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justforbooks · 3 years

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In Ian McEwan’s 1987 novel The Child in Time, Stephen, a children’s author, is rebuked by his scientist friend Thelma for his lack of interest in theoretical physics. “Shakespeare would have grasped wave functions, Donne would have understood complementarity and relative time,” she chides him. “But you ‘arts’ people, you’re not only ignorant of these magnificent things, you’re rather proud of knowing nothing.” She laughs at him for imagining modernism – “modernism!” – is anything more than a “passing local fashion” compared to the wonders of modern science.

It is a position with which McEwan clearly has some sympathy – Enduring Love (1997), Saturday (2005) and Solar (2010) are intensely interested in psychiatry, neuroscience and climate science respectively, though not so much in modernism. In his tenth novel, Edward St Aubyn is similarly determined to show that he has diligently digested a decade’s worth of Nature journal. Double Blind is a cerebral, large-canvas novel about a loose group of upper-class friends engaged in neuroscience, genetics and ecology. It seems to offer a riposte to Thelma’s arguments, 34 years later.

At the novel’s heart is a touchy defence of Freudian psychoanalysis – which of course formed the subsoil from which that “passing local fashion” for modernism grew, and which St Aubyn feels has been unfairly maligned by hard-science types. St Aubyn himself went through years of psycho-analysis, as did his most famous character, Patrick Melrose, who is raped at the age of five by his father in Never Mind (1992), the first novel in the Melrose quintet. It’s no coincidence that Patrick’s best friend is a psychoanalyst, nor that the characters who express cynicism towards the practice are usually the most loathsome.

Throughout Double Blind, there is a distinct thread of nostalgia for the “anecdotal end of science” – for science as a gentlemanly business of simile and symbolism, language and narrative. There are two scientists of this sort at the novel’s heart. One is the avuncular psychoanalyst, Martin Carr, who is frustrated by the limitation of modern approaches to schizophrenia, which lean too much on anti-psychotic drugs. We see these problems manifest in his patient, a young, working-class man called Sebastian, who suffers violent episodes of mental illness but who benefits from Martin’s attentiveness to his disordered language.

The novel’s hero, though, is Martin’s prospective son-in-law, Francis, a philosophically minded, mid-30-something naturalist, who is working to rewild the private land of some enlightened aristocrats. Francis’s quiet wisdom, big-brain and “impressive calm” in the kitchen have charmed Martin’s adopted daughter, Olivia, a biologist writing a book about epigenetics. Her best friend from Oxford University, Lucy, has been head-hunted by an ex-hedge-funder Hunter Sterling, who wants her to run his new venture capital firm, Digitas. Hunter – a Westminster School alumnus with a raging drug habit – has made investments in biotech, AI and robotics, but also wants to get into philanthropy. “For a man as rich as him to show his face in society without a Foundation would be like a construction worker not having a hard hat on a building site,” writes St Aubyn – and that’s one of the novel’s better similes.

As Double Blind veers between jet-setting farce and musings on recent issues of Current Biology, it soon becomes clear that St Aubyn’s main objective is to critique the exalted position of hard science – using his characters as mouthpieces. Martin’s pet peeve is that hard science denigrates the “fanciful realm of emotion… symbolic language, psychological conditioning and cultural context” in favour of “the proper objects of scientific enquiry: brain mapping and biochemistry”. As the novel’s title suggests, St Aubyn has some beef with funding, peer review, publication and the randomised double-blind placebo control trial, an experiment in which both doctor and patients are unaware whom has been given a placebo and whom the real drug. This model has long been held up as the “gold standard” of scientific research as it supposedly eliminates bias. However, those who thrive within this culture, argues St Aubyn, are no less biased or corrupted than the “arts” people; they are “rotten by their own ‘double blind’ standards”.

Ask many scientists and they will complain about the shortcomings of academic publishing, funding models and so on. But is corruption as endemic as St Aubyn seems to think it is? I’m not so sure – and St Aubyn isn’t the writer I’d trust to explore it anyway. He seems too nostalgic for the days when science was just about viable as an aristocratic leisure pursuit.

To make his case, he repeatedly returns to the importance of “symbolic language” and how scientists don’t understand metaphor. All except our hero, Francis. As he ponders the nature of awareness, he reflects on how his own mind “continually generated metaphors to remind himself of a natural state that should have come, well, more naturally, but in his case, came with a caravan of similes and arguments”. It’s a peculiar line of argument (as well as a peculiar metaphor). Science is hardly devoid of symbolic language. I do not pretend to understand string theory, but I assume that it involves metaphorical rather than literal string. The irony of St Aubyn’s defence of symbolic language, though, is that his own metaphors and similes are howlingly bad.

At one point, Francis compares “Occam’s Razor, the minimalist aesthetic that was supposed to adjudicate over intellectual life for the rest of time” to “a fashion editor in a black pencil skirt who simply refuses to retire, decade after decade, despite the screams of protest from an art department longing for a little moment of baroque excess and a splash of colour”. I’m sorry, what? When Lucy discovers, a few days into her new job, that she has a brain tumour, she thinks it’s “like being raped while you’re in a coma and only finding out when you see the CCTV footage”. Is it really? Must we imagine the uncommon horror of being raped in a coma to appreciate the shock of being diagnosed with a brain tumour? I began to flinch every time I saw the word “like”.

In the spirit of scientific enquiry, I reached for the Melrose books to run the same test again. St Aubyn’s best similes are exhilarating in their precision. “Dull, dissolute, and obscure [club] members felt buoyed up by this atmosphere of power, as little dinghies bob up and down on their moorings when a big yacht sails out of the harbour they have shared.” Vodka cracks ice in a glass, “like a spine in the hands of a confident osteopath”. However, many others feel lazy. A pompous, overweight man looks “like a hippopotamus with hypertension”. When David Melrose is drugged, “The armchair felt like a cheese fondue.”

St Aubyn has said that he can have “20 or 30 goes” at a sentence before it’s any good – except dialogue, which comes more naturally. I don’t believe he has had 20 or 30 goes at any sentence in Double Blind. And I wish he had gone several more rounds with his dialogue, which feels stagy and forced, like a Tom Stoppard play reworked by Dan Brown. In one scene, Hunter arrives unannounced at Francis’s cottage by helicopter and, over a caviar lunch, Olivia compares the “circular” arguments of scientists trying to prove the genetic causes of schizophrenia as “like a wagon formation protecting beleaguered dogma”. Olivia, Lucy and Francis may have zeitgeisty concerns – rewilding, psychedelics, epigenetics – but none of them sound like any mid-30-somethings around today. The women, supposedly great scientific minds, aren’t allowed do anything with them; they seem little different to the Alice-band-wearing Sloanes and predatory vixens St Aubyn depicts in the Melrose series. In fact, the whole novel has a peculiar late-Eighties atmosphere.

The most natural and affecting interactions are between Martin and his patient Sebastian. We are reminded that St Aubyn is at his best when he’s exploring deep psychological pain. But for much of the novel, it feels as if he is hiding behind a wall of intellectual discourse. Consequences rarely carry from one chapter to the next. Tension dissipates. If emotions, anecdote, psychology and narrative are so important, where are the deeper registers of empathy and pathos that made the Melrose novels so rich and memorable? As it is, Double Blind fails to convince either on the science or on the human drama. Maybe Thelma had a point.

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passionate-reply · 3 years

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Great Albums is back for a third time! This week, we discuss Dazzle Ships, the avant-garde masterpiece that was so infamously weird, it almost “sank” the pop career of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Or did it? As usual, you can find a full transcript of the video under the break, if you’d like to read it instead.

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums. Today, I’ll be talking about an album that many would consider OMD’s best, and many would consider the last great album they ever made: 1983’s Dazzle Ships, their fourth studio LP. It has a reputation that precedes it, as a strange, experimental, and avant-garde album. And I can’t argue with that too much, when it has tracks that sound like "ABC Auto-Industry."

The most obvious thing one can say about Dazzle Ships is that it’s dense and rich with samples. You’ll hear found sounds ranging from a “Speak and Spell” toy to a radio broadcast from Czechoslovakia. It’s a magpie’s nest constructed of garbage and baubles, collage-like and conscientiously artificial. And OMD’s Paul Humphreys and Andy McCluskey managed to make it before sampling became easier and hence more widespread later in the 1980s, thanks to advancements in digital technology. In its own day, it was, famously, a huge flop, baffling even the critics, which makes it tempting to argue that the world simply wasn’t ready for it. Popular legend says that Humphreys and McCluskey were essentially forced to make increasingly soft, pop-oriented music for years afterward, usually at the hands of their label’s higher-ups.

Is that story really true? Well, I don’t know, and I’m not sure if anybody really does. But I think it’s important that we entertain some doubt. Regardless of its actual veracity, this legend is offering us a simplistic narrative of art and capital butting heads, and one that we see repeated all too often in music journalism. It’s a story that expects us to believe that experimental music is good by default, and the natural goal of music and all the people who make it--and, conversely, that accessible music is bad, and anyone who writes a song you can dance to is always after profit, never craft.

Ultimately, though, the most important reason why I’m asking you to leave this question at the gate is that it’s simply a less interesting way to think about art. What I think is truly ingenious about OMD is their ability to combine a pop sensibility with that bleeding-edge experimentation, and vice versa. I don’t think of Dazzle Ships as just an inscrutable, esoteric musical ready-made, but rather something capable of animating and enriching a bunch of otherwise mundane sounds. A word I might use for it is "challenging," because it isn't simply off-putting--it has a certain charm that invites you to stick around and work through it, and you don't feel like it's a waste of your time. I think the underlying pop DNA offered by Dazzle Ships is a big part of that.

In “Genetic Engineering,” the samples from that Speak & Spell are contrasted with a more traditional chorus, which rises above the chaos, stirring and anthemic. It’s a song full of friction, not only between these musical ideas, but in ideas about technology and our future. Like many great works of electronic music, especially earlier in its history, Dazzle Ships is deeply concerned with science and technology, and the ways they’ve structured our world. These guys wrote “Enola Gay” a few years earlier, sure, but there’s much more than Luddite, dystopian thinking here! Dazzle Ships walks a tightrope between romantic adoration of the promise of a better tomorrow, and the tempered uncertainty we’re forced to develop, when we witness the devastation our most horrifying inventions have wrought already. Something that helps sell the former is the motif of childhood: in addition to the Speak & Spell, “Genetic Engineering” also features a children’s toy piano, and prominently references “children” in its lyrics. And “Telegraph,” the album’s other single, sees fit to reference “Daddy.”

Touches like these, and the centering of not-so-new technologies like telegraphy and radio, carry us backward in time. Dazzle Ships has a sense of nostalgia for the technological explosion of the Midcentury, when household technologies were improving in ways that saved time and labour, and faith in “better living through science” was high. It’s not a wistful or introspective nostalgia, but rather one that taps into the bustling excitement of living through that era. That retro styling helps us situate ourselves in a childlike mindset: optimistic, but somewhat naive. Children are highly imaginative, and become enthralled with possibility, but don’t always understand every implication their actions have.

But, as I said, “Telegraph” and “Genetic Engineering” were the album’s singles; the typical track on *Dazzle Ships* sounds more like “ABC Auto-Industry.” The track listing is structured such that these more conventional songs are surrounded by briefer, and more abrasive, intrusions. They become signals in the noise, as though we’re listening to them on the radio--or ships, rising above some stormy seas. Several tracks, such as “International,” also feature a more dissonant intro, on top of that, crowding their main melodies inward.

Over the years, many critics have been quick to contrast Dazzle Ships with OMD’s other albums, but I actually think it has a lot in common with their preceding LP, 1981’s Architecture & Morality, and seems to me to flow naturally from the direction the band had already been going in. Architecture & Morality is a lively mix, with moody instrumentals like “Sealand,” guitar-driven numbers like “The New Stone Age,” and catchy, intuitive pop songs like “Souvenir.” Architecture and Morality proved to be their most successful album, when its title track sounds like this. I fail to see how it’s tremendously different than the title track of Dazzle Ships, which leads us on a harrowing sea chase, with radar pings quickly closing in.

That nautical theme is a great segue to discuss the album’s visual motif. Like all of OMD's first five albums, its sleeve was designed by Peter Saville, most famous for his stunning work for New Order. The cover and title were inspired by a painting Saville had seen, Edward Wadsworth’s *Dazzle Ships in Drydock at Liverpool,* which portrays WWI warships painted in striking, zebra-like geometric patterns. These sharply contrasting “razzle dazzle” designs weren’t “camouflage,” but rather served to confuse enemy forces’ attempts to track them, and predict their motions. Dazzle ships were killing machines that fought dirty...and they were also beautiful. It’s a potent, complex symbol, and it’s a natural fit for an album that’s also capricious, perplexing, and captivating in its uniquely modern terror. Saville’s sleeve design features both a die-cut design as well as a gatefold; peeking through the cover’s “portholes” reveals the interior, where we find a map of the world, divided by time zones. It’s yet another reminder of how technology has reshaped the planet, connecting the human race while also creating divisions.

Earlier, I argued that Dazzle Ships isn’t that different from OMD’s preceding LP, and I’d also suggest that their follow-ups to it aren’t all that different, either. It’s easy to see the influence of Dazzle Ships on their most recent work, made after reforming the group in the late 00s, and informed by the critical re-evaluation and cult acclaim of their alleged masterpiece. But even in the 80s, they basically continued the pattern of layering easy to love, “obvious single choice” tracks alongside more experimental, sample-heavy ones. Compare the title track of their sixth LP, 1985's *Crush.*

Even the greatest of pop hitmakers can't maintain a streak in the charts forever--it's not the nature of mainstream pop charts. Not even in the 1980s, when you could get away with quite a lot of electronic weirdness...at least for a while. Looking back and listening to "Maid of Orleans," it's almost hard to believe it was one of OMD's biggest hits. Is it really less weird than something like "Telegraph"? Perhaps they had simply reached the end of their imperial phase...whether they really had that stern talking-to or not.

It's not so much that Dazzle Ships isn't weird, so much as it is foreseeable that a nerdy, left-of-center band like OMD would have come up with it. Dazzle Ships IS excellent--it’s a Great Album! But it's good enough that I think it deserves to be heard and valued on its own terms. The album is too goddamn good--too compelling, too spell-binding--to be reduced to "that one album the plebs were too dumb to really get." I'm not clearing the air because I think this album is overrated, but because I think it deserves better, deeper discourse than it gets. A truly great album is great whether it sells or it doesn't, right? My advice is to never let art intimidate you, no matter how obtuse people say it is. Send your ship on that plunge into the dark waters of the unknown--you might find something beautiful.

That said...my favourite track overall is “Radio Waves,” an irresistibly fun cut that could easily have become a third single. Since “Genetic Engineering” and “Telegraph” live on side one of the record, “Radio Waves” is really the only “reprieve” we get on side two, smack in its middle. It really stands out, in context--almost like the opposite of how a more conventional album might have one out-there track that catches you off guard. Aside from all of that, though, the song also stands perfectly well alone. I have a real soft spot for music about music, how it’s made and transmitted, and “Radio Waves” is simply one hell of a ride.

Thanks for reading!

#great albums #music #omd #orchestral manoeuvres in the dark #album review #album reviews #dazzle ships #peter saville

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onestowatch · 4 years

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Molly Payton Breaks Down the Process Behind Her New ‘Porcupine’ EP

A lot of Molly Payton’s tracks have been written in the tube, when the night is over and booze courses her veins. “It's where I do my best writing,” she laughs. “When I'm absolutely hammered and angry at someone.” It figures: her music is drenched in melancholy, laced with yearning vocals and cutting lyrics about boys who read too much Kerouac and wish they lived in 1972. Still, she has her reservations about the habit. “It's not good,” she jokes, “how as a musician you capitalize off heartbreak. I'm at a point now where if I have a bad experience with a guy I'm like, ‘Sweet, thanks mate! Great song.’”

The New Zealand-born artist moved to London with her mum when she was sixteen. The plan was to stay for only a short stint, but when Molly’s music started taking off that turned into two years (and counting). While Molly had been writing songs and singing for a while at that stage, she hadn’t yet considered making it a career. “In New Zealand I just never really thought of it as a possibility,” she explains. Back then, the main Kiwi artists she knew that had made it big were a couple of bands her parents liked, and Lorde. And while she notes that’s changing, it wasn’t until she’d trekked halfway across the world that pursuing music felt like a tangible possibility. “Moving to London,” she explains, “I was meeting people who it just happened to.”

Those people were the likes of bedroom pop turned breakout rock star beabadoobee, and Oscar Lang, who’s signed with The 1975’s label Dirty Hit. Alongside Molly, they’re part of a crew of talented young London creatives, the kind that make you feel very old and uncool. “They were a really influential group,” Molly says. “I definitely wouldn't have done anything if I hadn't met them. Just being around young people like that who've made what they want to happen was really good for me, to see that it's possible.”

While Molly’s mates may have helped nudge her in the right direction, she’s clearly got the talent to make on her own strength, as evidenced on her debut EP Mess. Released earlier this year and produced by Oscar, it’s a collection of fuzzy acoustic-leaning tracks, inspired by the likes of Jeff Buckley and Leonard Cohen. They’re like wrapping yourself in a warm blanket of nostalgia and show off a voice that could melt steel.

Now Molly’s just released her second EP, Porcupine. This time round she’s taking notes from the 90s bands she has on repeat, including Nirvana and Pavement. It’s aided by the fact after an extensive two-year search, she’s finally got a band of her own to flank her on stage and in the studio. The result is a slick collection of fuller, grungier tracks, the kind you can imagine swaying to in a dingy underground club with sweat lining the walls.

We caught up with Molly from opposite ends of the world to chat writer’s block, pre-show rituals and coming home for summer.

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Ones to Watch: Are you someone who's constantly writing?

Molly Payton: I used to be. But in lockdown I didn't write anything. I think it was partly because I got back from a trip to the States two days before lockdown, and when I was there, I was in writing sessions every day, and I felt like I'd just been squeezed out. I just didn't feel like writing for the first time in my life. But it's coming back now.

Do you have a process?

Not really. Most of my best songs I wrote in like 20 minutes.

Is that just you picking up a guitar and writing everything at the same time?

Throughout my day I'll be having things in my head, but it won't feel like a song, just ideas. Little melodies or playing around with chords. And every once in a while, - it's so nice - I'll just sit there and play something and be like, ‘Oh that sounds good,’ and keep playing. Then I get my phone out and go into my thousand notes of like, two lyrics at a time, and start putting stuff together. And it just happens. It’s the nicest experience. Though in the second EP, two of the singles actually, Warm Body and How to Have Fun, those are the first two songs I wrote with other people in writing sessions.

It must've been a pretty different experience having had that experience of songwriting on your own, then sitting in writing sessions. What was that like?

It depends. I hate some writing sessions. There have been a few that I just wanted to leave. But those two sessions were just fun. I wrote Warm Body with Oli [Barton Wood] who produced the EP. It was the first time we met, and I was so nervous because it was my first ever proper writing session. And he just gave me a guitar and put heaps of distortion on it, then gave me a really shitty mic. Which I think was probably the best first session I could've had.

How come?

Because most of the time it's just someone will have either an acoustic guitar and they'll be like, 'tell me about your ex-boyfriend', or they'll have a drum machine and put a little beat in the computer, and you'll do things really systematically. Whereas Oli was like, just play something and I'll play along, and we'll see if something happens. And that's how Warm Body happened.

You have a really powerful voice - is that a thing that you had to - excuse the cliché - find?

Oh god yeah, I had a really good singing teacher for two years. I wasn't a good singer. I always wanted to, I always sang, but I didn't start singing singing until I was about 15. My teacher was really about giving you confidence. And that's my thing, because I have really, really bad anxiety. Which is funny, because I was such a performer when I was a kid. But the idea of going on stage to someone with such bad anxiety, especially at that age, was terrifying. Which is hard - wanting to be a musician and being fucking terrified of going on stage.

Do you have any pre-show things to help that now?

Beer. [laughs].

Fair.

But I don't get nervous anymore, I don't know if it's because I have a band now... Probably. I have the best band in the world. They're all a bit older and have been doing music forever, so they're crazy talented musicians. And I know when I go on stage with them that if I fuck up, Simon the guitarist will do some crazy shit on the guitar and distract everyone while I get my shit together.

Did moving to London change how you wrote at all?

To be honest I was 16 when I moved here, and in [home country] New Zealand I was quite a shy kid. I hadn't experienced much, then was suddenly thrust into this crazy world. Because the school I went to here, and the people I was mixing with, were so far away from any kind of world I'd experienced before. It was very different, very intense. Going out all the time, having freedom for the first time in my life - and very suddenly - was a bit scary. I don't know if it changed my style of writing, I think that happened more through writing heaps and getting better. But my sound would've changed if I’d stayed in NZ. I met different people, and that would've changed the subject matter. It's hard to say. I don't even know if I’d be writing if I'd stayed in NZ. It's a bit nuts to think about, y’know.

Do you miss New Zealand?

So much. I miss my family, and how fucking pretty it is. London's beautiful but it's beautiful in a sad way. Everything about London makes me feel melancholy.

I lived in London for six years, so know what you mean.

Maybe it's because I’ve watched too many films. I always feel like I'm in a movie here, whereas in New Zealand I feel like a human being. It's also that weird feeling of separation here where no one knew me before. When I moved here, I had this freedom to be who I wanted to be, which was really fun for a while. I was like, ‘I'm gonna be confident, that's my thing now.’ Which was great, and it's nice to have that thing of, ‘No one knows that embarrassing thing I did when I was a kid.’ But after a while you miss having that. I've got four siblings, and I'm the baby. So just missed getting teased. And Christmas. I had Christmas on my own. In London. It was so sad. My mum was back in New Zealand.

That’s tough.

But whenever I say that to people who are living here, they're like, ‘Well why don't you just go back?’ And I’m just like, no of course not, I want to be here. It's London. In the same way it's sad, it's amazing. But I'm coming to NZ for a while so i'm gonna get my feed.

The dream is to just do summer to summer.

The thing is, I'm a winter person, I love winter. I think it's ‘cause I just love a good coat. I love hot drinks.

That's true. Two winter USPs.

There's nothing better than New Zealand winter. We'd go skiing and stay in this rinky dinky little hut and had to hike up the mountain because the lift didn't go. So, you'd have this horrible hike carrying your skis and your bag, then get into this warm hut and sit down and have a hot chocolate. Ugh. I miss winter.

I’ve just had two in a row so you can have one of mine. What are your next music goals?

I’d love to do a proper tour. That's the dream, I'd love to be able to play just every day. But it's weird, I'm such a homebody. Deep down I'm a huge grandpa, it's my secret to surviving London. I have some friends who go on tour and I'm like, ‘How do you survive, how do you manage this lifestyle every day?’ Because they go out after every gig, get trashed and do it again. Whereas I can't handle a hangover. I’m like 'Cancel it all. I’m sleeping today.'

Fair enough.

#Molly Payton #rock #Porcupine

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belizedeservesbetter · 5 years

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Rock of Ages is Hadestown

I don’t really know if this is a review or my upcoming college thesis

I’ve always loved Rock of Ages. It’s so fun. It’s so dumb. But it’s also so smart. Rock of Ages knows exactly who Rock of Ages is and should be. Rock of Ages is exactly what Rock of Ages wants to be. It’s a blast and the songs are of course good and it’s funny and full of heart and there’s actually some really wonderful theatrical moments and I’m thrilled that it’s back at New World Stages for the summer. But as I sat there watching the show on Thursday, I realized something.

Rock of Ages is Hadestown.

The plot is literally the same. Young musician working in a restaurant falls in love with a girl who wants more out of life but young musician can’t give her what she wants and eventually sells her soul to the devil. All the while, a fun narrator steps in and out of the plot and a second story of young love and falling out of love occur between the older character. Three women who sing together are also involved. That is a vast oversimplification of both stories but you get my idea.

Orpheus, then, is Drew. The wannabe musician with a big heart, good intentions but not the smartest or most logical person. Drew, who throughout the show writes a song that will Change Rock and Roll (and in Orpheus’ case, the world). This song that makes their female love interest fall in love with them. In this current production of Rock of Ages, he’s played by CJ Eldred, who looks STRIKINGLY like Reeve Carney, but can actually act.

tell me that is not Reeve. tell me they are not long lost siblings or at least dopplegangers

Which brings us to Sherrie, aka Eurydice, who has blown in from nowhere and bumps into Drew/Orpheus and there is an instant connection that is only bolstered by a lovely duet by the Greeks and a shared slushee by the rockers. Sherrie, like Eurydice, is a “hungry young girl” who wants more out of life. Where Eurydice wants... something, I guess, Sherrie wants to be an actress. Kirsten Scott sings the hell out of all her songs and is a sheer delight to watch on stage. Sherrie and Drew have a good thing going until Drew mentions just how good of friends they are.

Am I equating Orpheus’ inability to do anything but write his “La La La” song with a nervous Drew accidentally telling Sherrie they’re just friends? Yes. Yes and the scene it happens in the show is hilarious. There’s this wooden car set that Drew brings on and off that is SO cheesy and SO hilarious and they all know it too. There’s even a part where Drew mimes opening and closing the car door even though there is no door that was Comedy Gold.

Which brings us to Hades, aka Stacee Jaxx. Where Eurydice sells her soul to Hades and goes way down to Hadestown, Sherrie sleeps with Stacee, who then gets her fired and puts a rift between her and Drew. Stacee Jaxx is as gross and sleazy as they come, and PJ Griffith (whose bio on the website is fun) works every second of it. His story ends with Sherrie breaking his nose before he has to flee the country. Where Hades is revealed to Have a Heart, Stacee is kicked to the curb, which I liked. I liked that the Big RockStar ends the show with nothing and no one.

The Hermes of Rock of Ages is Lonny, who is both the narrator of the show and a character who influences the plot. “Just Like Paradise/Nothin’ But a Good Time” is literally Road to Hell and all the characters and themes are introduced right from the start. Lonny steps in to narrate quite a bit, going so far as to interrupt Drew’s train of thought towards the end of the show which leads to this funny “You’re in a musical called Rock of Ages and it used to be on Broadway and now it’s not and they made a movie out of it” moment which was absolutely on the nose but they KNEW it was on the nose and worked with it. Mitchell Jarvis, who created the role of Lonny, is back in this current Off-Broadway production and he is spectacular. You can tell he loves everything about this role and this show and he is having a fantastic time and you the audience are having a fantastic time with him.

This is where it becomes a bit more of a stretch but bear with me on this so there are three waitresses who also work at The Bourbon Room and while they ominously sing like The Fates, they do pop in to provide Sherrie with some comfort every now and then. They’re also super cool and do some really incredible dancing. The standout waitress, also known as Waitress #1, is Katie Webber and holy shit she’s incredible. She was also in the original cast of the show and you can tell how much she loves it.

This is even more of a stretch but the characters Dennis and Justice combined make Persephone. Dennis, the owner of The Bourbon Room, talks about Stacee Jaxx with a lot of love and nostalgia, which makes me think he had feelings for him at some point. Considering Dennis ends up with Lonny at the end, I think I could be right in this. This is probably adding layers to Rock of Ages that isn’t there but I think Dennis really loved Stacee and was hurt to see him leave him in the dust like that. Matt Ban plays Dennis currently and gives Dennis a strong “Tired Dad” vibe, which worked well for the character. He also had great chemistry with Mitchell Jarvis.

Justice also gives me big Persephone vibes, especially her moment with Sherrie where she talks about how she was in love once and how she’s not as happy as she used to be. I’ll definitely take “Pour Some Sugar On Me” (and Dennis’ “Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore”) as this show’s “Our Lady of the Underground” and maybe some of her verses in “Chant.” Jeannette Bayardelle was wonderful as Justice. She also had this glitter lipstick that looked like the glitter lips from Priscilla - Queen of the Desert which I love love loved.

A lot of the themes are the same - with the ones on climate change, the workforce and capitalism being summed up in the Regina (pronounced like vagina)/Hertz plotline about tearing down the Sunset Strip. Of course the Orpheus/Eurydice themes match up surprisingly well with the Drew/Sherrie ones too. Actually, I think it’s interesting how Rock of Ages goes further in exploring what happens when Drew does get what he wants, like what happens when his songs do get noticed and how it turns out to be not what he wants after all.

And in this current production, there’s even a Tall Ensemble Man, played by Michael Mahany, who, again, is clearly having a great time. He’s also the sole male ensemble member (not including Mekhai Lee because he plays The Mayor and Drew’s Agent mostly) which makes the big ensemble dance breaks really funny.

The set is also literally the same as Hadestown, but more rock and roll. There’s literally the stares Hades uses to go up and down from his little patio, but this time they go into Dennis office. To be quite honest, I fully expect the inevitable Hadestown revival in the far off future to be staged in a rock and roll bar/club like The Bourbon Room. It fits the story perfectly.

The big difference is that Rock of Ages ends happily. Drew and Sherrie actually get to live happily ever after, which Orpheus and Eurydice don’t get to do.

There is so much I love about Rock of Ages. It’s an absolute blast. I love seeing it because it’s sheer escapism. There’s nothing I have to think too hard on and it’s not a show that tries to be that either. I love how you can tell what songs they only got partial rights to, like the split second moment where Stacee sings Styx’s “Renegade.” I love how much fun everyone is having, especially Tall Ensemble Man. I love that the ending is absolutely ridiculous and Dennis is briefly mentioned to have died, but he comes back as an Angel that gets rid of Stacee Jaxx. I love that Lonny tells Drew to fuck the book writers of the musical. And I love that Rock of Ages has its flaws and problematic jokes, cause it keeps me humble. It reminds me that I’m seeing Rock of Ages and not a Serious Show. I love how much fun and how drunk the audience is for this show. I love that this is the closest thing to Straight Culture I’m ever gonna see, which is fascinating to say the least. I love the merchandise the show has! You can get Wolfgang Von Colt (Drew’s stage name) t-shirts that look like Drew made them himself. I love that you can buy Arsenal (Stacee Jaxx’s band) sweatshirts that look like Stacee designed them himself. I love that the band is onstage the entire time and I love that they are Arsenal and are constantly flipping off Stacee.

Also! We don’t give enough credit to director Kristin Hanggi! Why do we always forget about her when we talk about female directors? She's been with this show right from the start! She’s infused this show with so much satire. It’s really a lot more progressive than you’d think.

And this show is so fun. It’s so so fun. I understand why there’s die hard Rock of Ages fans who’ve seen this show hundreds of times.

Go check out Rock of Ages at New World Stages till the end of summer! New World Stages has actually become a great spot for post-Broadway shows, like Jersey Boys and Play That Goes Wrong. There’s also Puffs, which I liked even though I’m a little traumatized from it. And there’s also Gazillion Bubble Show, if you’re into that.

#rock of ages #review #broadway #off-broadway #i will die on this hill i love this show #voice

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technicolorfamiliar · 6 years

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Global Spirit Tour: 2017 - 2018

Prologue:

Something weird happened early in 2017.

I was looking for a song to lip synch to. In drag.

This was for a one-off performance with the improv group I was part of at the time. We had a string of a few LGBTQ events, and drag lip synchs were becoming a regular part of our season. I needed a song, and I needed to pick something I knew no one else in the group would choose. As someone who is secretly very competitive (and someone who knows I perform on stage better as a man anyway), finding the perfect song and perfect character to fit the song was stressing me out. So I turned to my beloved 80's New Wave station on Pandora for inspiration.

Eventually, the inspiration I desperately needed presented itself (this is the Weird Thing). It was, of all things, Depeche Mode's "Stories of Old" from Some Great Reward, a song I knew and loved deeply as a teenager but hadn't actually heard or really listened to in years. And with the inspiration from the song came the core inspiration for my character. Suddenly, everything locked into place - the look, the hair, the clothes, the physicality (read: how provocative I could get away with being at what was technically a family friendly event). And with that perfect vision for my character, all thing things I loved about Depeche Mode when I was in high school came flooding back to me. Wave after wave of nostalgia, the kind that makes you realize, "this is why I am the way I am."

And so I was forcibly dragged back into all things Depeche Mode by one song, one incredibly underrated song stuck somewhere in the middle of what isn't even my favorite DM album.

(I ended up using a different song by a different band for the drag improv thing, at the directors' request, they thought something more well-known would be more appropriate, and at the time I agreed. But my character mood board was still very much focused on DM in the mid-80s.)

Funnily enough, at that same time, DM were about to release a new album and announce dates for their Global Spirit Tour. So the timing on my part worked out perfectly. I have a habit of rediscovering the music I loved in high school just as a bunch of new content is about to hit the internet (one day I'll write about how Danny Elfman and Oingo Boingo saved my life more than once).

For a little background, when I say I loved DM in high school, I mean that's when I first heard of them. I didn't grow up on Depeche Mode, as my parents - who were my major source of music recs until I was 15 - absolutely hated anything that had to do with 1980s synthpop, post-punk, or any other new wave music. But someone much older and much cooler than me gave me a mix tape with "In Your Room" on it and I was intrigued. That wasn't the DM song that sealed my fate as a fan. That was 100% "Never Let Me Down Again", but a nudge in the right direction was all I needed, and for that honest to god actual mix tape cassette, I am eternally grateful.

I was a teenager during the era of Playing The Angel, and I was lucky enough to see them on that tour with my best friend at the time. The tickets were my high school graduation present. Our seats were at the very back of what used to be the Nissan Pavilion in VA. I hardly remember anything about the show itself, and any pictures I must have taken on my old pocket digital camera are sadly lost.

Washington, DC:

It was 2017 before I managed to see another DM tour. For whatever reason, whether it was my busy work schedule, being broke, or waiting until shows were already sold out to look for tickets, I missed both the Sounds of the Universe and Delta Machine tours. So when the Spirit tour was announced, I was poised and ready to make what some people might consider irrational financial choices in order to see three separate shows between September 2017 and June 2018.

The lead-up to the September 7th show in DC was a lot of fun. I was going with my two close friends, so we enjoyed some additional bonding as we eagerly anticipated the show together. This was the only gig on the tour I saw with people I knew, and I have nothing against going to concerts by myself -- and sometimes traveling great distances to do so. But getting to share the excitement leading up to the actual day and at the event itself with two of my very good friends was really special. I'm really glad I got to share that experience with them, and have their positive, enthusiastic energy to draw on.

This is the part of the post where I go on a brief tangent about superfan elitism, bear with me: The hardcore DM fans would say, "Three shows? That's nothing." And I would say they're right, but that doesn’t make me any less of a fan. I could have gone to more shows, probably, but my bank account, my job security, and my sanity required that three be the maximum amount of shows I got to see on this specific tour. There are numerous ways a person can express their love of a band, a tv show, a piece of immersive theatre, or whatever. The level of insane superfan I am or am not does not mean that their music is any less important to me as an artist and as person. HOWEVER, the people who I encountered at these three DM shows who were on their phones the entire concert, people who had better seats than me who sat down completely unengaged the whole time, and the people making disrespectful and unrelated comments about the audience and the band themselves can go fuck themselves. That negative, attention seeking, distracting bullshit has no place down in the floor seats in front of the stage, they can go be terrible up in the mezzanine levels.

Which is exactly where my first show was spent.

Second or third tier seats for big arena shows are 1000% not worth whatever money you spend on them. They're too far away, and you're surrounded by people who act like they've never heard of the band they paid actual money to see. The only reason my friends and I were up there in the first place was because of how absurd the US ticket queueing system was for the first North American leg of the GST. I, like many others, have a lot of issues with how that was handled and am glad they scrapped it for the second round of US shows.

I'm glad I had my two friends with me at the DC show, though. The three of us were maybe the only people having a genuinely fun time in our section. This first show for me was the only one where I cried. I wasn't expecting to, but hearing and seeing Martin sing "Home" struck something in me. And then "Heroes". I knew it was coming, but it still managed to really resonate on a deep emotional level. I love David Bowie as much as they do, but knowing that "Heroes" was how Dave was initially asked to be in the band, and my own personal feelings and connections to Bowie, hearing Dave sing it as well as he did was everything in that moment.

I have a number of issues with that show in DC, but none of them have anything to do with DM or the show itself. They played more songs from Spirit at this show than at any of the others I attended, but there was also "Corrupt" and "Wrong", "A Question of Lust" and "Somebody". It was also the longest set list of out of the three shows, with 22 songs total, which is rare for them, from what I understand, because of how intense their live shows are, especially for Dave (which I got to experience more closely at the other two shows). His presence on stage radiates to the rafters of huge venues like the Capital One Arena -- but more about Dave in a minute. I can talk about how good they sounded in DC, and how much hearing those songs live meant to me on that night during that time in my life, how I felt the synths and bass and percussion in my bone marrow and in my soul, but I can't really talk about the all-consuming, sweaty frenzy of experiencing a show like theirs from the floor. For that, I need to talk about Berlin and Philadelphia.

Berlin:

So DM announced more dates in Europe. And, because I'm insane I guess, was online at some ungodly hour when tickets went on sale for the two shows in Berlin, Germany in January. I was able to get an early entry ticket for the January 19th show in BERLIN where I would be surrounded by other people who were actually genuinely excited to be there, which would be a huge improvement after the lackluster crowds in DC.

Am I glad I did it? Yes. Would I do it exactly the same way ever again? Probably not. Because queueing overnight outside the arena was worth it for the concert experience itself, but it's not necessarily something I need to do again any time soon. I'm a weak, American fan, and I own that. The German DM fans go so fucking hard and I am absolutely terrified of them.

Somehow, I managed to get a spot on the barrier without any pushing or shoving. I wound up in the pocket where the main stage becomes turns into the catwalk, right in front of where Andy Fletcher has his set-up. On either side of me were two other women who also were there by themselves. They were nice enough to talk to me and keep me company while we waited.

The show, though.

My consciousness went… somewhere else. I can’t really compare the feeling to anything else I've experienced. I've been to some other really singularly wonderful concerts, to see bands and musicians that I have deep emotional ties to, but none of them have been like this. It's the combination of being part of the masses down on the floor, on the barrier, exhausted and sweating and euphoric, with the power and intensity of hearing and seeing Depeche Mode perform live. I was hyper-aware of everything happening in front of me. Time did something strange, it crawled by so slowly and yet it was over before I could register what happened. I was an outsider there, but I felt like I was part of this massive collective, all connected by our desire to be there, our love of the music, united for a few hours, and I was so aware that everything that was happening on stage and around us was happening to eary one of the people in that arena at once.

The sound of the ignition at the beginning of "Stripped" reverberating in your rib cage, the driving, head-banging riffs in "I Feel You," the cosmic outro of "Cover Me," the field of wheat arm-waving during "Never Let Me Down Again" -- having it all happen to you, at that volume, at that frequency and intensity, is like having your soul yanked from your body and cast into decadent oblivion.

Honestly, it was a blur. But as far as I can remember, highlights included:

The additional songs from Ultra! Unexpected, but very much appreciated.

Experiencing Andy Fletcher's ridiculous awkward dad dancing up close and in person. There's a lot of hype about Fletch's moves, but let me tell you, they exceed any expectation.

Martin. Martin sang "Sister of Night" AND "Judas". I was overcome. People talk about singers sounding like an angel, but Martin L. Gore is the only person in the history of music that saying actually applies to in full.

And Dave. If he was anything like he was at this show when they were at the DC show, I missed the fuck out. Because yes, he performs to the whole arena, even to the people in the very back, but it's altogether something else to watch someone that animated up close. He's tapping into some energy and fire to fuel his work that I've only rarely seen in other artists. Dave Gahan never phones it in, he always performs like he's got jet fuel for blood and like every show really means something. He is outrageous on stage, in every sense of the word. He is endlessly inspiring, and deserves so much recognition and respect.

Philadelphia:

That said… to me, it seemed like the band as a whole was having way more fun at the Philly show than they did in Berlin. I can't put my finger on the specific differences, but they seemed lighter, more pleased with their work, and maybe genuinely surprised at the warmth of their audience in Philly. Martin smiled a lot more at the Philadelphia show, and Dave seemed looser, maybe less tired after a double in Germany.

The Philly gig on June 3rd was the best, by far, out of the three. The second US leg of the GST was announced and I, of course, being the way that I am, thought, "FUCK IT WHY NOT" and magically got a floor seat ticket right in front of Martin's side of the stage after the general tickets went on sale. And it was worth every penny and a short train ride from Baltimore.

I met a few more very nice people, a couple from Florida (whose first show had been cancelled due to the major hurricane last year) and a solo lady sitting behind me who let me join their conversation. And the man sitting to my left was British? European? So he also knew all the things the audience is supposed to do during specific songs that I learned when I was in Berlin. There were definitely some bastard people in the crowd, even down on the floor, terrible people who clearly weren't enjoying themselves, but the high energy of everyone else made it easy to shift focus to the band.

The set list was very similar to the one I heard in Germany, with the exception of two of Martin's songs from Music For The Masses and "A Question of Time" right before their closer -- "Personal Jesus." But again, the performances and mood behind most of the songs at the Philly show seemed lighter, more playful and mischievous (on Dave's part). And the time really flew by. I missed "I Feel You" in the set list, but that's a very minor criticism of what was, over all, a miraculous third show out of three very powerful concerts.

Epilogue:

The general consensus among fans is that this may have been the last big tour Depeche Mode have. They may keep recording together and separately, but another tour on this massive scale is unlikely. If that's the case, I'm so glad I found a way to see three very different shows on the Global Spirit Tour. I can’t imagine experiencing the same exact feeling these shows gave me; I certainly didn't feel the same at David Byrne's awesome American Utopia tour show this summer, and I don't expect the feel the same when I see Nick Cave in October.

Depeche Mode, especially now, at this stage in their careers, during this time in American and world history, and for me personally at this specific point in my life as I age out of my 20s, have been a source of sanity and compassion, of deep feeling and social commentary. Their music touches maybe the parts of myself I'm too scared to look at head on. After going through some of the things that have happened to me as an adult, and as I figure out the kind of person I want to be in the coming decade, obviously there are certain themes resonate with me more than they did when I first discovered DM as a teen. I am grateful to have had circumstances happen the way they did to lead me back to Depeche Mode, to delve deep into their music and history.

Those three shows changed the my standards for seeing live music. After being front row for the Berlin concert, how could I ever go back to being content sitting up in the second or third tier for any arena show? I've been spoiled.

And after a few months have passed, when I think about my experiences over the course of the Global Spirit Tour, it doesn't quite feel real. There are a few other concerts I've been to where when I think about it, I think, "Did that actually happen??" (Namely seeing Danny Elfman in Los Angeles on Halloween, 2014. Absolutely bonkers.) Seeing DM in Berlin is definitely one of those moments already, not even a year later.

I look forward to the future of their music. If Depeche Mode tour again, and that's a big if, the furthest I would travel to see them is maybe the UK, but hopefully that won’t be necessary! However, I absolutely would go see a solo show, if Martin or Dave ever had shows anywhere even remotely close by. I would absolutely travel to New York or LA to see a solo Martin show or Dave with Soulsavers. From what I can tell those venues are usually smaller, so it would be easier to have a more enjoyable, intimate experience.

But that's all there is. Nothing more than you can feel now, that's all there is.

Until next time.

Photo by me, Jan 19, 2018

#depeche mode #global spirit tour #live music #long post

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eldritchsurveys · 3 years

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1036.

5k Survey LXXVI

3901. What is the most annoying tv ad? >> Implying that they aren’t all annoying? 3902. If you died, how would you hope others would remember you? >> I’m not concerned about that right now. I’m still on “are people even going to care?”, so. 3903. Name 2 questions that you will most likely never say 'no' to: >> This reminds me of how Sparrow and I have “body snatcher” questions -- like, questions you’d ask if you’re suspicious that the other person has been possessed or replaced by a lookalike impostor or whatever. And one of hers for me is “do you want Red Robin?” because I never say no to Red Robin, lmao. 3904. What is the softest part of your body? >> I don’t know, man. My organs??? 3905. What family do you want to see in place of the Osbournes when they finally stop doing their show? >> ---

3906. If you could pick 3 bands to go on tour together who would they be? >> I don’t care. We can’t go to concerts right now anyway. 3907. What is a main differance between western and eastern philospohy? >> Location. 3908. Would you be fooled by Joe/Josephine Millionaire? >> Who? 3909. Do you believe Michael Jackson does innoprpriate things at his Neverland Ranch? Like what? >> I don’t care. I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care. When he died the first thing I thought was, “oh, good, then I won’t have to hear about this shit anymore”. That’s how much I do not care. 3910. What do you think of gov. Ryan who cleared out Illinois' death row? >> This means nothing to me. 3911. Would you want a $500 gift certificate to: Kmart or Target? Target. Kmart doesn’t even exist in this area anymore. Macy's or Hot Topic? Macy’s. As much as I nostalgically love Hot Topic, let’s be real -- the clothing quality is shit, not to mention that they really don’t sell the same shit I used to love about them anymore. Border's Books or Spencer Gifts? oh, I miss Borders! :’( Victoria's Secret or Frederick's of Hollywood? I don’t wear lingerie, so I guess you’ll be giving that Frederick’s gift certificate to Sparrow. 3912. What do you think of this website: www.blackpeopleloveus.com/ >> Oh, that’s hilarious. I’m glad I actually went to see what it was, considering I’m usually lazy about that on surveys, lol. 3913. Man vs Elephant. A zookeeper was treating a constipated elephant. He gave her too much laxitive. Suddenly everything exploded out onto the zookeeper. He was knocked to the ground where he hit his head on a rock and got knocked out. There he suffocated under a pile of elephant dung. True story. Is it a funy story? If yes, what is funny about it? Why is it so taboo to laugh at death? >> I can see the humour in it -- I love ridiculous death stories -- but the concept is too gross for me to think about. And it’s taboo to laugh at death because people often feel like if you laugh at something you can’t also take it seriously when need be -- which isn’t true at all, in my experience. I laugh at death jokes and funny death stories without fail, but if someone told me someone they loved just died in [insert ridiculous way here] I’m not going to fucking laugh in their face about it. (People are welcome to laugh if I die in a ridiculous way, though. I’d probably do it on purpose just to add some levity to the situation.) 3914. What are your favorite five things from this list: alternate realities, animals, astronomy, birds, camus, cats, cheap trick, cocaine, cooking, costumes, dancing, elvis, gambling, greta garbo, james dean, jeff buckley, joy division, marilyn monroe, mixed drinks, moody blues, morrissey, mozart, my bloody valentine, orbital, pizza, playing flute, prince, radiohead, rummy 500, scrabble, table tennis, talk talk, van morrison, writing >> Alternate realities, astronomy, dancing, James Dean, Joy Division. Also mixed drinks. Preferably while listening to Joy Division and looking at the stars. 3915. Do you have to read lots to be able to write well? >> I think it helps. 3916. Vanilla ice. Everyone loved him, suddenly everyone hated him. What was the deal?? >> I’m sure there was a story, but I certainly don’t care enough to know it. 3917. If you could kick one person out of the grammies who would it be (Avril, Eminem, etc)? >> --- 3918. Studies have revealed that when sending out a resume a person has a 50% higher chance of getting a responce if their name is white sounding than if it is black sounding. What do you think about this? Why do companies respond this way? >> I don’t know what these “studies” are, whether they actually existed, or whether they were even reputable (or repeatable...), but in the case that that does happen, it wouldn’t surprise me. Like, racism is a real thing that has real repercussions, lmao. We been knew. 3919. Should Big Fat Greek Wedding really be a Big Fat Greek sitcom? >> I don’t know??? 3920. What are you addicted to? >> Nothing. 3921. What fascinates you? >> A lot of things. 3922. What is fascinating about you? >> I’m not sure. 3923. Personality wise, is anything the same for all human beings and if so, what? >> I don’t know, and I wouldn’t dare to speculate. 3924. What kind of a contest woud you have a shot at winning? >> I’m not sure. 3925. You see a dirty punk kid who had a giant cowboy hat on who is rolling his own cigarettes. Your impression? >> “hah, check out Mini Odin over here”, probably. 3926. What would you never want to have more than 2 of? >> Ears??? I don’t know, dude. 3927. Is there a movie you just could not finish watching? What and why? >> Yeah, there’s quite a few movies like that. Beyond the Black Rainbow was one. It was just too fucking esoteric for me. 3928. Is there anyone that you love and want to be around for no explainable reason? >> Well, I mean, there’s a reason... it’s because Can Calah is wonderful and makes me feel good to be around. 3929. Would you go to times square for new years? >> Fuck no. I used to live like a 15-minute walk from Times Square and I still wouldn’t go on NYE. That is literal pure hell and I really don’t know why people do that to themselves. Watching it on TV at home with people you like (or even just by yourself/with your dog) and some snacks and a bottle of champagne is the true ideal. 3930. Do you think that there are to many signs blocking up the scenery? >> Like... street signs??? Is this a reference to something 3931. Did video really kill the radio star? >> *shrug* 3932. What was your favorite atari game? >> I’ve never played Atari. 3933. what is your favorite neon color? >> Neon green. 3934. Do you get depressed eveytime it rains? If yes, why? >> No, although a rainy day may exacerbate an already gloomy mood (I am absolutely solar-powered). 3935. 'The more you admit that all your actions are robotic, the less robotic you are.' What does Tim leary mean by this? Do you agree or disagree and why? How much of your actions do you admit are robotic? >> I personally don’t know what the fuck he’s on about, but all those “LSD gurus” said some weird shit like that on a regular basis. It was part of their charm, I guess (and definitely fit in with all the counterculture stuff going on in that era). 3936. Are we not men? >> Well, I’m not. I’m a spider. 3937. Is it easy to be you? Would being someone else make it any easier? >> It is very much not easy to be me. Being me is often so exhausting and energy-consuming that I can’t do anything else some days. I don’t know what it is like to be anyone else, though, so I can’t comment on that. I’m doing my best with what I’ve got. 3938. Why are sex religion and politics such taboo subjects? >> Because people usually have very strong, deep-set beliefs and opinions about those things, which can lead to strife if everyone in the room is not in agreement. 3939. Is there really a differance between republicans and democrats? >> Yes. Otherwise the divide wouldn’t exist in the first place. I would allow that the differences are changeable (as the foundational policies of both parties have shifted over time), but they still exist either way. 3940. Imagine someone has a great personality, sense or humor, family and job. they also really really like you a lot. Would you consider dating them if they: were fat? limped? were a midget? had hiv? were paralized in one arm? had a glass eye? had only 6 months to live?

3941. What makes you experiance nostalgia? >> I mean, a lot of things. 3942. What do you remember about these historical figures: Woodrow Wilson? Hellen Keller? Christopher Columbus? 3943. Out of the above three figures, one is a huge racist, one is a socialist and one is a slave trader. Can you guess which is which? Racist: socialist: slave trader: 3944. Betcha they didn't tell you that in american history. Wilson, Keller and Columbus are painted as heros, impossibly good, ideal people. Why are so many things ommitted from and lied about in american history text books? >> *sigh* 3945. Do you drink super caffinated energy drinks? >> I don’t drink energy drinks, and I avoid caffeine levels higher than that which is in a cup of black tea. 3946. eminem or moby? >> Eminem. 3947. spongebob or the animanicas? >> I’ve never seen the Animaniacs, but I don’t much care for Spongebob, so I guess I’d watch Animaniacs if I had to choose. 3948. Why do people rush to grow up only to wish they were a child again? >> Social pressure, and then disillusionment. *shrug* My best guess. That’s not the experience I had/am having, so I can’t speak from experience. 3949. Why do people sacrifice their health to obtain money and then use the money to restore their health? >> Because capitalism is hell. 3950. Jetsons or Flintstones? >> I don’t have a preference. They kind of strike me as the same show just set in wildly opposite time periods, lol.

#surveys #survey #5000 question survey #not for reblogging *glare*

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rikka-zine · 5 years

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An Interview with Justin Isis

We are pleased to introduce you to Justin Isis who has lived in Tokyo for ten years. He is a localization specialist by day, writer and editor by night. He had occasionally worked as a model, consultant, rapper, visual artist and occultist as well. He has helped Chômu Press and Snuggly Books. Both are UK-based publishers. We (hopefully) reveal what these mysterious independent publishers do every night…

RZ Zine (RZ): Can I ask where you are from originally?

Justin Isis (JI): It’s complicated. Actually my father is Italian and mother is Australian. But I was born in New York. I mostly grew up in the US and I moved to Australia when I was about nineteen. I lived there for a few years before coming out here.

RZ: So you grew up mostly in English-speaking countries.

JI: Yeah, I also lived in Italy for three years though.

RZ: So, what brought you Japan?

JI: I originally was interested in Japanese fashion. It was like ten years ago. You probably remember the magazine called FRUiTS (*1 A Japanese fashion magazine running from 1997 to 2016.). It should be a passionate with street fashion stuff. I was interested in that time period, when I was in high school basically. So I was interested but I didn’t really plan to come to Japan.

But when I was in university, I was living next door some Japanese people. They encouraged me to start studying. I thought I could do like translations or get some kind of job if I could speak Japanese. I started doing it and I was studying here for a year, and then I moved here. I was interested just in the fashion side, then I got really into Japanese writers mostly of Showa period, like Yukio Mishima, Kawabata, Tanizaki, and Akutagawa. Some other writers I feel like close to those writers are Kurahashi Yumiko and Kouno Taeko. I was really interested in them, too.

RZ: Kurahashi is an amazing author.

JI: Yes, she is, but it’s not really…I don’t think anyone’s really translating over them. Probably there is just one or two Kurahashi’s books. They’re not really known in English. I could not feel so many translations from that period. I mean, I think maybe some younger or newer writers are getting translated into English. But the older ones, not as much.

RZ: I see. And I am also interested in fashion.

JI: Oh really? Do you have any favorite styles, like Gothic & Lolita?

RZ: I’ve never tried myself but I had sometimes read Gothic & Lolitta Bible. (*2 A Japanese fashion magazine of the genre. It featured some of Visual-Kei artists but they sometimes featured the author Shibusawa Tatsuhiko (1928-1987) either.)

JI: Hey, I forgot a band which member manages a Gothic Lolita brand.

RZ: You mean Mana-sama of MALICE MIZER?

JI: That’s it. It was such a dramatic band I used to listen to. But I can hardly listen now.

I feel like fashion is boring though. Because everything is really fast fashion. I feel like it’s getting really…even Japan is getting…I don’t say globalized. But it’s not as outstanding as before.It is changed. Uniqlo is currently blowing out too, even in the US cities. It is gonna be boring. I was actually gonna write a book that was making fun of Uniqlo. So I just called it Uniqlo. But when I posted about it on Facebook, someone actually like the marketing director of Uniqlo was messaging about it. (Showed “Liked” by her and the message like “Oh I’m looking forward to read it!”) So I was like…I’m not gonna write. (laughs)

Well, I think there’s still interesting fashion things happening. But it’s hard to find something really interested in. I worked in Hiroshima as a host for a while but I got sick of it. Because it’s pretty unhealthy like staying up all night and drinking. I was interesting those kind of fashion and I was in some of those magazines like Men’s Egg and Men’s Spider. I think they’re coming back now. Egg magazine has just restarted because of nostalgia or something.

It is interesting that side of the culture I guess. And I noticed that a lot of books get translated into English but seems that they don’t really talk about it, much address it. Especially if I read Murakami Haruki, I feel like everything is very like generic. If I read his books, I always think when he is looking at Japan, what I feel like is I don’t really know what country it is. And I feel like he never says anything to be specific. It never seems like he goes to Daily Yamazaki. I mean what he is doing like is he is just sitting in Azabu-Juban or something. I don’t know where he is really but I never feel like he talks about clear specific things that much. I guess he is obviously the most popular Japanese writer. But his writing is even in Japanese, I don’t feel like he really writes anything interesting. His Japanese is boring. His Japanese probably is pretty easy to translate because he doesn’t really use difficult words. It is pretty clear and direct. I don’t feel like he really does anything really interesting with his writing. I don’t feel like he really goes in the Japanese everyday life very much. I guess he’s just living in his head, he’s not going to Daily Yamazaki (*a Japanese convenience store chain.)

Well, I would say I know in more detail but I just I figure things that it just smears maybe things that with Japanese food. We’ll just think it is like boring one more something it seems interesting I don’t know.

RZ: Do you read in Japanese?

JI: Yes, I try to. But it’s I usually have to read with original and translation and trying to figure it out especially like Mishima and these kind of older writers. Because they’re usually using strange Kanji. So I try to. But my reading is pretty weak recently. When I was still studying, I read a lot. But now I’m just pretty lazy.

You might have heard of my friend, Quentin S. Crisp (*1), he’s actually translating one of Nagai Kafuu’s novel, Okame Zasa. I think he’s done a half of it and I tried to read the original but I can’t.

(*1 According to his profile in Drowning in Beauty, Quentin S. Crisp was born in 1972, in North Devon, U.K. He studied Japanese at Durham University and he did research in Japanese literature on a Monbusho Scholarship at Kyoto University from 2001 to 2003. His fiction and poetry has been published by Tartarus Press, PS Publishing, Haikasoru and Eibonvale Press. He is studying for an MA in philosophy at Birkbeck College. )

RZ: How did you two know each other?

JI: We actually met on the internet. I think I wrote to him. I was reading some comments may be posted on… Do you know Momus? He’s a kind of like musician, sort of a producer. He produced some J-pop kind of stuff. Quentin who was posting something about him on his blog and he actually mentioned Mishima’s quadrilogy Houjou no Umi (The Sea of Fertility) that I was reading it at that time. So I thought, wow, someone else knows about it. I wrote to him and just kind of became friends through that. That’s what led to Chômu Press. Because he’d gotten some books published, but he had a lot of these other stories that wasn’t really doing anything with. So we thought, we could start our own kind of magazine or blog or whatever to release these stories. And I had some stories too. So he started doing that and then his brother said “I have some capital.” or “I have some funding.” so we can start a company and releasing these books.

RZ: I have been interested in something experimental literature. So I know Eibonvale press, Ex-occidente press, Zagava books and you, Chômu Press…

JI: Yeah, they’re all pretty good like friends. The ex-Occidente guy is called Dan Getsu. He is Romanian. And Eibonvale guy is David Rix and he’s actually got a novel coming out with Snuggly Books. Next one. So everyone is like working together. It’s quite closely related.

At the moment, I’m actually working with this artist called Gea Philes, she’s from Chile. We’re doing like a kind of a graphic novel. She’s drawing comics and I’m writing. It probably gonna be released on Zagava. But it’s just a kind of grue, weird kind of stuff. We’re doing this like a collaboration and some of it is set in Japan.

RZ: Speaking of Snuggly books, what is it actually? I saw a lot of translation by Brian Stableford were put out from the press.

JI: His health is pretty bad right now so I don’t know if he’s gonna continue much longer. He’s having trouble but still translating. The main idea (of Snuggly) is that, we, I mean Brendan Connell and I, wanted to release a lot of our books but we wanted more money to do it. So we thought if we publish more translations, translations are usually sell well, we make money with the translations and can release other books and we don’t have to worry about trying to make it easier to read. Because our books are pretty weird.

So we’re not so expected but it’s doing pretty well. I think last year we put out 30 or 35 books and then the year before was only maybe 15 or something. So It’s mostly, probably 70 percent are translations. And we want to do some Japanese translations as well. I was thinking about doing like Shinichi Hoshi. Because this is also not really much in English. There’s a few stories but I don’t think there’s any like really big books from him. I’d like to do it because his style is also pretty easy. His Japanese is not super difficult. I could maybe do it but too busy right now. So I don’t know. I’d like to eventually do or we’ll see some other people.

He is really interesting writer but I feel like, in English, not many people know about him. He’s not as famous as like some other writers from the same period. He is an underrated writer because maybe his writing is simple.

So Snuggly, I mean we, want to eventually get Japanese translations published probably and I am too lazy right now doing my own stuff. I think most of them in from in fresh and then recently putting up more Spanish translations both Spanish writers and South American writers coming

out down. This is like weird interesting ones, a kind of decadent Spanish language writers. Some Mexican ones, I think it’s great.

RZ: You told you don’t like SF on an interview through…

JI: Oh, I like science fiction. But I think it’s easy to get a kind of lazy with it. I think a lot of writers maybe coming to it more from watching science fiction movies or the science fiction TV shows which are good. but I think there’s more I think a lot of them are at least starting off from that with that base rather than starting with the books or something I don’t know.

I think that the books are more interesting or like more ahead of the shows like so the the TV shows and movies usually seem like maybe 40 years behind the books or not as interesting.

So I think I probably do read mostly in special interest is Alfred Bester.

RZ: And you like Samuel R. Delany as well?

JI: Yeah, I read a lot of Delaney. Actually he’s one of my influences. There’s another writer called Barrington Bailey. He’s really good, too.

RZ: He is popular in Japan pretty much. His new collection was published just a few years ago.

JI: Oh really? I’m surprised to hear that he’s not just a few years ago something that’s really strange. Why is he popular in Japan?

RZ: Hmmm, probably some famous translators do on his books? I don’t know.

JI: It’s really unusual. I think he’s still fairly like unknown in Western countries. Anglosphere is still considered him a minor kind of writer. But yeah, he’s got some really amazing stories.

I usually I feel like I just keep coming back to that time period like the 60s and 70s. Cordwainer Smith is my another favorite.

RZ: He is als popular in Japan. His complete collections were published two years ago.

JI: He’s mostly written short stories, I mean they’re all kind of been in the same universe, the same future history forever. His stories influenced me a lot. Who else is good… Joanna Russ is good, too.

RZ: (agreed.) Oh, didn’t you mention Greg Egan? He’s also very popular in Japan.

JI: Yeah, I can imagine he’d be popular. One of my good friends is doing some kind of math PhD. He’s American but he’s reading Greg Egan in a Japanese translation and try to improve his Japanese. Greg Egan is really good too. I prefer his short fiction.

I actually lived in in Perth in Australia which is where he gonna swim. I was thinking on the train, it’s like … “you might be Greg Egan.” Because no one knows what he looks like, so maybe he’s just riding the train I might have seen him but we don’t know.

RZ: I brought his latest collection in Japan with me. It was published last week.

JI: I gotta take a picture for my friend and let him know what I find! (Took photos by phone.) He was reading Diaspora. My friend was also reading Yasutaka Tsutsui, but I haven’t read anything by him. My friend’s Japanese is much better than mine and he does also math and programming like genius. Recently he was trying to find more Japanese I might get some recommendations from you for other Japanese science fiction writers. He’s asking me is what other good Japanese science fiction is. I say I don’t know. Do you have any ideas?

RZ: Project Itoh is highly acclaimed. (I also mentioned Dempow Torishima and Gengen Kusano before the interview.)

JI: I just saw a news on Facebook like someone was starting a Asian Science Fiction Association or Group Meeting or something. I think someone in Korea posted about it. They had some meetings. I think Cixin Liu was there too.

RZ: Oh, didn’t you mention Can Xue in an interview, too? One of her out of print books was reprinted in Japan last year. It was sold out so quickly, so reprinted again.

JI: That’s nice. I still feel like at the Anglosphere I think there’s some more receptivity recently but I feel translated fiction is still very unfairly unknown and not that many not that many people are picking up translated fiction. It’s getting a little bit better but it’s still pretty bad I think.

I think someone posted, I think it was in New York Review of Books, they said they were looking at the publishers that had released the most translations in 2018 and Snuggly was actually on the list. I thought it’s really bad that we’re actually putting out just as many translations as a University Press or like a major press. I think this article was trying to be positive when they’re saying actually a lot of translations are coming out. I thought it’s still pretty bad. It’s only that level. I feel like it’s still really monoculture or it’s still limited. Can Xue or Kurahashi Yumiko or someone, it’s still fairly unknown which is a shame. I think it’s slowly changing but still pretty slow.

About the publications from Snuggly Books

JI: This one (Neo-Decadent Manifesto of Women’s Fashion) just came out I think a year ago is it so this is the same guy that wrote this Daniel Corrick is doing the men’s fashion one. I think I told him to do it. I don’t know these I don’t think it’s written it yet and the other guy, Damian Murphy is writing an occultism manifesto, a kind of magical manifesto. We’re trying to release some more of these like little documents, talking about stuff. I’m actually interviewing Damian right now. It would be a long interview. He talks about a lot of interesting books, luxurious looking, complicated looking books. Actually he’s like a cultist and kind of magician I guess.

RZ: I’m very interested in Colby Smith’s story in this. (Drowning in Beauty)

JI: He’s actually quite young. He’s learning Japanese now. I was trying to teach him Japanese.

RZ: I couldn’t find any other works by him. Is it the first and only fiction by him?

JI: He’s a student in Ohio and I guess this is his first publishing.

RZ: How could you find him?

JI: We met on a forum. So we’re just talking about there and he mentioned that he was like trying to write stories. So I said that send it over to me and and he sent over a bunch of stories.

We felt like this was the best one. So we decided to use this one. Actually he’s got a book coming out, I think, by the end of this year.

RZ: Oh, I’m looking forward to it.

JI: He’ll be really happy to hear that. He’s always excited to hear the feedback.

RZ: By the way, the forum that Colby and you met was Thomas Ligotti’s one?

JI: Yeah, I think I started posting on that forum because Quentin Crisp used to post. I enjoyed Ligotti’s books but I’m not super interested in. I try to I guess some were just like more pleasant kind of things that are not kind of the opposite of horror. But yeah, Ligotti’s is a pretty amazing writer. We posted for a while and there’s some other writers Colby. I think Colby got banned from his post and I don’t think he’s on there anymore. But there’s some of us used to posting and advertise things out there.

RZ: Ligotti fans made me remember some guys from Warwick University, you know, like Nick Land.

JI: Okay, Nick Land is interesting writer with CCRU. There’s some maybe influence once

there. I think he’s in China.

RZ: I found an article in Dennis Cooper’s blog. About some of the stories of Drowning in Beauty are influenced by J. G. Ballard.

JI: Yeah, I think I especially like Atrocity Exhibition. He took kind of I don’t wanna say sampling but almost like it. I think he was influenced by William S. Burroughs where he had these really compressed, condensed approach to writing which I think influence on at least me. That’s a kind of what I’m still interested in some sort of sampling things or plagiarizing things or stealing things. I did a lot of that with my mother books on my collection Pleasant Tales II which is just came out. I would start with a story from the public domain which you can use without getting a lawsuit. Other than Atrocity Exhibition, Crash and a lot of the short stories influences me as well.

RZ: Is your day job still related to localization?

JI: Yes, I also do kind of translations.

At the moment, I’m actually writing children’s books for EFL, English as a foreign language for a company. So I’m working with the comic artists to write really simple books for kids and introduce some really basic English grammar. That’s been kind of strange because it’s also sort of like reading a manga or a comic but they’re very simple way. I usually am I feel like I’m not trying to be super professional with writing because I feel like if I’m worried too much about making money with writing I probably wouldn’t write anything I would not do it. Okay, I just make money translating things and doing other stuff then use that money to even sometimes help with Snuggly trying to publish some of these things that probably wouldn’t be released otherwise because that’s too strange.

I’ve always been interested in languages. I grew up with my parents speaking Italian. So I was in that situation those different languages. I released a poetry book and still doing that too but I don’t have enough for another book. I like to eventually do another poetry book.

RZ: You told that you wrote your stories at Manga cafes in Tokyo.

JI: I used to love I still do a lot of work in Manga cafes because I used to have an internet connection in my apartment but my one computer crashed. I couldn’t figure out. So I just started going to you know what is it bad news was that internet cafe usually like do some writing in there doing some trying to get writing done in there if I’m usually in my apartment and who’s too many distractions I can’t like focus on writing. I feel like it’s easier to focus.

RZ: Have you ever met any Japanese authors?

JI: No, I haven’t really. I’ve never been so like a convention in any country and I don’t think I’ve met other than my friends I haven’t really met any writers. I haven’t met any Japanese authors here so I’d be interested to meet to see what they’re doing.

Some of my friends told me about a writer called David Peace. I think he’s teaching at a university. I was gonna meet him at one point but then it didn’t happen. I have a friend who was teaching at a university and I think he was in the same faculty with Peace, so he had a chance to meet him.

And just earlier today, I was with one of my friends here. He’s a writer for Warhammer. Do you know Warhammer novels?

RZ: Well, yes, the novels based on TRPG and once Ian Watson and Barrington J. Bayley wrote it in my understanding.

JI: Yeah. His name is Steve Parker. He writes those Warhammer novels but he also lives in Tokyo. I hang out with him today. He is a good guy. He’s a really huge guy, like a bodybuilder. We’re usually hanging out and talking about books and Daily Yamazaki. He’s just putting out a new Warhammer book called the shadow or something. He was just put out this trilogy for the Warhammer. I think he’s had some original stuff out, too.

There’s another writer in Tokyo. His name is Ralph Doege. He is a German writer, German science fiction writer. He’s on holiday until for now and I asked him if you wanted to come out tonight but he was too shy or just too scared. He is a historian. He is really into Japanese idol music. Last week, I was like “Just come out drinking or something.” but he was like “No, I’m going to see indies Idols”, underground idols or whatever. I might meet him this week. I think these guys were doing some international science fiction magazine in Germany. This is his book. The cover is a Japanese artist called Shinohara Ai.

About next publication

JI: Chomu Press was inactive at the moment but it’s probably gonna restart later this year. I think David Rix’s putting out a book and I want to put another one, too. I made a list of things that I wanted to include that I felt was missing from other books that taking place in Japan, the things that I hadn’t seen. So I put down Daily Yamazaki and a bunch of other like cultural elements. One of the stories in this one (Drowning in Beauty) I was trying to research nail salons and get it kind of accurate. I don’t know if you gonna be interested in this kind of stuff… but I feel interested in for some reason. I guess I feel like not many people are probably going to notice it but I started a really long time ago, I started writing it 10 years ago. I thought then I had to like take notes because I thought what was happening you know in 2010 when this what I had the idea for this so I wanted to make sure everything would be consistent. I guess the original idea with naturalism was to be quite close to life, because you know, normally when you I guess when you’re reading a book or you’re reading a novel there’s lots of like dramatic things happening and there’s a plot of the story but I almost feel like it’s more interesting with it and that doesn’t happen someone who’s just going to get like a choco-croissant (*2 ) or something that we read little things are happening in in real life the strange things are happening so basically the book is just based on that those kind of things and it’s almost it’s almost like a novel but it’s like a novel made of the different short stories but it’s a lot of the same characters.

(*2 Choco-cro is the specialty of a Japanese chain, Saint marc cafe. It is mentioned in “The Quest for Nail Art” by Justin.)

The other thing I wanted to write about was, you know like Goto Yuki? (*3) Gomaki’s younger brother. I actually met Goto Yuki like a couple years ago and he was arrested for stealing building materials from the construction site. I felt like I have to write a book about Goto Yuki’s stealing construction materials. I thought that’s kind of like I have to include that somehow so I it also comes out in the same book when you Goto Yuki. I hope he’s not gonna be nervous but still it’s something I wanted to put in a book.

(* He was once a member of idol group, AAA.)

On Writing

JI: I think a lot of people are writing books like basically trying to write a movie in their mind. They’re just sitting there, they’re visualizing the things happening and then just describing a movie. You know, like the restaurant was dark and he looks around and there’s a table… they’re having this very kind of a simple approach of narrating things and visualizing things. You might have an opening scene and you know the characters come out and just driving. It’s like you’re trying to create a little movie in your mind but I think that’s boring. I feel like if you want to have that, you can just watch a movie or turn on I don’t know Captain Marvel, Lord of the Rings or whatever.

I think words and language can do more interesting stuff especially with how it is structured and laid out, and what are some things we could do with with books or writing that you couldn’t do in a movie or would be impossible to view.. I was trying to think well how could I write something that I can’t really visualize and trying to use language in ways that aren’t really visual because we have enough TVs or movies. I don’t think it’s really the most interesting use of language just try to have a visual sense with it.

I’m influenced a lot more by just Facebook, Wikipedia or something. I think that’s another way to look at writing rather than having this kind of 19th century, you know, a way to play setting the scene or you know having characters and having this kind of stuff. I still do that as well but it’s not really what interests me about writing. I’m more interested in how can I like arrange things, or set things up, or like format things more. I don’t know what everyone else is doing. I mean these other people like Brendan and Quentin. They’re quite more interested in the past or like the actual original decadent writers but I don’t know I guess I’m more interested in what’s happening with at the moment unless I’m probably less interested in the past or I feel like writing generally gets better and more interesting as that goes on.

Some people are like pessimistic about writing. They think no one is reading any more like you know the standards are going down. Everything’s getting worse. But I don’t really think that’s true and I think books now are probably more interesting than they used to be in a lot of ways.

RZ: Thank you very much.

#rikkazine

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mgmcintyre · 5 years

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Lease Old And Own Lush

Halifax is a city in name only, in a lot of ways. I'm not one of those people that just slags it off for fun, I genuinely like it here, but that's reality. We've only got a couple hundred thousand in the city proper, we lack the amenities that larger cities draw to them by virtue of the population density, and getting a decent band to travel here for a concert costs an arm and a leg and your life savings (trust me, I'm still paying it off). But we're the eastern hub of our country, we're the capital city of the Maritimes, arguably, and that leads us to straddle the definition somewhat. We get some big city things, but we keep some of the small town charm. Less shootings, more stabbings, that kind of thing. And the best part of being a small town that pretends to be a big city is that things stay the same. Not all the things, that would suck, things need to change, evolve, get with the times. But certain things you need to stay the same. To keep them as psychic anchors. To make sure you have one place to run when you just need a minute.

Tom's was that kind of place.

"Tom's Little Havana" isn't what anyone who goes there has called it in a dozen years or so, but that's what it was originally. A cuban themed cigar bar, tucked into a narrow, high ceiling'd slot in an old department of education building on Doyle street. For those of you too young to remember smoking in bars, I will tell you three things: smoking is stupid and will kill you, I haven't smoked in over a year, and if you told me this second I could light a cigarette or cigar at my table at whatever bar I was in I would immediately find one to light. Call it nostalgia I guess, but this is a eulogy for a bar. They had this big humidor and you could nab a cuban and smoke it with your scotch or beer. Sometimes you couldn't smoke cigarettes. Sometimes you could. Depended on who was working.

I don't think I ever went there when all the toilets were working at once. One time I went into the men's room and a guy was standing by the sink with his dick out, peeing into the stall and the toilet about seven feet away. The urinal was covered with a garbage bag. The spare stall was open, adorned with a printer paper sign, originally saying 'Please Hold Down To Flush'. In pen, someone had changed it to 'Lease Old And Own Lush'.

You read about dive bars that people loved, either journalists or literary figures or barflies, and they talk in this reverential tone that I never properly understood. They talked of the dirty floor tiles and the chipped tables and the cracking leather on the stool like it was a holy land they were hoping to visit again some day. I liked going to Toms, sure, but I wasn't about to pray at the alter. But then I realized all these people were writing about bars that didn't exist anymore. No one laments something that's still there.

Tom's shut down the original location because of development, and moved to the space on Birmingham. It was a converted mall front space, which was a little weird for sure, but it was weird as hell to me because part of it occupied the same space as a wine store I spent a year unhappily working in before changing my entire life and going back to school. So it felt like kismet to me. They brought the wall mural and booths and tables to the new space, so if you got enough of a drunk on it was like a weird dream. Like someone was making a film about the old Tom's with a slightly better budget.

They lost a lot of casual customers on that initial move to the new space, but the core regulars were there first day first pour. I bartended for four years, worked in liquor stores for 5 before that, the regulars at Toms are real regulars. Gus' Pub has them too. Charlie's has them. Characters. Back stories. Feuds. Someone chatted up the others ex-wife sixteen years ago and I'll be damned if I share a bar with him, unless he's buying.

The reason they have real regulars is because of their real bartenders. Ian, Angie, Crusher, Mark, a dozen others I can't remember because I always just nodded to them and never needed to order a drink. To work a room like that alone takes a lot of skill. In the industry we referred to Tom's as Bartender Retirement, because no one could possibly work there before running through the gamut of every problem there is and end up a master of juggling tasks and people. I never once gave a bartender a credit card for a tab at Tom's, and my bill was more or less accurate. Well. It was never more than I had. It was frequently less, especially in the old days. With a nod and a wink.

My pals became my friends became my family at Tom's. Tom Collins with Conor, scotch with Tristan, endless pints with Jeremy (IPA) and Kris (Keith's with a side car of lime cordial from a bottle they kept behind the bar for him). I celebrated parts of four birthdays at Tom's. I made the stupidest financial decision of my life at Tom's. I drank off two very bad break-up's at Tom's, one for a night and the other for three months.

A girl I used to know told me about a first date she went on at the old Tom's. They tucked into a quiet table around the back corner. He told her he was kind of broke, but he had brought a bottle of wine in his backpack and if they could just get glasses, he could open it with a pen. I think that's fucking beautiful.

Being nostalgic about the places you used to get drunk and make stupid life choices is incredibly ugly behaviour I'm sure, in anyone but yourself. But you still drift off into those Facebook photos after a few glasses of wine. Thinking about what it was like to be so young, or so thin, or so stressed, or so free. When I think about Tom's I don't think of 'good' memories. I think of memories. It's like a first house. Tom's was the first place I felt at home, that I felt like anyone could be at home. Tom's didn't judge. It's Tuesday at 3pm and you need a beer, haven't seen you in two months but let's talk about that fantasy novel I recommended, how's your dad?

I said I love you to my friends more times at Tom's than I think in any other room in this world. That's just what Tom's was for. It was for backgammon and card games and a coffee with something in it and talking about the play or the novel or the music festival or the movie or the new job or the new love or the new life you were working on. It was about eulogies and congratulations, hope and despair, laughter and tears.

It's a stupid sickness I have, to care so much about brick and mortar and kegs and table cloths. But the quiet comfort of that one solitary booth was everything to me when I needed it. That one stolen glance, that laughter echoing off every wall and reverberating in your chest, that sparkle of energy at 9pm on a Friday night telling you 'yes, this is real, this is good, this is your life, and you belong here'.

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lodelss · 4 years

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2020 | 9 minutes (2,261 words)

The image that struck me most was the empty piazza. That Italian square — I believe it was in Venice — with no one in it. Maybe a bird or two. It looked inviting but also wholly unnatural. A city square is made for people, lots of people, people from everywhere. If people aren’t there, does it cease to be a square? I wondered the same thing about the Louvre and its tens of thousands of objects with no one to look at them — is it still a museum, or is it just a warehouse? I wondered about all those Berlin concert halls with no one to hear their music, all those Indian cinemas with no one to watch their films, all those crumbling ruins everywhere, standing there with no tourists to behold them or to record that beholding for everyone else. At this particular point in history, does art exist if we aren’t sharing it?

By sharing I mean not only sharing a moment with the art itself, but also sharing the space with other people, and more literally, sharing all of that online — posting updates on Facebook, photos on Twitter, videos on TikTok, stories on Instagram. This kind of “sharing” is constriction rather than expansion, regressing back to the word’s etymological root of “cutting apart.” This contortion of a selfless act into a selfish one is symptomatic of a society that expects everyone to fend for themselves: Sharing online is not so much about enlightening others as it is about spotlighting yourself. It’s impossible to disconnect the images of those now-empty spots from the continuous splash of reports about the coronavirus pandemic gouging the global economy. In America, the economy is the culture is the people. Americans are not citizens; they are, as the president recently put it, “consumers.” And on the web, consuming means sharing that consumption with everyone else. That the images suddenly being shared are empty exposes the big con — that in reality, no one has really been sharing anything. That social distancing is nothing new.

* * *

Even before Hollywood started postponing all of its blockbusters and talk shows started filming without audiences and festivals started to dismantle and bands canceled their tours and sports seasons suspended indefinitely, the public was turning on cultural institutions run by a subset of morally dubious elites. In December 2018, protesters at the Whitney Museum of American Art burned sage (“smoke that chokes the powerful but smells sweet to us”) and forced the departure of the board’s vice chairman, Warren Kanders, the CEO of the company that manufactures tear gas that has reportedly been used at the border. Two months later, artist Nan Goldin, who had a three-year opioid addiction, led a “die-in” at the Guggenheim over the museum’s financial ties to the Sackler family, the Purdue Pharma founders who many hold responsible for the opioid crisis. In the U.K., the Tate Modern and Tate Britain also dropped the Sacklers, while climate activists pulled a Trojan Horse into the courtyard of the British Museum to protest the sponsorship of an exhibition by oil and gas company BP. As performance artist Andrea Fraser, known for her institutional critiques, wrote in 2012, “It is clear that the contemporary art world has been a direct beneficiary of the inequality of which the outsized rewards of Wall Street are only the most visible example.”

If that recent exhibition of impressionist paintings seemed oddly familiar, or that ballet you just saw appears to keep coming back around, or that one classical musician looks like he’s hired nonstop, it’s not your imagination. It’s a function of that exclusive control, of the same artists, the same works, the same ideas being circulated (“shared”?) by the same gatekeepers over and over and over again. “Far from becoming less elitist, ever-more-popular museums have become vehicles for the mass-marketing of elite tastes and practices,” wrote Fraser in Artforum in 2005. Which is why certain names you wouldn’t think would cross over — from contemporary artist Jeff Koons to art-house filmmaker Terrence Malick — are more widely known than others. According to The New York Times in 2018, only two of the top 10 all-white art museum chairs in the country are women. And almost half of the 500-plus people on the boards of the 10 most popular American museums have become rich off the finance industry, while many others owe their wealth to oil and gas; the small group that is responsible for exploiting the world is the same group that is responsible for its enlightenment. They determine which pieces of art are bought, how they are curated, and how they are disseminated — theirs are the tastes and practices we are sharing.

With this “increasingly monopolized market and increasing parochialism,” German artist Hito Steyerl explained last year, “a sense of international perspective gets lost, which is a wider sign of rampant isolationism.” And this doesn’t just apply to high arts, but “low” arts as well; movies, music, television, theater, books have all been corporatized to the extreme, with huge amounts of money going to a few while the majority lose out. This is how you get a never-ending Marvel Cinematic Universe, but Leslie Harris — the first African American woman to win a Dramatic Feature Competition special jury prize at Sundance for writing, directing, and producing her 1993 film Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. — still can’t get a second feature off the ground.

While public funding for the arts has plummeted since the ’80s, however, the web has increasingly encouraged public sharing of its consumption on social media. Online, we look more traveled, more cultured, more inclusive than ever before. And it’s difficult to argue that wider access to art, that our increasing proximity to foreign cultures, could be wrong. But if you look closer, you notice that all this connectivity is largely superficial — it is heavily prescribed and strongly overlaps. The latter-day bourgeoisie all travel to Portugal at the same time, all visit the same Marina Abramovic exhibit, all watch the same Agnes Varda films, attend the same Phoenix tour. They clamor less to immerse themselves than to record and reproduce everything they have experienced, their distraction expressed by the ever-growing collection of imagery memorializing all the different experiences they’ve had — the same kind of different as everyone else’s.

“An idea of progressive internationalism,” Steyerl told Ocula magazine, “is progressively abandoned or gets snowed under constant waves of affect and outrage manipulated by monopolist platforms, and solidarity is swapped for identity.” In other words, all of this supposed sharing is really a tech-sanctioned performance of capitalism to showcase one’s value in a toxic din of competing consumers. The more photogenic the better, which means the less nuance, the better; think the Museum of Ice Cream, which costs almost 40 bucks for access to photo-friendly adult playgrounds — “environments that foster IRL interaction and URL connections” — like a “Sprinkle Pool” of multi-colored biodegradable bits you can’t actually eat. And the more recognizable the look (see: the retro aesthetic of any teen Netflix show), the more heady words like “nostalgia” become a proxy for depth that isn’t actually there. As we speed online through Steyerl’s distracted fragmentary so-called “junktime,” we quickly compound what she dubs “circulationism,” propagating images with the most power, giving them even more power. Standing next to the Mona Lisa, for instance, offers greater token currency among a wider set than standing next to anything by Kara Walker, who speaks to a more immersed but smaller audience. Either way, online, currency is king.

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Culture has, above all, become a mark of personal wealth. When Americans share their experiences on social media, they are sharing their cultural capital with a neoliberal society that defines them by it. This is a result of the culture war Fraser recognized several years ago, which “has effectively identified class privilege and hierarchy with cultural and educational rather than economic capital.” But, again, economics ultimately rules. While the poor may be allowed to briefly occupy the space of cultural capital, it is the rich who own it, who offer it up for limited consumption.

Yet the desperation to share, to express one’s value in a world that is so intent on devaluing us all, is deeply human. Which is why you get people Photoshopping themselves onto famous backdrops, which, from a cultural capital perspective, is no different from being there — on social media a photograph is a photograph, and the real Sistine Chapel looks the same as the Etsy wallpaper reproduction. People have always consumed art partly for the cultural capital rather than just the personal enrichment, but now the goal is to broadcast the enrichment itself to the public: sharing one’s consumption of the aura has priority over one’s actual consumption of the aura. Though a hierarchy persists even here. The authentic art consumer, the one who actually experiences the work in person, looks down upon the forger. As Walter Benjamin wrote, the aura of a piece of art is tied to its presence, which can’t be replicated. Which is to say the essence of art can only be experienced through the art itself — a picture can’t recreate it, but it does make its shared image more valuable.

It’s apt that right now, in the midst of a pandemic, the popularity of a cultural site can kill and that virtual tours are being encouraged over actual ones. What better way to illustrate that our increasingly insular art world has not in fact connected us at all, but has done the opposite? As Steyerl noted in e-flux magazine in 2015, the Louvre, that model of national culture, was a “feudal collection of spoils” before revolutionaries turned it into a public museum, “the cultural flagship of a colonial empire that tried to authoritatively seed that culture elsewhere, before more recently going into the business of trying to create franchises in feudal states, dictatorships, and combinations thereof.” Those with the means flock to symbols of elitism like this, not to widen their perspective in solidarity with the world, not to connect with a community of strangers, but to bolster their own value locally by sharing the encounter online. This is not globalism; this is the neoliberal stand-in for it.

All of that foot traffic, all of that online diffusion, is an expression of how we have commodified the individual consumption of art to the point that it looks like we are sharing it with others. We aren’t. We are instead dutifully promoting ourselves as valuable consumers in the capitalist community we are complicit in perpetuating. “It’s not a question of inside or outside, or the number and scale of various organized sites for the production, presentation, and distribution of art,” wrote Fraser in Artforum. “It’s not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution.”

* * *

One of the last movies I saw in the cinema before they started closing down was The Invisible Man. It was a perfect example of how a public screening can tell you what streaming cannot — in real time, you can gauge by the reactions around you whether or not it will be a hit. As with certain art installations, you are experiencing not only the art, but also simultaneously others’ experience with it. In that theater, we screamed and laughed and sat agog together. It was a spark of community that extinguished the moment the lights lifted. A few weeks later, these same strangers who shared that moment of emotion together, headed to supermarkets to empty out toilet roll aisles, buy up all the disinfectant, and clear out the fresh meat despite a collective need for it. These same strangers who in concert cheered on an oppressed heroine, went on to unashamedly side-eye the Asians in their community. Individuals in North American society can occasionally partake in a cultural experience with their neighbors, but in the end it’s to exhibit their own counterfeit edification. It’s telling that the big tech these individuals ultimately share their consumption on — Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Tumblr, Instagram — rarely funds the arts.

Which brings us back to those empty images from the start of this essay. Proliferating photographs of abandoned culture, of objects ignored, confront the hollowness of online sharing. Social media implies connection, but the context of its shares is as important as the context of art’s production and neither can be divorced from the hierarchies in which they reside. No wonder our meagre individual expressions of value dictated by capitalist enterprise fit perfectly within a capitalist enterprise that profits off our inability to ever sate ourselves. The only way to really share — with art, with each other — is to remove sharing from this construct. The only way to really connect — to support a collective of artists, to support a collective of human beings — is to distance ourselves from the misguided values we have internalized.

“At its most utopian, the digital revolution opens up a new dematerialized, deauthored, and unmarketable reality of collective culture,” writes Claire Bishop in Artforum. Under a worldwide pandemic, we see a move toward this — individuals freely leaking their cultural subscriptions, artists offering performances for nothing, even institutions waiving fees for access to their virtual collections. While the vulnerability spreading across America right now is ordinarily framed as weakness in the landscape of capitalist bravado, it is central to real sharing and offers a rare chance to dismantle the virulent elitism that has landed us here. It’s unfortunate that it takes a dystopia, a global interruption of the systems in place, to see what a utopia can be — one in which sharing is about the creation and cultivation of community, a reality that only exists outside the one we have built.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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7r0773r · 4 years

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Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

We don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don’t know. Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise. (Heaven and Earth in Jest, p. 10)

***

I am an explorer, then, and I am also a stalker, or the instrument of the hunt itself. Certain Indians used to carve long grooves along the wooden shafts of their arrows. They called the grooves “lightning marks,” because they resembled the curved fissure lightning slices down the trunks of trees. The function of lightning marks is this: if the arrow fails to kill the game, blood from a deep wound will channel along the lightning mark, streak down the arrow shaft, and spatter to the ground, laying a trail dripped on broad-leaves, on stones, that the barefoot and trembling archer can follow into whatever deep or rare wilderness it leads. I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood. (Heaven and Earth in Jest, p. 14)

***

When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw “the tree with the lights in it.” It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam. (Seeing, p. 35)

***

This is the sort of stuff I read all winter. The books I read are like the stone men built by the Eskimos of the great desolate tundras west of Hudson’s Bay. They still build them today, according to Farley Mowat. An Eskimo traveling alone in flat barrens will heap round stones to the height of a man, travel till he can no longer see the beacon, and build another. So I travel mute among these books, these eyeless men and women that people the empty plain. I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I’m terrified that I’ll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake. (Winter, p. 44)

***

When I was in elementary school, one of the teachers brought in a mantis egg case in a Mason jar. I watched the newly hatched mantises emerge and shed their skins; they were spidery and translucent, all over joints. They trailed from the egg case to the base of the Mason jar in a living bridge that looked like Arabic calligraphy, some baffling text from the Koran inscribed down the air by a fine hand. Over a period of several hours, during which time the teacher never summoned the nerve or the sense to release them, they ate each other until only two were left. Tiny legs were still kicking from the mouths of both. The two survivors grappled and sawed in the Mason jar; finally both died of injuries. I felt as though I myself should swallow the corpses, shutting my eyes and washing them down like jagged pills, so all that life wouldn’t be lost. (The Fixed, p. 56)

***

Nature is, above all, profligate. Don’t believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once. This is what the sign of the insects says. No form is too gruesome, no behavior too grotesque. If you’re dealing with organic compounds, then let them combine. If it works, if it quickens, set it clacking in the grass; there’s always room for one more; you ain’t so handsome yourself. This is a spendthrift economy; though nothing is lost, all is spent. (The Fixed, p. 66)

***

This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am patting the puppy, I am watching the mountain. And the second I verbalize this awareness in my brain, I cease to see the mountain or feel the puppy. I am opaque, so much black asphalt. But at the same second, the second I know I’ve lost it, I also realize that the puppy is still squirming on his back under my hand. Nothing has changed for him. He draws his legs down to stretch the skin taut so he feels every fingertip’s stroke along his furred and arching side, his flank, his flung-back throat. I sip my coffee. I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feeling save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories. It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator—our very self-consciousness—is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution, cutting us off at both ends. I get in the car and drive home. (The Present, p. 80)

***

My mind branches and shoots like a tree. (The Present, p. 90)

***

If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring. At the ring’s center is a single atom of magnesium. Now: If you remove the atom of magnesium and in its exact place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin. The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood. . . . (Intricacy, p. 127)

***

What if God has the same affectionate disregard for us that we have for barnacles? I don’t know if each barnacle larva is of itself unique and special, or if we the people are essentially as interchangeable as bricks. My brain is full of numbers; they swell and would split my skull like a shell. I examine the trapezoids of skin covering the back of my hands like blown dust motes moistened to clay. I have hatched, too, with millions of my kind, into a milky way that spreads from an unknown shore. I have seen the mantis’s abdomen dribbling out eggs in wet bubbles like tapioca pudding glued to a thorn. I have seen a film of a termite queen as big as my face, dead white and featureless, glistening with slime, throbbing and pulsing out rivers of globular eggs. Termite workers, who looked like tiny longshoremen unloading the Queen Mary, licked each egg as fast as it was extruded to prevent mold. The whole world is an incubator for incalculable numbers of eggs, each one coded minutely and ready to burst. (Fecundity, p. 169)

***

I have to look at the landscape of the blue-green world again. Just think: in all the clean beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death. I have to acknowledge that the sea is a cup of death and the land is a stained altar stone. We the living are survivors huddled on flotsam, living on jetsam. We are escapees. We wake in terror, eat in hunger, sleep with a mouthful of blood. (Fecundity, p. 177)

***

Either this world, my mother, is a monster, or I myself am a freak. (Fecundity, p. 179)

***

Is this what it’s like, I thought then, and think now: a little blood here, a chomp there, and still we live, trampling the grass? Must everything whole be nibbled? Here was a new light on the intricate texture of things in the world, the actual plot of the present moment in time after the fall: the way we the living are nibbled and nibbling—not held aloft on a cloud in the air but bumbling pitted and scarred and broken through a frayed and beautiful land. (The Horns of the Altar, p. 230)

***

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down. Simone Weil says simply, “Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love.” (The Horns of the Altar, p. 245)

***

I stood at the window, the bay window on which one summer a waxen-looking grasshopper had breathed puff puff, and thought, I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent; and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf. (The Waters of Separation, p. 265)

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mathangigram-blog · 7 years

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Interview (2005): London calling -for Congo, Colombo, Sri Lanka

- By pop matters :

In 1976, Cory Daye recorded a song called “Sunshower” with Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band. She was 24. The band were well outside a recording deadline from RCA; when the album was eventually released, the label failed to notify the band.

“Sunshower” has been sampled for almost 20 years now; there’s a snatch of its warped Hawaiian guitars and splintered percussion towards the end of A Tribe Called Quest’s “Can I Kick It?”, but like attempts by De La Soul and Doug E. Fresh, it’s just dressing. The appropriations always seem piecemeal and placeless: Busta Rhymes’ “Take It Off” is slick, but not convincing. Ghostface Killah’s “Ghost Showers” attempts to wholly inhabit the song; it swallows him whole. There’s simply too much in the original: swooping Hawaiian guitars, child-like chants, ambient noise, guitar barely recognizable in a flood of in reverb. The percussion is so richly syncopated, so densely layered, that it leaves Daye’s vocal somehow isolated, exposed, as if shimmering in a cloud of dust. The melody itself sounds free and ungrounded, and takes on an almost atonal quality. The groove is woodlike, organic, pulmonary. Nobody has done anything as remotely convincing, assured, or unique with the same materials. Until M.I.A.’s “Sunshowers”.

The difference between the original and M.I.A.’s second single, produced last year by Steve Mackey and Ross Orton, is more than one of genre or period; it is a difference in aesthetics, a difference in the place given to popular culture. The original material itself is gutted. The slightly adrenaline bliss of Davy’s chorus sounds highly phased, over-exposed, washed-out at the edges. A percussive bass glissandi, which in the original gracefully eases the song into a final elaboration of the chorus, is ripped out and looped throughout the piece. The groove is a relentless throb that hammers its way throughout the entire song, rattling and lurching between violence and grace. “Sunshowers” erases the spirit of the original as it goes along.

Where Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band brought a wispy lyricism to disco, a feeling of dreamy nostalgia wrapped in their elaborate big band arrangements, M.I.A.’s use of the song is – like the rest of her material – a blend of hard unsentimentally and poplike glee. It’s a striking contrast: strident political stances sit alongside made-for-ringtone hooks. There’s no middle ground on Arular, her debut album. Even the wordplay is taken to a level of abstraction, with playground chants in place of intimacy and wit. There is very little that deals with the minutiae of personal relationships; even “URAQT”, a song about betrayal, revolves more around the exchange of postures than of emotions. Relationships are almost transactions. There is no trust in this music.

It’s a stance that echoes the details of her life: M.I.A. witnessed at first hand the violence of Sri Lanka’s civil war, followed by an abrupt relocation to a neglected council estate on the outskirts of London.

London shapes much of her music. The touch of gleeful – almost naive – joy in her sound recalls early British experiments with hip-hop. It is the sound of the Wild Bunch, of Fresh Four’s “Wishing on a Star”, of Carlton’s forgotten The Call Is Strong, where the sing-song lilt of Lovers Rock met the swallowed aggression of dub, where the structure and confidence of American hip-hop met the residual brashness of punk and ska. Though those influences have been replaced in the contemporary sound of London by dancehall, crunk, grime, and American R&B, the aesthetic is the same – and one unique to London. “The thing that I’m a part of,” M.I.A. agrees, “is that I listen to everything. And so do the grime kids. There are grime tunes where Lethal B could rap over a Kylie Minogue backing, because he knows it – he hears it: he’s on a bus, he’s in a cab, he’s in a Chinese takeaway.”

The vocal cadence that is a part of her singing voice – the rise in intonation at the end of almost every line – is now near-ubiquitous among Londoners of a certain age. It is not, curiously, part of her speaking voice, which is a fairly cool and unremarkable London accent. “Everybody has access to all kinds of genres of music every day when you wake up. So why not reflect that? It’s way more realistic than me saying ‘I only hear dancehall when I walk down the street. I only hear dancehall for eight years of my life walking around in this city.’ That’s wrong. Because that’s not the case. Every day I wake up in this city, the cosmopolitan Westernized fast first-world amazing foreign land that’s got amazing technology, amazing information access, speedway, highway – let’s not kid ourselves: we do hear everything at once, so whether it’s through television, on the radio, on people’s CDs, people’s cars going past you – so why not reflect that in what you do?”

While race relations over the last two decades in London have hardly been exemplary – something M.I.A. knows about at first hand – the capital’s density and diversity have made possible a mixture of cultures that sets it apart from most other Western cities. Even so, M.I.A. sees this process as increasingly under threat. “I knew someone like me could never come out of America, and I knew that I couldn’t come out of Sri Lanka either. It was really important to be in Britain to come out the way I did. But at the same time, I just think it’s really, really sad that I’m the only person here, when there could be a damn lot more. There could be more people making a crossbreed sound and referencing each other’s communities. But there isn’t. The Asians do stick to the Asians. The Somalians stick to the Somalians. The Palestinians stick to the Palestianians. The Moroccans stick to the Moroccans. The white kids stick to the white kids. The black kids stick to the black kids. And that’s only a new thing that’s happening.”

Since the late '90s, concerns have been voiced that “economic migrants” are using the UK’s asylum system as a backdoor. This argument has increasingly come to drive British political debate (not to mention newspaper sales), intensifying around election cycles despite a fall in the number of people seeking asylum. Since 2001, the debate has taken on an additional overtone of paranoia and “racial profiling” amid fears about international terrorism. Local community workers admit to noticing a correlation between incidents of racial harassment and the intensity of the national debate. Steve Griffin, Deputy Director of Groundwork Merton, a local regeneration agency covering the area in which M.I.A. grew up, notes that, “You get Islamophobia going. There’s been more attacks on Asians and more problems for Asians since 9/11 in this country.”

M.I.A. is outraged by this situation – and the smothering effect it is having on cultural interaction in London. “I’ve followed British culture, the underground culture, and musically I feel like I’ve been a part of different movements that have happened. But for the first time, everything is kinda just quiet, you know? Back when I was sort of walking around there seemed to be more of an identity amongst young people, and there was just stuff happening, and it was real sort of energetic and colorful. And then, it seems like everybody’s bogged down by all this immigration stuff, and newspapers are like 'Immigrants go back home!’, and for the first time they can say it on the front page without it being politically incorrect. And then with all this terrorism stuff where they’re like 'Muslim kids are bad’. There’s some weird atmosphere going on. Girls have started wearing yashmacs, and there’s divides amongst communities and stuff. And that’s when I decided to go, 'Look: the only thing that Britain always ever goes on about, and is proud of going on about, is that it’s a cosmopolitan city, and it’s multicultural.’ So unless everybody starts waking up in England and starts shouting about it, and saying that’s a really great thing, you’re not even doing what you said you’re good at doing in the first place.”

Maya Arulpragasam was born in London in 1976. Her father moved to London in 1971 after graduating in Moscow with a master’s degree in engineering. His name is sometimes rendered A.R. Arudpragasam, sometimes Arul Pragasam; his nom de guerre is Arular. In January 1975, he was instrumental in founding the Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students (EROS) in Wandsworth. In June of that year, EROS staged demonstrations at the inaugural cricket World Cup, prompting clashes between Sri Lanka’s Tamil and Sinhalese supporters, and bringing the conflict in Sri Lanka to international attention for the first time. In March 1976 he was one of three EROS members selected to train for six months in Lebanon with Palestinian militants associated with the Fatah wing of the PLO. He left after three months of training, returning to Sri Lanka with his family. Maya was six months old.

By 1976, Sri Lanka was well on its way to the internecine ethnic violence that would erupt in full a few years later. Following the withdrawal of the British in 1948, and the electoral triumph of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism in 1956, the island’s Tamil minority was gradually coerced into a position of second-class status; economic discrimination went hand-in-hand with a gradual displacement of Tamils from the education and administrative institutions. A handful of bloody incidents – on both sides – eventually tipped the balance in favor of militancy: land grabs, armed attacks, mob violence, and the destruction of symbolic and cultural treasures, sometimes with official connivance. By the early 1980s, more than thirty Tamil militant groups had emerged, of which EROS was one.

In Sri Lanka, Maya and her siblings rarely saw their father. He was introduced to them as an uncle. They temporarily relocated to the outskirts of Chennai (then Madras), where they lived in a derelict house. Her sister contracted typhoid. They returned to Sri Lanka, and remained constantly on the move. She remembers a childhood “inundated with violence”: the convent at which she attended school was destroyed during one of the government’s aerial bombing campaigns. She watched as some of her friends died. Family members were incarcerated.

In 1986, they fled. Her father remained in Sri Lanka; the rest of the family made it to London. Maya was 11.

They were allocated an apartment in Phipps Bridge Housing Estate, a development in the borough of Merton, which sits the middle of the vast band of conurban sprawl that constitutes outer London. At the time Phipps Bridge consisted of five high-rise tower blocks and ten low-rise buildings. Of the 4,000 residents, about 65 percent were on income support. It was built in 1976, when institutional inertia and hamstrung development budgets continued to license the building of high-rise estates, despite mounting evidence that they anchored social deprivation and institutional neglect.

By the mid-1980s, life on Phipps Bridge was an experience in misery. Sue Johns, a local resident, wrote in a poem of “the piss-filled lift” and “the shells of wrecked cars”, of “Fifties design faults holding on / By the skin of their teeth in the eighties”. She pictured residents waiting for a long-promised redevelopment “Behind Chubb locks and net curtains”. Television cop shows used the estate to film scenes depicting the most run-down, graffiti-stained dead-end estates in the country. It was hardly the perfect environment for an refugee family; Donna Neblett, a longtime resident and now a manager in the community center, remembers: “Police would not come onto the estate; they’d never come by themselves. They’d always be in cars, they’d never get out and walk. It was a very notorious estate. Everything: drug dealers, needles on the floor. Worse things than you can imagine was Phipps Bridge twenty years ago.” Maya was placed in special needs education to improve her English. Her mother worked from home as a seamstress. Maya remembers watching as their home was burgled. When her radio was stolen by crack-addicted neighbors, Maya listened to hip-hop from the teenage boy who lived next door.

Maya’s family was one of only two Asian families on Phipps Bridge in 1986. The mid-1980s were hardly a golden period in British race relations. Steve Shanley, until recently a housing officer for the estate, insists that despite Phipps Bridge’s reputation as a “a fairly tough estate”, there were not “any racial tensions or any great problems.” The local council records a relatively low number of reported racist incidents. By contrast, Donna Neblett remembers an estate rife with racist sentiment “There were people [living on the estate] that were the leaders of the National Front, so this is where they had their offices and their meetings, in the houses on the estate.” The statistics may reflect the tiny proportion of black and ethnic minority residents at the time. “People knew not to come on Phipps if you were from the [black and ethnic minority] community”.

Racial tensions – conditions in general – have eased considerably on Phipps Bridge over the last few years. But the obvious question is how an Asian family might have been placed – in near-isolation – in such an environment in the fist place. Local authorities are adamant that they are not in the business of social engineering. According to Steve Shanley, individual requests for location tend to be accommodated, but “one thing that councils make sure of is that they don’t proactively put people together. It wouldn’t be seen as 'equal opportunities’ to find out people’s nationalities and think, 'Right, well we’ll put them there.’”

One resident guardedly confided a suspicion that “I think basically what they tend to do – in my experience – is that’s where they’ll put [black and ethnic minority residents] anyway. It’s normally run-down, notorious, them sort of estates. That’s how it used to be. I’m not going to say it’s like that now, but I know back then it was. And that’s when you… That’s all I’m going to say on that.”

Maya used the aesthetic template of hip-hop to pull together her range of influences and interests – at first in the field of visual art. She graduated from Central St. Martins College of Art and Design, and a book of her graffiti-influenced artwork was published by independent label Pocko. It caught the eye of Nick Hackworth, who in 2002 established the Alternative Turner Prize to critique the narrow criteria of Britain’s leading art prize. Maya was among the six artists shortlisted. Hackworth – Arts Editor of Dazed and Confused – was immediately impressed by “the combination of the political content from her Sri Lankan background through the Tamil Tigers, with the kind of street aesthetic.” He remembers a boldness of vision that fused well with the improvisational nature of her technique: “She was just spray painting on bits of board, so it was pretty DIY kind of stuff with the actual media, tying in with the spraycan-type aesthetic. So it’s kind of rough, ready, and graphically quite powerful, because she doesn’t use too many elements; she repeats some of the elements; she keeps it visually quite clean, she doesn’t overload the images … It’s about graphic boldness. That was the best thing about it.” The work attracted the attention of Justine Frischmann of Elastica, who commissioned an album cover and a tour documentary. It was on tour that she met electro-revivalist Peaches, who first showed her around a Roland 505.

Her visual style is on display on the video for “Galang”, her first single. The video was directed by Ruben Fleischer, who notes that “using her artwork as a way to define her and inform people is very important. I mean how many other beautiful singers are performing in front of tanks, burning palm trees, bombs, Molotov cocktails, and helicopters? All of the stencils we made were completely based on her aesthetic, and were meant to be an extension of her. Many of them she either helped us make or made herself.”

The video’s imagery – alongside the lyrical content of “Sunshowers” – has attracted some criticism of her political stance. There are the brightly-colored burning trees, bombs, tanks, Molotov cocktails, London housing estates, and cell phones – and the video is punctuated by images of a racing tiger, a motif that recurs in her concert visuals and designs. A portrait of a Tamil militant leader appears at one moment.

For some critics, this is simply revolutionary chic: an attempt to commercialize the color and exoticism of distant struggles while safely draining it of any real-world political context. Nick Hackworth is aware of that tendency. “I think it was that unusual combination which I hadn’t really seen before in too much stuff. And also – I suppose it sounds potentially pejorative – it was slightly exotic, seeing something that dealt with non-English or non-European political problems in that kind of way, visually.” There are long-standing European traditions of seeing the “orient” as repository of color, creativity, and vibrancy – as a nest of cultures alien enough not to have to be inspected for political markers. Other critics are more troubled, arguing from her father’s biography and a handful of details (for instance, for a brief period after the December 26 tsunami, her website carried links to an aid organization closely associated with Tamil militants) that she is a closet supporter of terrorism – in particular, of the Tamil Tigers.

From the early-1980s, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) quickly became the dominant body in Tamil militancy, and Tamil nationalism in general, not least because of the viciousness with which they dispatched rival groups. In April 1986, for example, hundreds of members of rivals TELO (the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation) were killed in a sequence of attacks, despite their being armed, trained, and supported by the Indian government. From 1987 the “Black Tigers” developed suicide bombing as a tactic, their victims including former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandi. UNICEF and Amnsety International have censured them for the forced conscription of child soldiers, including 40 since the December 26 tsunami. They have been accused of murdering civilians in border areas to induce population displacement. The Sri Lankan government, meanwhile, has continued a series of depredations, including extensive – and sometimes apparently indiscriminate – aerial bombing campaigns. Over 65,000 people have died; at one point up to 30 percent of the Tamil population was estimated to have fled the island, with over a million people – from all ethnic groups – temporarily or permanently displaced. A 1991 report estimated that perhaps ten percent of the population had been displaced. Sri Lanka is one of the most heavily landmined countries in the world.

This is a far cry from the revolutionary panache suggested by M.I.A.’s work. Some of the associative imagery of “Galang” and “Sunshowers” implies a connection to the Palestinian Intifada, the Zapatistas, the Black Panthers, and the anti-Apartheid movement. Some see these as a valid comparisons; Dr. Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam notes, “The LTTE also fights against linguistic, ethnic and class/caste discrimination and oppression. The methods might be open to question, the aim is certainly not.” M.R. Narayan Swamy, author of Inside an Elusive Mind, the first biography of LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, disagrees, citing the LTTE’s murderous reputation. “This does not mean that LTTE has no support; on the contrary it does. It controls vast areas in Sri Lanka’s north and rules a de facto Tamil Eelam. But it will be very difficult to say how much of the support it enjoys comes out of genuine respect or genuine fear. The support is real, and so is the fear.”

M.I.A.’s stance, inevitably, is more complicated – and conflicted – than critics suggest, not least because of family involvement. Her father’s group, EROS, reached a working arrangement with the LTTE as the other groups were being eliminated. When Arular returned to Sri Lanka in 1976, he was apparently in close contact with Prabhakaran; according to some sources, EROS established a training camp at a farm in Kannady which was used by the LTTE. Arular and Prabhakaran are reported to have shared bomb-making knowledge, equipment, and chemicals. According to M.R. Narayan Swamy, “Arular was never in LTTE. Yes, he was with EROS in the early stages, but he left it but kept in touch with most of the actors in the militancy scene.” Arular’s official biography – which is to say, the one that appears on the jackets of his books – insists that he now writes history, and has mediated between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE. In any event, relations between M.I.A. and her father, whom she has referred to as “insane”, are not close. She has not seen him since 1995. Arular is titled in an apparent attempt to bait him, citing her mother’s complaint that “the only thing he ever gave you was your name”. She has doggedly refused his request to change it.

What’s more, if tiger imagery does predominate M.I.A.’s vision of the world, it’s not necessarily advocacy. The overdominant LTTE imagery – if indeed it is that – does accurately reflect the totalitarian hegemony that the LTTE and Prabhakaran exercise over the northern part of the island, and Tamil nationalism as a whole. The tiger, as a symbol, has been associated with Tamil nationalism for centuries; her use of it does not necessarily signal support for LTTE, though the gesture may be somewhat naive.

But it’s an issue that goes to the heart of her identity as an artist. She sees herself not as a individual, but a spokesperson. “In the beginning they told me [in England] that being an artist was about being an individual and reflecting society. And in Sri Lanka I was brought up with a different value system, which was that you talk for other people, and it’s always 'we’. It’s never 'me’. You never think selfishly. Nobody cares, nobody wants to hear what your particular opinion is. It’s the opinions of thousands that count.” Hence the urgency: “It’s too soon for me to get censored before people know what I’m talking about. There’s so much confusion about what I stand for and what I’m saying that that’s the whole point: there have to be discussions; there has to be people talking, and there has to be young people talking about politics if they want. They have to have a chance to hear different opinions. And that’s really what it’s about.”

There’s a personal edge to this, of course: Maya was personally caught up in Sri Lanka’s violence, and she’s aware of the impetus that experience gave her. But the instinct is deeply intertwined with an instinct to represent others. “I feel the reason why I’m really like outspoken and stuff is because all of these things were inflicted upon me, and I never went and caused any trouble, you know? I just feel like I was kind of skipping along in some country and somebody decides to drop a bomb and shake up my life and then it’s all been survival from then on. And that’s the reality for thousands – and millions – of people today. Why should I get censored for talking about a life that half the time I didn’t choose to live?”

Given the extent to which her viewpoint is grounded in personal experience, what is impressive about the maturity of her songwriting is her ability to write convincingly in the third person. “Sunshowers”, for instance, outlines – with some economy – the fate of a victim of racial profiling who is not a clear stand-in for either herself or her father.

There’s a sense, too, that western critics (such as they are) are simply missing the point when they object to the sense of indiscriminate violence in her music. Violence is not often represented in Western popular music; where it is it tends to be – as in gangsta rap, say, or death metal – ritualized at source and translated into a marketable commodity. Violence in the western popular imagination is abstract, organized, refined. In much of the developing world, Sri Lanka in particular, the experience of the last few decades has been one of arbitrary, unannounced, and spectacular slaughter. M.I.A.’s music and politics might sound like an assault without coherence or strategy; that doesn’t necessarily mean they lack realism.

Ruben Fleischer, who directed “Galang”, thinks “the principle idea behind M.I.A.’s artwork is to have pretty heavy/political ideas, but to present them in a poppy candy-coated wrapper. So someone might buy her painting because it is pretty to the eye, and not necessarily consider that it is a rebellious image that she is presenting. However, after they’ve had it for a while, they might start to think – why do I have a pink tank on my wall? � I think that ["Galang”] is a very successful video in that we have true images of revolution playing on MTV. However, because there’s lots of pretty colors and a pretty girl dancing, no one blinks an eye. Hopefully we have succeeded in subconsciously starting the revolution.“

The superficiality of M.I.A.’s chosen media – graffiti stencil art and popular music – makes politics a risky business. Her approach is the opposite of that of radical artists like Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino, who followed Franz Fanon in calling for an art that documented resistance while breaking down the barriers between spectator and artist. They called for artistic processes – and exhibition – that involved the audience directly, making them reexamine their role and forge a new, collective, identity. M.I.A.’s art and music, by contrast, are all spectacle. The two-dimensional stencils and the catchy hooks can only subvert the audience’s role after their immediate appeal has worn off, and they lack the breadth to contain a full alternative program. What’s more, the distance that comes from rendering real-world political conflicts in such a stylized, vibrant medium feels very much like the distance afforded by nostalgia, hero-worship, and romanticism. Graffiti – like hip-hop – is a superficial, ephemeral medium, with its own set of artistic risks.

But the realm of the image is what M.I.A. is most determined to contest: the media role models, the conformity of mainstream popular culture. "When [XL] first signed me, they sat me down and they were like, 'You know we only sign artists that are like "fuck you.”’ I was like, 'Hmm. What part of “fuck you” don’t you get about me? Me being on MTV is way more “fuck you” than me not being on MTV.’ Because of where I come from. I haven’t seen anyone like me on there before. And that’s what would be really fun to do.“

The narrow range of images presented by "the commercial media” appalls her. “There’s only so much controlled generic brainwashing you can do. And the thing is it would be fine if the audience weren’t reduced to being so dumb. I feel like they constantly think that we’re just stupid and that all we can handle is more songs about champagne and Bentleys … We don’t all have access to millions of pounds and Bentleys and �50,000 diamond necklaces. Where do those people go to be content with how they live, if constantly we’re being fed images of 'this is what you need to aspire to be; this is what you need to aspire to be?’”

There’s a common thread that runs from her concern with racism to the assumptions made about audiences. It’s prejudice, the ugly side of London’s cosmopolitan mosaic, and the DNA of Sri Lanka’s remorseless conflict. “What I want to say is, just be careful how you judge people, because you never know. And I’m a living proof of that. Every step of the way, people thought I was shittier than I actually was, or people thought I was worse than I was, or people thought I exist as something bad on the planet. Politics shaped that in the beginning for me. But right now it’s just a messy situation. All I want to do is exist as a voice for the other people that you don’t get to hear from. That’s all.”

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lodelss · 4 years

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Performance Art: On Sharing Culture

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2020 | 9 minutes (2,261 words)

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