’ve likely heard her sighing la-la’s on Gilmore Girls or more recently Bunheads) but more obviously barbed and painful songs. But this album kept resurfacing and insisting on itself, at a time when I wasn’t even listening to that much music.
I liked the theme that runs through it, of either being or dealing with the charming person, who may or may not also be a functional or decent person. I’d become aware that Mann is friends with a lot of comedians I admire, and I could detect a comic knowingness in the voice of her writing, almost as if each piece were a sketch. But most of all, and this is odd because I never say this, it was the craftsmanship of it – the way that each proficient melody was fitted perfectly to the words, and rhyme to rhyme, and structure to theme. It’s like a meal of fresh ingredients perfectly cooked, though there’s nothing exotic about the dishes. Just exquisite care, to be savoured.
Yet you didn’t hear people talk about it the way they talked about, say, Grimes (whose video for Oblivion would be on this list if I hadn’t mentioned it on this site already – I hope it wins the new Prism Prize for Canadian videos next week). This is the curse of the mid-career artist these days and I think even more so the female mid-career artist. That’s the not-so-funny joke behind the Portlandia sketch in which Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein hire Mann as their cleaning lady, keep telling her what big fans they are, but then keep scolding her for how she does the laundry.
It’s good to see her comedy friends helping her out in real life though, as when Tom Scharpling directed the videos for Charmer, including the one for “Labrador,” which remakes shot-for-shot the minor-80s-iconic Til Tuesday video “Voices Carry,” featuring among others Mad Men’s Jon Hamm.
7. Kacey Musgraves, “Merry Go Round” (from the upcoming album Same Trailer, Different Park)
From a veteran singer-songwriter to a great newcomer: My friend Jody Rosen turned me on to the wordplay and emotional wallop of Nashville’s Kacey Musgraves last year – “Merry Go Round” was a minor radio hit this fall, and her first major-label album is just about to come out in March. I had hoped Taylor Swift might mature into this kind of voice as she grew up, which doesn’t really look to be happening. But Musgraves simply begins from there, doing with country music what it often seems only country music can – address white people who have much more to worry about than “white people problems.”
(Or so I say in the middle of this very damn white list. There are a couple of exceptions coming up, but just wanted you to know that, yeah, I see it.)
8. The Music Box: A Shantytown Sound Laboratory, New Orleans
This I mentioned quickly on B2TW in the summer but it deserves note again. You know the old line that writing about music is like dancing about architecture? Here’s the architecture you can dance to. A collective led by street artist Swoon and others turned a set of dilapidated structures (not exactly hard to come by in New Orleans) into a playable, amplified, megaphoned, wind-driven, synthesized, climbable, jammable, avant-gardable, neighbour-kid-interactable structure called the Music Box, on a none-too-affluent NOLA block. It was full of horns you could blow into and weather vanes that played chimes and organs and drums and looping devices embedded in all kinds of crannies. I visited it the last day it was open and wished I could spend many more days there with the local children and teens who were enchanted with it and the vital spirits who built it. Luckily, though it’s over, it’s not over: The Dithyramblina , like the Hacienda, must yet be built.
9. Eddie Pepitone at the Dark Comedy Festival, Toronto
I could name instead Maria Bamford’s set at the same festival, which was a lot like her amazing special that she performs for just her parents; or Kathleen Phillips volunteering as a foul-mouthed sacrificial “virgin” in a lame Satanic ritual in a Halloween comedy show at Double Double Land, but I have talked a lot about those two hilarious women. Eddie Pepitone was new to me this year. Not sure how that happened, it just did.
And I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so cripplingly continuously – while being moved and politically challenged and thinking about psychoanalysis and the entertainment-industrial complex, and slightly frightened because he would bomb out into the crowd to sit in any empty seat and heckle himself (because who else could heckle him so effectively?) and I had an empty seat beside me – in my life. I could try to repeat jokes to you but that never works. Pepitone also had a very affecting interview on the Marc Maron podcast, talking about his mother’s mental illness and his father’s frustrated ambition and growing up on Staten Island. I’d like to see the documentary about him, The Bitter Buddha.
10. Jerzy Pilch, My First Suicide, translated by David Frick (Polish 2006, English 2012)
A stroke of serendipity: John Darnielle (aka the Mountain Goats) mentioned Polish novelist Jerzy Pilch on Facebook one day last spring, and I asked him which book he’d recommend. He told me a different one, but literally a day or two later there was a charity book sale at work and this was there for $5. I read it the next weekend on a beach.
This is basically the biography of the viewpoint character – apparently autobiographical though the deviations are difficult to plot – in linked short stories, in what turns out to be the distinct counterculture of Calvinist Poland – like Garcia Marquez, but with Eastern European dour humour, he creates an entire world.
And then he tears it down, with a crash of vodka bottles, deactivated cellphones and dubious liaisons. The only lesson one could take from it is never grow up.
But it is fiction that is indelibly itself, with a voice that gets right into your duodenum and I will read anything he writes that I can find. The lesson I take from that is, sometimes you get lucky.
11. Three dances on the This American Life live special, The Invisible Made Visible
Last May the Chicago radio show did a live concert that was simulcast into theatres all over the continent. I couldn’t make it to any of the screenings but I downloaded the show later. There are lots of nice things in it but three great ones, all dances: Ira Glass was inspired to do the show because he sensed his audience would love the blend of virtuosity and clumsy dailiness in the work of choreographer Monica Bill Barnes, but of course he couldn’t put a dance company on the radio. This turns out to have been a very smart instinct: I’m no dance expert but I’ve seldom seen anything (though Toronto choreographer Ame Henderson’s work with Public Recordings comes close) that posed such effective solutions to the issues of the form’s artificiality – an artificiality that we desire because it’s beautiful, but might also find irrelevant because it is rareified. One Barnes dance here was based on audience behaviour at a James Brown concert; the other involved having a lot of cardboard suitcases being stacked by and then thrown at a dancer. (I took it to be about moving house.) They were gorgeous and funny and breathed a recognizable flavour of air. I told a friend they felt like a Trampoline Hall lecture in dance form. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.
The other dance was by David Rakoff (who was from Toronto by the way) talking about the cancer that cost him the ability to dance, and then doing it anyway. This performance is already kind of famous. He died not long later and a lot of people who didn’t know him are still heartbroken about that, including me.
12. Reggie Watts at the Mod Club, JFL42 festival, Toronto, Sept. 21, 2012
A continuing theme of the comedy-related items here is that I am not quite sure how to write about them. I can do it in the immediate wake of those experiences, but retrospectively they have an elusive quality. That’s both more and less true of Reggie Watts. In a sense I am on firmer ground with him because he’s also a musician, but what happened in his show was hard to keep track of even while it was happening – he would begin speaking about soda or about some street name he saw that day, and it would become this involuted R&B riff and a keyboard solo and then a falsetto rap about the constellations. He is a virtuoso in a form that doesn’t exist until he creates it, and then demolishes it. Like the best comedy and in a way the best music, it is at once profoundly intellectual and boldly stupid. The best way I can communicate it I think is to let you watch his TED Talk, which also operates very gratifyingly as a demolition job on the whole once-promising and now-bloated phenomenon of the TED Talk.
13. Your Sister’s Sister, a movie by Lynn Shelton, 2012
I guess I didn’t see that many movies in 2012, considering that I have only seen one of the nominees for Best Picture in the Oscars next week. But one that stuck with me is this film written and directed by Lynn Shelton, who made the quizzical but compelling Humpday, also starring Mark Duplass, in 2009. Her ken for sexual farce is carried forward here but into a much darker, sadder place. The funny thing is that there are things terribly wrong with this movie, including at least one chokingly bad and unbelievable twist on which the whole story hinges and a resolution that seems completely pat and again hard to swallow considering the ordeal the film’s just put you through. But the acting and the dialogue in the rest of the film make that completely unimportant. Duplass, Emily Blunt and my current favourite actor in the world, Rosemarie DeWitt, are completely present and incarnate in every frame and every second of their inappropriate triangulation, such that I felt like I was breathing and aching right in rhythm with them. The story is minute and intimate and dwells on the completely central but not-often-enough-grappled-sincerely-with subject of how people can be remotely decent to each other when they need so much and are so basically fucked up from the first dice toss. I almost wonder if the hard-to-credit happy ending is simply a vote on the side of, “Let’s say we can, even if that’s probably a lie, because otherwise, ouch.” Which is a violation of logic and form and honesty that I will take from a movie, if it’s already convinced me we are copacetic. How are you supposed to end a story, anyway? It’s always a feint. True stories don’t really end so much as stop. Like this.
Filed under books, carl wilson, comedy, dance, lectures, literature, movies, music, other, TV/video
List of Cultural Remembrances from the Year of The Dragon
by Margaux Williamson
1. Trickster Makes This World (2010) – book by Lewis Hyde
Best book ever, man. Lewis Hyde examines the origin stories of hunger, rule breaking and loopholes from different cultures all over the world. I would call it invaluable – and dense. For some reason I didn’t think I would like it, so I read the chapters that seemed most interesting, then I started from the beginning and read the whole thing again, losing it twice along the way. I could say a lot about it, but mainly, if I knew you, I would buy it for you. The subject matter of “tricksters” might seem specific, but this book is far-reaching and deep. And rigorous.
Because the book looks to so many different cultures, it inevitably seems to create a new one - but because the subject matter is about corrupting what becomes too immovable, this new world culture doesn’t feel oppressive, it just feels older and wiser and full of troublemakers who are here to help.
2. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1975) – a memoir by Maxine Hong Kingston
Trickster Makes This World cited the work of a lot of people I love and am familiar with, like Marcel Duchamp, Allen Ginsberg and Frederick Douglass, but also one I didn’t know – Maxine Hong Kingston. I ended up picking up her book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts shortly after reading Trickster Makes This World. The voice of the book is angry and uncertain, the heroine trying to figure out what is real from the old world or the new world, from inside her house or outside. It’s like she is throwing her arms and legs around to figure out what the actual boundaries are, and in doing so, finds the new framework of her specific world. It is epic and intimate.
According to Wikipedia, the book:
…has maintained a “vexed reception history that both attests to its popularity and questions it.” Much of the debate concerns issues dealing with “autobiographical accuracy, cultural authenticity, and ethnic representativeness,” while the critical center of the battle is whether or not Kingston offers a faithful representation of Chinese culture and of Chinese-Americans.
The book was criticized by the American writer Frank Chin for being “unChinese” and “a fake” and by the Chinese American writer Jeffery Paul Chan for being called non-fiction and for belittling Chinese-American experiences.
Both criticisms brought to mind another captivating and subversive book I read this year: I Love Dick (1997) by Chris Kraus, a book that attracted similar criticisms from male colleagues but did well to wait for the younger critics, as seen in this really good essay on the author by Elizabeth Gumport. Here’s a passage from I Love Dick that Gumport quotes in her piece:
Because most “serious” fiction, still, involves the fullest possible expression of a single person’s subjectivity, it’s considered crass and amateurish not to “fictionalize” the supporting cast of characters, changing names and insignificant features of their identities. The “serious contemporary hetero-male novel” is a thinly veiled Story of Me, as voraciously consumptive as all of patriarchy. While the hero/anti-hero explicitly is the author, everybody else is reduced to “characters.” . . .
When women try to pierce this false conceit by naming names because our “I”s are changing as we meet other “I”s, we’re called bitches, libelers, pornographers, and amateurs.
Well said, Chris Kraus.
3. The animated movies of Studio Ghibli at Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox
Greatest art pleasure of the year: a month-long program of Studio Ghibli animated movies at the TIFF cinemas during the spring. For movies that continuously touch on the battle between nature living and dead, there is no better venue than a warm theatre in a cold Toronto March.
4. Idle No More
It’s been amazing to see the different Canadian Aboriginal communities move together for the Idle No More protests across the country. It made me think of the smallest and the biggest gestures of trying to right wrongs and change your neighbourhood or the world. Small things like – I took a Canadian art history course once with a professor named Lynda Jessup. Maybe assuming we had already had our fill of the Group of 7 and their nature, Lynda Jessup taught us about the dead Catholic nun paintings (doesn’t count as vanity if you get your portrait done after death) from the early white colonialists, and then went straight to contemporary First Nations, Inuit and Métis art. Her course program gave me a sense that Canada was more exciting than it would lead you to believe. I felt grateful for it, and to other small and big gestures from friends and groups like the ImagineNATIVE Film Festival where I’ve seen great and surprising things including, this past year, Alanis Obomsawin’s movie The People of the Kattawapiskak River, about the Attawapiskat housing crisis, which I wrote about here.
5. All the wrong people telling all the right stories
I started the year off reading Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) on my Kindle – about a poor young white boy and an escaped slave’s adventures around the Mississippi river in the mid-19th-century . Somehow, Ernest Hemingway’s critique of the book had always stuck in my head. Hemingway said it was the greatest American novel, the novel that all other American novels come from, except for the horrible few last chapters , which no one should read. Though I hadn’t read Huckleberry Finn, I assumed Hemingway was wrong – maybe out of a random but sturdy loyalty to Mark Twain that must have ignited when I put on a Mark Twain wig and mustache at age ten for a school play.
Hemingway wasn’t wrong. Huckleberry Finn is a remarkable book and I wanted very much to cut out the last chapters and grind them down in my compost and let the worms eat them.
Suddenly feeling closer to Ernest Hemingway, I finally read his beautiful The Sun Also Rises about an American in Spain saying something about America. A book that made me feel that my alcohol consumption is totally moderate. Which echoed in my mind as I later read Ben Lerner’s beautiful novel Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) about a more contemporary man in Spain who is there to write something about Spain but then says something about America. A book that made me feel that my drug consumption was totally moderate.
But back to Huckleberry Finn; those terrible last chapters of Huckelberry Finn, and the great majority of chapters, kept thoughts of appropriation, political engagement and entertainment in my mind all year – thoughts heightened by good movies like Beasts of the Southern Wild (made by Benh Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar), Django Unchained (made by Quentin Tarantino) and The Paperboy (made by Lee Daniels). What those movies have in common with each other and with Huckleberry Finn is the Deep South, complicated appropriation of voice, and a desire to go towards pleasure, beauty, fantasy and heroes within stories that are fundamentally painful.
Appropriation is always a complicated issue. For me personally for instance, I always wish more men wrote in women’s voices. Though of course people are bound to get things terribly wrong, it’s hard not to see an empathy or loyalty develop to characters you work hard to identify with. Which suddenly makes me remember some interesting articles by Sarah Bakewell on Montaigne that ran in the Guardian last year (oh! now I see it’s a book). To sum up her summing up Montaigne: “Once you have seen the world from someone else’s perspective, it becomes harder to torture, hunt, or kill them.”
I heard Kevin Hegge, who made the movie She Said Boom: The Story of Fifth Column about the all-woman Toronto rock band, be asked on the radio this past year if he had been hesitant about directing a movie that was so much about women’s voices. He said he tries very hard not to take offense at the assumption that a woman directing would have been uncomplicated. There are women who are not feminists, he said, continuing: I am a feminist – a feminist needed to direct this movie.
video still of artist and musician G.B. Jones from “She Said Boom: The Story of Fifth Column”
I think that’s what he said. I didn’t write it down.
6. Behavioral science: B.F. Skinner wasn’t totally wrong
Speaking of Montaigne trying to see things from other cultural perspectives (but mainly trying to imagine what his cat was thinking), behavioral science came back in fashion this year, or at least it seemed so to me after reading David H. Freedman’s article The Perfected Self, which lingered in my mind long after reading it. I always kind of liked B.F. Skinner, having picked up his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity because I thought the title was funny, but ending up really appreciating it and B.F. Skinner along the way. This was all in my mind as I read Jane McGonigal’s book Reality is Broken about how gamers have this sense that reality is broken because reality feels so much less meaningful and rewarding than video games. Though the book contains matter-of-fact lines like “we know regular life is meaningless, so …”, it’s a somewhat hilariously practical approach to thinking about how humans can change their behavior.
7. Dante’s Inferno (around 1320)
I had no idea how gentle and completely captivating this book was. I loved especially the first realm of hell, Limbo. It felt like a best-of, having all the people in history unlucky to be born just before Jesus. Even apart from finding Homer, Penthesilea, Orpheus, Plato and Euclid there, it felt so familiar. Dante’s empathy with the sufferers he came upon as he carried on through the realms of hell made you really feel sad that the work isn’t part of the bible.
Loved this painting this year:
St. Anthony Beaten by Devils, panel from the Altarpiece of the Eucharist, 1423-26 (oil on panel) / by Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni di Consolo) (c.1392-1450)
Also loved this one by Chris Ofili that stayed in my head all year:
Chris Ofili / Lover’s rock – guilt
8. We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011) – movie by Lynne Ramsay
With some of the movies I mentioned above, I thought about the function of fantasy and entertainment in regards to painful political situations. For instance, Mark Twain’s attempt at a happy ending for a story that is contained firmly within the time of slavery. Or Quentin Tarantino with Django Unchained, staging a story two years before slavery ends, adding to the story a triumphant ending no less - Tarantino getting as close to hope and a hero as one could possibly fantasize about. I couldn’t help but imagine the opposite movie, a movie not about the near end of American slavery but about the beginning, a story that would feel centuries away from hope – how impossible it would be. How it hurts to even imagine. How not like the movies it would feel. I thought about these things in positive terms, not just as though it’s dumb or dangerous to find delicious and pleasurable stories to tell within the worst stories that we have, but also that it serves a purpose.
The movie that stayed with me most in this way this year was Lynne Ramsay‘s We Need to Talk About Kevin. I had never thought of the genre of reckless-feminist-fantasy movie (in this case, a shifting-of-perspectives fantasy contained within a nightmare situation). But this seemingly effortless masterpiece is now my favourite of the genre. I’ll write more about it soon.
9. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011) – book by Stephen Greenblatt
Speaking of happy endings to the worst stories we have, Stephen Greenblatt wrote a brilliant book that I somehow couldn’t put down, about a book hunter and a book that may have greatly contributed to the undoing the spell of the centuries-long dark ages. He tells the story of Poggio Bracciolini, a book hunter and papal secretary from the 15th century who found the poet Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, a work written in the first century BC in service of Epicurean ideas. Lucretius’ work includes explanations of atoms, evolution and returning to the ground when you die. The Swerve flies from the 15th century back to the collapse of the Roman Empire, forward to the Renaissance, back to the dark ages and forward again to *spoiler* Thomas Jefferson. Within all the most painful stories about where humans can go and how long they can stay there, it tells the best story – the one about how one beautiful book saved the world.
10. Lena Dunham’s television show Girls
Lena Dunham’s television series Girls is great - as many people have said and many have disagreed with. I love that virgin character and her virgin-lover.
All the criticism about the lack of people of colour on the show was true, but so strange in comparison with all the other popular shows by white men that leave everyone out. It made me think that maybe white men are still universal and white women are still just white women.
Or maybe the creators’ casually audacious attempt to be universal with the title “Girls” but be so so specific in content is what brought on the attention. But maybe that’s good. Maybe we can add it to the pile of universal specifics that is getting more interesting by the day. We can know it as Lena Dunham’s Girls, right there next to Rye Rye’s Hardcore Girls, next to these true crime hardcore girls, next to my sweet little nieces (who are girls).
Since I’m suddenly lost in the subject of girls, let’s go to Honey Boo Boo child and recognize that she, Alana, is a powerful child-pageant contestant who is destroying the perverse realm of learned femininity and child sexuality from within. On television, she gets to use her own words rather than speaking the words that someone in an office far away wrote for her. She might not be writing her own scenes yet, but she’s in control of the dialogue and she’s pretty great at dialogue.
Also – thank you Tina Fey, and good job The Mindy Project. The thing you notice about women making their own television shows is that the men on television get a lot more interesting.
Back to Lena Dunham’s Girls. The most criticism I saw for the show seemed to initially come out of New York. It’s hard to do something in your hometown I guess. And maybe the story of second-generation artists and trust-fund kids running around in the city without looking out at the world is a more embarrassing story than the one New York used to be able to tell. But you got to use what you’ve got. When the neighbourhood changes, the story changes.
11. Speaking of using what you’ve got: Friends in my Toronto neighbourhood
Darren O’Donnell continues to be one of the most interesting artists around, with his and others’ Mammalian Diving Reflex (“Ideal Entertainment for the End of the World”) and the band of teenagers The Torontonians growing in art and skill.
Lynn Crosbie, who wrote one of my favourite essays this year about violence in movies, continued to devastate and bring the sun in with her beautiful book Life is About Losing Everything.
And Sheila Heti, whose latest book I acted in, continues to get much-deserved rave reviews like this really smart one from Joanna Biggs of the London Review of Books.
Etc. Etc.
* Honourable mentions: Los Angeles – you are so beautiful in January. Attack the Block - you were as good as E.T.
Filed under books, comedy, literature, margaux williamson, movies, TV/video, visual art
Carl’s Tuesday Musics: Marker Starling, “Author”
by Carl Wilson
Marker Starling is Toronto’s Chris Cummings, who recorded a series of great albums of “visual music” under the monicker Mantler until jazz musician Michael Mantler (apparently taking out whatever were his own frustrations over his stature in the world as he approached 70) threatened this little-known Canadian artist with legal action and forced him to adopt a new name. No matter, no matter, the beauty carries on, with Cummings’ ownmost amalgam of smooth R&B, disco, organ music, sex and poetry. Just stand back and gape at this opening acrobatic sequence:
Like a face bears a noble expression, it’s not the words you love, it’s the voice of the author. It’s not the story spoken, but the impression furnished.
In dusky theatres of old, in auditoriums dark with age, the speeches actors would unfold, the poems fluttering from the stage: garlands of love, daggers of hate, waistcoats and gloves, prop pieces of eight, fiery hues for burning at stake.
Better pay your union dues: They’ll write a part for you.
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Filed under carl wilson, music, poetry, Tuesday Musics, TV/video
