Parabasis

The Life of the Party

by 99 Seats

So, yeah, that happened. And yeah, we all watched it. Except for the folks who watched the US Open. And it was as bizarre, as unsettling, as disturbing as everyone said.  When I watched, I was confused, certainly. And then I got the gag and it was...lame, yes. Occasionally funny-adjacent, with built-in laugh and applause lines. But mostly, I was confused. And I still am. I'll get to that in a second. It did, though, show the exact problems with the modern Republican Party and modern conservativism that I was talking about.

Most of the post-show talk has hovered, probably rightly, around Mitt, his reaction and the decision process that ended with Clint Eastwood on stage, doing improv with an empty chair for eight minutes. It does say a lot about Mitt, his speech, our politics and our media that we're all talking about the appetizer and not the main course. But that's not what I'm wondering about, nearly 24 hours later. Here's my question: Why did Clint Eastwood do this?

Let me be clear: I'm a fan of Clint Eastwood, as an actor and a writer/director. I get the complaints that people have about his recent work, but I still like him. I'm under no illusions about his politics, though and never have been. I thought I knew his politics pretty well, in a basic way: he's a moderate Republican in the classic modern mold. Pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, pro-women's issues (relatively), environmentally conscious. And the record bears that out. He identified more as a "libertarian." Which is how most of my right-leaning friends identify and often with the same basic profile: to the left on "social" issues, big on a lack of government influence in their lives, hawkish on war. He's eschews labels and such, has endorsed Dems and Republicans, votes the person, not the party. And yet...he endorsed both McCain and Romney and, at the very least, agreed to introduce the guy who was going to introduce Mitt Romney at the RNC in a significant primetime slot. Why would he do that? I'm asking seriously. Mitt Romney is running as a pro-life, hard right on social issues, who is hawkish on war and "pro"-business. In terms of beliefs, there doesn't appear to be a lot of overlap there. What was Clint endorsing?

For the last few years, there have been near-constant conversations about the end of the moderate Republican, the person exactly like Clint Eastwood (and, frankly, like Mitt Romney of a decade ago). Giving a moderate a prime spot at the convention seems like the perfect time for a full-throated defense of moderate conservatism. Or at least to have a major American figure stand up and say, "I don't agree with Mitt on everything, but we share these values and that's important. This party can stand disagreement." That would have been an impressive thing that we'd all be talking about. Even if it wasn't about Mitt (pretty much like all of the other significant speeches), it would have been about something.

Instead, what did Clint say? A cheap joke about the "lefties" in Hollywood. An Oprah joke. A Biden joke. Jabs about Obama being a hypocrite, an attorney, his inauguration. A complaint about Obama not closing Gitmo. A complaint about trying terrorists in civilian courts, followed immediately by noting that Obama doesn't actually do that. A complaint about Obama both not bringing the troops home from Afghanistan AND about Obama setting a date for the troops to come home. He did also note that 23 million people are out of work. That was largely it. And the crowd ate it up. Seriously. I watched it and they all loved it, every second.

What does that say about what's important to the Republican Party. Not policies, reality, the problems facing the country. Jokes and jabs that get laughs and cheers. Substance-and logic-free attacks. And attacks that are mostly about things that are about how Republicans feel about things. Even if the bit had worked perfectly, cleanly and clearly, it doesn't seem like the substance would have changed.

I can hear the arguments winding up right now. "But...it's the convention! It's a big show! It doesn't mean anything!" Except...it does. Because the question still stands: why would Clint appear here? Why would he want to endorse someone who doesn't agree with a number of his beliefs? Why would he stand on a platform that calls for the outlaw of abortions, gay marriage and critical thinking? (No, really, the GOP platform speaks out against critical thinking.)

Parties are supposed to be about the things you believe, the way you want the world to be. Does Clint want to live in Mitt's world? Does Mitt want Clint to have a say in his? It doesn't seem like it.

But Mitt was glad to trot out a cardboard cut-out of a tough guy to make jokes and throw cheap shots and pretend that it's tough talk. And Clint was certainly happy to go along with it. I'm willing to bet that, for Clint, it had to do with the Super Bowl Chrysler commercial, which, in conservative circles, was seen as an endorsement of Obama. (Odd enough that we get the whiplash of Obama both being blamed for not keeping a factory open and for being blamed for saving Detroit in the first place, all by people who claim that the free market should have no interference from the government.) It doesn't strike me as impossible that Clint felt his brand was damaged by the Chrysler ad and wanted to make peace. Maybe not. Maybe he just wanted to do it.

Either way, given a national stage and audience, he opted for nastiness and cruelty, for an incoherent litany of things that largely add up to "We don't like you, President Obama." And his party loved it. Because, at the end of the day, modern Republicanism is defined by that: they don't like things. Period. They don't have solutions to problems, they don't have answers to questions. They're trading on dislike, disdain and anger. Lindsey Graham said as much. It's a party of pure id.

The other moment that should define the Republican Party was this:

That is the modern Republican Party. Doing something about global warming is a silly, silly notion that has nothing to do with helping your family. Which should come as a surprise to the good people of Louisiana. And Tampa.

Jamelle Bouie nailed the line of the night about Clint Eastwood: "This is a perfect representation of the campaign: an old white man arguing with an imaginary Barack Obama." I say take it one step further: Clint Eastwood's speech was the perfect representation of our politics. Tearing down someone who believes most of the things you believe in defense of someone who looks like you and makes you feel better about yourself. It's not a good place for us to be.

Breaking Bad, Morality and the Workings of Narrative (Spoilers)

By Isaac Butler

Before this post gets down to business, I would just like to register a brief frustration: I had a much longer blog post about this week's Breaking Bad planned for ya'll and then, well, Starlee Kllie went and wrote it. Seriously, it's like she had some kind of brain-ray that took everything I was going to say about the show and turned it into a really great piece for Capital New York. She even registered my feelings about Mike's (mistaken) characterization of Walt's tenure with Fring. Sigh.  So read that if you want a detailed conversation about this week's ep. it's really good. There's also this recap from Lindsay Bayerstein which is well done as well. I also ended up having to pay Lindsay a dollar because she won a "Death Pool" as to who would get die first this season. 

I want to talk about something else, something that Kline touches on at the beginning of her piece:

It took this long in a season’s worth of his acting reprehensible for her to get there. I imagine it is the same for a lot of people. I’m not even sure I’m there yet, although for reasons that don’t have much to do with the man anymore. It’s the nature of narrative. I want Walt to live, even to win if he must, because I don’t want the story to end.

So the task "Breaking Bad" has set for itself is to straddle this line. It has to keep making Walter worse and worse, until every last one of us wants him dead while continuing to (presumably) keep him alive for another nine episodes in a way that feels solid and true to the plot and not in any way artificial. Because the minute we sense that they’re sparing his life for just the sake of the timeline, this delicate puzzle we’ve been assembling will collapse.

This is true but also work diving into a bit more, because it begs the question, the overriding question of Breaking Bad: What are we supposed to want to have happen? 

I'll give you an example from this week's episode.  Walt is in Hank's office.  He has to remove the two monitoring devices he has planted there: a bug behind a picture frame and some kind of transmitter in his computer.  Walt cries Hank out of the room and then goes and gets them.  We the viewers feel tense in this moment. We are in suspense. Our heart rates increase, we maybe clench our fists.  Later, Hank comes in and hands Walt the coffee. Walt sees the bank surveilance. Walt overhears Hank and Gomez talking. And the tension ratchets up again.

So here, again is my question: Why does it ratchet up? And why were we tense in the first place? We should at this point want Walt to fail.  We should want Hank to catch him, we should be, instead of tense, hopeful. But we aren't.

We aren't for two reasons, I think. The first is that what is happening here is a nearly automatic, reflexive response to how suspense narratives work. We have been trained our entire lives as viewers to respond to these moments with tension, and there's a high level of technical engineering that goes into this sequence. The writers, for exmaple, have inserted a "ticking clock"-- Person A must accomplish Task B before Person C returns-- which gives a scene urgency regardless of its content. There's propulsive, percussive music that increases the tension etc.  We're simply conditioned to respond to these cues with tension.

The second reason is that we want the show to continue and Walt is the show's protagonist. The show cannot continue for long once Walter is caught or killed. And even though we know there are nine more episodes to go, part of the skill of Breaking Bad is getting us to forget this external reality for just as long as it takes to make us tense.

I do not think, in other words, that we are bad people for being tense here. But part of what's so damn smart about Breaking Bad is that the writers clearly know how easily manipulated audiences are and try to use this in interesting ways. And there's no better example of that the train heist episode, which is like the 99% pure blue crystal distillation of how the show works. We start with a group of people arguing about whether or not to murder an innocent woman. Then we have an awesome-- and completely satisfying-- classic train heighst.  Then it's punctuated by a reminder to the audience of what this is all about, causing us to cast our minds backwards and reexamine how satisfying we found the whole heist-trope-thing in the first place.

I remain curious, then, as to why people are upset about Mike dying. Seriously.  The same people who on twitter and in blogs are celebrating the show's moral compass and then also in mourning for the cold-bloodiest character on the whole show. The guy has been a criminal and killer for decades. His body count has to be higher than Walt's. In the first episode he was threatening to kill a single mother and then had to be begged to leave the body out for her daughter to find it. Despite all of Mike's protestations to the contrary, the falling out between Walt and Fring is actually (if you rewatch the episodes) largely not Walter's fault, and Mike has, from the get-go, seemingly wanted to kill him. 

Again, we're dealing with another narrative function here, that of the "fan favorite character."  And I think what Breaking Bad has taught us time and again is that a properly contained, properly constructed, skillfully pulled off narrative can triumph over our own moral sense like a magnet pulling our compass in the wrong direction. And it is in this meta-way, in the way that it self-consciously uses the tools of storytelling to pervert our good sense, that the show is profound. For as anyone who has looked at the interrelationship of art and politics, or  propaganda efforts behind totalitarian regimes, or the history of anti-semitism can tell you, a good story can be a very, very dangerous thing indeed. 

Breaking Bad is hardly the first television show to enter this territory. Indeed, as we live in the age of the Charming Male Sociopath protagonist, many shows are working this grain. But few of them do it self-consiously the way Breaking Bad does. One of its main predecessors is, of course, The Sopranos. But in the case of The Sopranos, I got the sense over time that the writers, having figured out that it was fairly easy to manipulate people into having sympathy for their sociopathic lead, felt contempt for us for liking the show in the first place and decided to just make it clear that they were better than us over and over again. 

The question moving forward is how much deeper into this trench the show can dig. You could still have some (limited) sympathy for Walt in seasons three and four. Sure, he had indirectly caused a plane crash that killed a over a hundred innocent people, but the events at the end of Season Three are caused by his attempts to save Jessie's life and his actions in Four are explicitly undertaken to save him and his family from Gus, who is presented as definitely the worser of two evils. But in this season, the writers have taken away the futzy incompetence that was our last plank of Walt-based sympathy and they've kept driving him further and further towards the darkness. The next nine episodes, then, will be an experiment to see how much sympathy for the devil is in fact required to make the architecture of narrative function properly. 

The Vanishing

By Isaac Butler

Kevin Drum is curious about the disappearance of George W. Bush from our daily life and our popular consciousness. He makes a lot of good points, namely that we shouldn't be surprised because by the time he left everyone on both sides of the aisle hated him and his legislative record is very, very thin beyond the Patriot Act.

I think there's two other layers to this that Kevin doesn't discuss that are worth contemplating.  The first is how Bush's disappearance from the public eye works as a metaphor for what he really achieved, which is to say that his two terms fundamnetally determined everything that's come after them.  There's the economy he broke, the executive branch he stuffed with bible school graduates and incompetents and the two disastrous wars he got us into. All of these have meant that his sucessor, both Barack Obama and whomever will come after him, are stuck with the aftermath. We're still, four years later, cleaning up George W. Bush's messes (if anything, one of my chief Obama criticisms is that he hasn't gone far enough in doing so). And of course there's Roberts and Alito and all the other hyper-conservative judicial appointments. 

But beyond that, don't we also want Bush to disappear?  Don't we all need, psychologically, to blame it all on him and having him vanish?  After all, Democrats voted to approve much of his agenda. Tom Daschle okayed the War in Iraq and then snapped to the reporters that "we would like to move on," as if the decision about going to war was a simple annoyance to him.  Virtually no one voted against the PATRIOT Act.  Obama continues many of Bush's most troubling policies where it comes to civil liberties and habeus issues.  We still extrajudicially murder people. Killing Bin Laden hasn't ended the failing war in Afghanistan. Bush has disappeared in the same way our own reckoning with what we did during his eight years disappeared.  Were he to come back, we'd have to confront those secret shameful parts of ourselves. 

I Think It's Time To Admit It

by 99 Seats

I've largely avoided political talk around here because, well, I find myself alternating between depression and anxiety as the Silly Season unfolds. But, after the Ryan pick, the Niall Ferguson article, the Todd Akin mess, the welfare flap, the serial mendacity of Mitt Romney, and after a few months of watching the politics unfold in the single worst arena for discussion, Facebook, I feel like I need to say something. And I think we need to face something.

The Republican Party no longer exists. Not as a political party. Conservatism no longer exists, not as a governing philosophy. It's a marketing campaign.

Earlier this year, Steve Benen at the Maddow Blog noted that Mitt Romney had very little to offer the constituents he met. Benen wrote:

But Romney's in a tough spot, because he doesn't have much of anything to trade in exchange for votes. He meets a struggling firefighter, but Romney can't promise to boost salaries for first responders, because the his platform calls for the opposite. He meets struggling college students worried about tuition costs, but Romney can't promise more Pell Grants or expanded access to student loans, because he fully intends to end the federal government's role in helping young people afford higher education.

This continues today. Outside of the very wealthy, there is nothing in the Romney-Ryan budget that helps actual people. It includes less money for public services, less money for student loans, less money for healthcare, less money for just about everybody, except the very rich. It's tempting to think that the Republican Party is the party of the rich, but that's not really true, either. Because the rich will hurt, too.

This matters for artists, too. When pressed to say what he plans to cut in order to balance the budget, Romney goes after the NEA (and Amtrak and PBS). Which is ridiculous because those programs make up a miniscule part of the federal budget. This is not a serious plan for deficit-cutting. And, if you are among the super-rich, you're more likely to enjoy and support the arts. Which means your opera, your symphony, your theatre will want more money from you. Yes, you'll get a tax break on it, but it's still money out of your pocket.

A couple of things about all of this: it does no good. Slashing funding for education, tecnnology, scientific research, health care advancements, none of that actually makes America stronger. It's counter-productive to Romney's "rebuild" America rhetoric. It also doesn't actually make the deficit any better, since it includes massive tax breaks. It's also, all of it, largely unpopular. The American people are a confused, difficult people to govern. The number one thing on our list to cut to balance the budget, foreign aid, is just about the smallest drag on the budget. We don't want to cut the other stuff, but we want the budget cut. It's a hard row to hoe, I get that.

But what the GOP and the Romney campaign are doing isn't threading the needle. The Obama budget tries to do that. What the GOP and Romney campaign is doing is, well, A) lying. Straight-up lying to the people they met. And B) marketing to a demographic, not serving a constituency.

The Romney campaign's rhetoric of "freedom," "accountability," "ending bureaucracy," "rebuilding America" is pitched perfectly to attract a certain kind of voter, to make a segment of the population feel like Romney is one of them and has their concerns in his heart. He's not and he doesn't. Like McDonald's pandering to a community struck by obesity and diabetes, he's offering people the worst possible choices and presenting them in coded ways that make them think he really knows them.

This extends to modern conservatism, which has morphed into a cult that believes government should be small enough to fit in a woman's uterus or a gay person's bedroom, that believes that any restriction on the 2nd Amendment at all is an assault on the Constitution, but invasive searches of certain segments of the population are totally fine. Who exactly are they serving? Whose best interest? Again, it's tempting to say "straight white men," but, as was pointed out during the debates on the Montana abortion law, the lack of available abortions means, if you knock a woman up, you have to marry her (or at least take care of the child). We like to say it's a party of business, but global warming, a lack of immigrant labor, products that sicken and hurt your customers are generally not good for business in the long run. Like lowering taxes by cutting services, eventually, this costs you.

But hearing it makes a certain population feel good. I'm not going to get into psychologizing that part. But it does. They listen to this rhetoric and feel good, good about their lives, their choices. So they vote for it. From 2000 to 2008, we saw how that worked out. Hell, we're still seeing how that's working out, since the same people are basically in charge of our government now, no matter who is in the White House. They're calling the shots and are still calling the shots on the basis of what makes their audience feel good, not what's actually good for them.

For a while now, I've been referring to the GOP as the Party of Your Asshole Uncle. "Pissing off liberals" has been a major part of their raison d'etre since William F. Buckley's days. Which is, I suppose, fine...if you're a jerk who likes needling your city mouse brother and his kids at Thanksgiving. It's not really when you plan to lead a country of 300 million people. To do that, you need a governing philosophy. Not a bunch of slogans and cheap jokes. Until the Republican Party can actually come up with a governing philosophy that makes sense for an incredibly wealthy, increasingly diverse, unimaginably powerful and influential, modern nation of 300 million people, I don't think they should be treated as a serious party.

Upcoming Performance: The Soundtrack Series 8/23

By Isaac Butler

Hey folks,

In two days, I will have a performacne here in New York. I'm one of the storytellers performing in this month's edition of The Sountrack Series, a night of original true stories linked to specific songs. I'm doing a new story about eighth grade, Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick, being uncool and having a wife with better musical taste than you. 

There are three other storytellers. They're all excellent. It's going to be a really great time.  I hope you can make it!  here's all the info:

What: The Soundtrack Series featuring yours truly.

When: 8/23/12. Show starts at 8. Doors at 7:30

Where: Le Poisson Rouge! 158 Bleecker Street

How Much: Five smackaroos (or clams! or bucks!)

Website: http://www.soundtrackseries.com/

Nine Thoughts On Tiny Furniture

By Isaac Butler

(1) Damn. That Lena Dunham can frame a shot. There are very few stills on the internet that really do this skill justice, as part of what's impressive about Tiny Furniture is the length of its takes and how long each shot holds up, but you can tell that she pays pretty careful attention to staging, camera placement, design, etc.  This sets this early film apart from the Whit Stillman of Metropolitan or anything by Noah Baumbach, who both seem to me (along with Nicole Holofcener) her clearest influences. It is also far, far better directed than anything made by Judd Apatow, who is, of course, the Godfather of her television show. 

(2) It seems to me that the biggest difference between Girls (or what I've seen of it-- the first two episodes-- and read about it, which is way too much) and Tiny Furniture is the level of sympathy for its protagonist. Hannah-- and please, readers, correct me if I'm wrong here-- is largely painted as delusional about her abilities and potential as a writer. Her artistic ambitions are held up for ridicule, as a kind of Millenial (ach how I hate that word) "I'm A Precious Little Snowflake" pretention waiting to be taken down. Hannah, for example, has a twitter account in the show where almost no one followers her, despite her incessant tweeting, and she absurdly calls herself the "voice of a generation" in the first ep.  Aura-- Dunham's character in Tiny Furniture-- is actually talented.  While we see little of her work, everyone who has encountered it likes it and compliments it, and the one piece we see some of (The Fountain Video) is an actual early YouTube video by Dunham herself. 

The end result of this is that we feel a bit more for Aura, and for what clearly seems to be the acute depression she's going through. Hannah is an intense mix of self-loathing and self-aggrandizement, Aura on the other hand seems to think she's worthless, as demonstrated by a number of increasingly despearate acts performend simply to get people-- including her own mother and sister-- to notice her. These acts, particularly a tantrum that hilariously, horribly, seems to stretch forever as Aura's sister tries to surpress laughter, are not viewed uncritically within the film, but we are still invited to sympathize with her.

(Of course I also worry that the first couple of episodes of Girls are setting up the Apatow formula that i find so exhausting and that ends up being the outline of pretty much every film he's involved in from The 40 Year Old Virgin through Bridesmaids where a character's problems are painted in such an extreme light early on the film that the redemption at the end feels tacked on, unearned and, in Knocked Up's case, actually impossible (quick refresher: Seth Rogan's character is established as an illegal immigrant early in the film yet easily finds an office job and rents an apartment large enough for him to live in with his girlfriend and their child during a thrity second montage) but I'll have to watch the rest of the season and the next when it airs to see if my worries are unfounded or not.)

(3) Or maybe I sympathize with her because I had a girlfriend named Aura in high school and we're no longer on speaking terms and she was kind of depressed. Or maybe because I too come from privilege and had a horrible first year out of college, which included 9/11, getting married to my first wife too early, and getting so depressed that leaving the house felt like a victory, as did getting through a day without crying. I wouldn't mention these autobiographical factors except that everything about Dunham's work feels oddly connected to autobiography, both hers and that of her viewers, whether they be admirers or detractors. The work feels-- and is received in a fashion that is undeniably-- deeply personal, which might explain (along with our economic moment, it's all-white cast and, you know, sexism) some of the bewildering vitriol that greeted Girls after its premiere. 

(4) Autobiography is a tricky beast. There is something in us that yearns to know the "real life story" behind the shows we watch, the books we read, the plays we attend, the films at which we stare. That real life story could simply be how the thing was made, or on-set gossip, but our desire for an autobiographical truth reaches past the work-- or rather through the work-- and slips towards its creator. I am deeply, deeply suspicious of biographical readings of works, a suspicion that has only deepened as I've come to know more artists and been able to spot, in ways that the public cannot, where their life and their work intersect. In general, biographical readings of books, paintings, films, television shows, tend to shrink rather than enlarge the subject. It does not matter that our protagonist's two week bout of stomach flu was written right after a novelist had a week long struggle with the same illness, what matters is what the illness means within the text.

Dunham courts this kind of biographical fallacy with such abandon that it might not, in her case, be called a fallacy. Tiny Furniture is filmed in her parents' apartment (where, until recently, she lives, and I am almost angry that I know that and angirer that I wanted to). Her real life mother plays her mother in the film, and her real life sister plays her sister. Tiny Furniture and Girls have nearly identical premises (after college, a smart woman who is good at talking and terrible at life tries to sponge off her parents rather than enter the real world) that feel autobiographical, even if they are not. Dunham, of course, has a hit show on HBO which I have to imagine is a fairly full-time job and, given her show runner/director/co-producer/star role, is far more capable than either of the women she writes or portrays. And Dunham has proven-- and I mean this as a compliment-- naturally gifted at courting and charming the press, who in turn deliver to us the delicious autobiographical nuggets that in part sub in for actual evaluation of a work's intrinsic quality or interestingness. (This is not a slam on either Girls or Tiny Furniture; I'm quite taken with both).

(5)  In other words, it's actually hard to watch anything Lena Dunham does on its own terms and within the context of itself. It's hard to treat Tiny Furniture-- which, despite the similar premises and casts and concerns, actually is quite different from Girls-- as anything other than a rough draft for the tv show, much the way that The American President feels like a rough draft for The West Wing. It's hard to just talk about the movie as a movie.   But it's not a rough draft for a TV show. It's a movie, goddamnit.  And it's a pretty good one. 

(6) I found myself most fascinated by Aura's relationship with her mother. The biggest surprise for me in the film is that the mother is kind of a jerk-- distant and secretly as needy as her daughter-- without being painted as a monster.  There are real moments of tenderness between Aura and her mother, but there's also a door there that's been slammed shut, that Aura's constant entireties for verbal recognition and physical affection cannot breach.  Aura comes home from college and her mother barely notices, she gets a job and her mother barely seems to care until prodded to such a point that nothing she says  could possibly suffice. Most of the times we see her, she is not so much repremanding Aura-- which she has plenty good cause to do-- as denigrating her.

And yet we also get sequences where Aura reads her mother's diary and discovers that at her own age her mother was just as fucked up, just as depressed and strange and vulnerable and striving and depressed as she.  The real insight of the film is its recognition that, despite Aura's similarities to the discarded, earlier self of the mother, the possibilities for connection between the two women are limited. That past is a country that can only be recalled; return is impossible. Yet within that recolleciton lies the one extended moment of real tenderness between the two women.

(6) The film's other big moment is the aforementioned tantrum sequence, where Aura begins by getting upset with her mother and sister for reasons  that are completely valid, but as the scene goes on (and, hilariously, on and on) it slips into utter absurdity. It's a complicated moment with deft tonal shifts that relies in part on its length to work.  It reminds me most of the work of Alexander Payne, who is a master of stretching moments until their emotional texture changes, generally from serious to comic, but sometimes in the other direction.  Think here of Judy Greer's hospital bedside monologue from The Descendants. 

(7) I am less confidant in Dunham's abilities as a director to coach meaningful performances from actors. She's quite good at writing people roles that play to people's strengths but in Girls the scenes between the four leads often feel like the characters might be in two or three different styles of television show simultaneously. Dunham's hyper-real deadpan, for example, does not feel of the same world as Zosia Mamet's more sitcommish overindication. In both projects, Dunham's own performance is at its weakest when we see reaction shots of her during other people's dialogue. She has what in rehearsal I call the "I'm Listening" face, which is where you do a little something with your forehead that feels attentive while acutally speaking your scene partner's lines in your head. I don't know if she's really doing that or not, but were I both writing and directing the scene that I was in, I'd probably do that, and since autobiography is, again, a perfectly valid-- maybe even the only valid-- way to watch or critique anything anymore, I feel comfortable asserting that I'm right. 

(8) The men in Tiny Furniture are total assholes in a way that feels both individuated for each character are true. I double checked this with my wife who has been, at an earlier time in her life, a single woman in her twenties in a cool part of New York (Williamsburg, specifically) and she verified this. 

(9) Of course, another question presents itself: Is Aura deserving of, worthy of, our sympathy? Given her privilege-- which is immense-- should we care about her struggles or that she's depressed or in pain? Well, I suppose to me the question is this: Do we want to grant a work its fundmental premise or not? Because one of Tiny Furniture's fundamental premises is that Aura is a worthy protagonist, just as, say, in A Midsummer Night's Dream fairies are real. If you can't accept that, there's sort of no point in your watching the thing.

(This, btw, is why I don't see biographical features about the Royal Family. I am incapable of granting these films their premises, of taking as a given that the struggles of this particular group of people are worthy of documenting or sympathizing with. Fictional royals I have no beef with. But if you really want to enrage me, strap me down in that Clockwork Orange eye dropper torture chair and force me to watch The Queen on a loop. (Oh my God! The Queen's approval rating has slipped five percentage points! THE HORROR!!!!!!))

And this returns us to our economic moment. It's a moment in which middle and working class people are struggling, and struggling in particular ways, and in which their stories are not really being told. They're not being told much in our big theaters or on television and they seem totally absent from the multiplex.  In fact, the only major release about the struggles of working people to come out this summer is Magic Mike, which is essentially about a man who must turn himself into an object so that he can accrue enough capital to control the means of production in the age of mechanical reproduction but is constantly thwarted by management. It sits in theaters alongside Beasts of the Southern Wild, which appears to be the high-quality art-house rural poverty film of this year, as Winter's Bone was before it. But still, we're talking two movies here.

This is a really big problem.  In the peculiar way that responses to Dunahm's work seem to be about anything other than the work itself, there's been a certain amount of anger at Girls (and, to a lesser extent, Tiny Furnture) for existing in the first place. I guess I'm with Ta-Nehesi, writing about Girls and race, on this one:

There has been a lot of talk, this week about Lena Dunham's responsibility, but significantly less about the the people who sign her checks. My question is not "Why are there no black women on Girls," but "How many black show-runners are employed by HBO?" This is about systemic change, not individual attacks. 

It is not so wrong to craft an exclusively white world--certainly a significant portion of America lives in one. What is wrong is for power-brokers to pretend that no other worlds exists. Across the country there are black writers and black directors toiling to bring those worlds to the screen. If HBO does not see fit to have a relationship with those writers, then those of us concerned should assess our relationship with HBO. 

Dunham is a talented storyteller with an interesting, complex, and artful take on her subject. Her subject happens to be (for the foreseeable future) the lives of young white female New Yorkers who come from money. That subject is neither more nor less valid than other subjects. The problem is that the lives of fairly well off white folks are the only story our culture at large treats as valid. I think it's possible to both find things of merit in Tiny Furniture and also wish that, say, Ballast had garnered Lance Hammer an HBO deal or that someone was throwing thirty million at Kelly Reichardt to develop a project. 

Of course, given my own background, I'm a terrible, obviously compromised person to be making this argument. But I do believe it. The need for a wider variety of stories does not invalidate a specific story being told. It might raise the bar for quality of those stories--certainly, an upper middle class dramedy set in a living room at a LORT theater is going to have to be really, really good for me to like it--but frequency doesn't invalidate subjet matter. 

TV Land

by 99 Seats

So. I'm here. I'm alive. I'm coming around the bend on my 7th week in Los Angeles. It's been an interesting journey. I don't know if I've mentioned it, but I started a tumblr about it, from a more personal perspective here. It's mostly pictures and quick hits and "L.A. is like this, NYC is like that" kind of stuff. Me processing suddenly living somewhere else.

But I haven't forgotten about you all. I do plan to tell you about theatre out here...once I figure it out myself. I'm seeing my first show here in L.A. this Friday. One thing I've noticed is that there is a LOT of theatre. Or at least a lot of theatres. Seriously. The rap that L.A. gets is that it's 27 suburbs in search of a city. Well, each of those suburbs has one or two theatres in it. There are a few clusters of theatres, but it seems like on every main drag, there's a theatre or two. I can not vouch for the quality. But then again, I can't vouch for the quality of every small theatre in New York. Once I get more into it, I'll let you all know.

Theatre, however, is a sideshow in this town and everyone acknowledges it. It lives in the shadow of the film/TV industry. Actually, right now, it seems like most everything out here lives in the shadow of the TV industry. I've talked with a lot of people since coming out here, some are friends I haven't seen in a while, some were recommended by friends and colleagues. Nearly all are looking at or currently working in TV. It's become the 500-pound gorilla out here. As others have noted, we seem to be in a golden age for television. Particularly driven by the very high quality in writing. Plus the economics for a young writer are in television's favor. For movies, right now, there are really two bandwidths: cheap movies and big budget movies. When you add in the loss of control of your story, TV is way more attractive.

Now, I know that a large segment of the readers of this blog are, shall we say, less interested in television. (At least I assume they still read this blog.) I've never been among them (obviously). But there's an interesting artifact about the way theatre people view television. Several people I've met with have asked what shows I like. I can get through that okay, despite being vaguely sheepish about the shows I watch religiously: Fringe, Happy Endings, Community, Justified are all at the top of my list. Yes, yes, I know, I know, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, etc. I haven't gotten to those yet. I will. I'm good with the shows I like. Then I was asked a question that stumped me: Why?

That should be easy. I'm a smart, thoughtful person. I'm also an artist, so I'm aware of the conscious and subconscious intentions of artists. Television may be part commerce, but it's also art, created by artists. It does something. It's about something. And if I'm making sure I'm home to watch it, even in the era of DVR, if I'm making new friends watch it, the way I press Zadie Smith's White Teeth into their hands, it's saying something to me. But we're so used to thinking about television as entertainment, as being shallow, that, at first blush, when I'm asked, I get ready to answer in terms of craft, style, technique. Not in terms of the deeper point of art.

As I pursue this "new" line of work (it's still dramatic writing, but of a very different order), I'm realizing that I have to think more deeply about the work I'm doing and why. What are the stories I want to tell and why. Sometimes, as a playwright, we can fudge some of that. We can talk in big ways, use our over-educated minds to explain things away and keep the raw emotions at bay. Out here, for all of the crap, all of the commerce, I'm looking at digging deeper. But, you know, with jokes.

"Caught" In A World of Men

By Isaac Butler

Anne and I have sporatically been making our way through Netflix's catalogue of varous classic films. It all started when we were in France and caught a screening of the Fritz Lang film Clash by Night (adapted from the play by Clifford Odetts) which put us on a Lang kick that took us to The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street and The Big Heat. Somehow, we digressed to Carol Reed's Night Train To Munich and Hitchcock's Notorious and films featuring the late, great Robert Ryan (who was in Clash by Night). So... in other words, now we're on a Robert Ryan kick, and this is how we wound up seeing Caught, starring Ryan and James Mason, written by Arthur Laurents (!!) and directed by Max Ophuls, which is instantable at this very moment.

Caught is fascinating and dated in equal measure.  It falls into the long list of movies from the period that contain as their central anxieties questions having to do with women's changing place in society, with what happens when the roles get so prescribed that all one's choices are bad. In Caught's case, Barbara Bel Geddes plays Leonora Eames, a kind of Lily Bart without money, a woman whose sole ambition is to marry for money and be kept by a wealthy, powerful man. To that end, she works as a floor model at a department store and takes charm classes by night.  She meets and winds up marrying Robert Ryan's Smith Ohlrig, a multi-millionaire tycoon who marries her in a fit of pique induced by his therapist advising him against it. he then proceeds to neglect and emotionally abuse her until she leaves him to go work for James Mason's Larry Quinada, a pediatrician working in the immigranty slums of Broome street. She disguises her identity, Larry falls in love with her and she with him, but it tunrs out she's pregnant with Ohlrig's child, the result of a short-lived reconciliation caused by his (false) promise to change his ways.

All this is the standard stuff of domestic melodrama, except that the two male leads are two of the best actors of their generaiton and Max Ophuls shoots it like a fucking wizard. It's what happens to resolve the plot that's so fascinating. So here come the spoilers:

Leonora ends up having to return to Smith due to her pregnancy. She begs him for a divorce, which he says he'll grant her, so long as he gets the kid.  She refuses and winds up trapped in her bedroom, constantly tormented by him awakening her at all hours of the night for psychological torture.  Eventually, Smith almost dies in a freak pinball-machine-angina-incident (I'm totally serious) and then she escapes him with Quintana via the baby dying after which it is implied they'll live happily ever after.

I cannot imagine a movie being made today in which a baby being born prematurely and dying is celebrated.  And Caught actively celebrates it.  When James Mason, tears welling in his eyes, tells Leonora that "sure, the babies going to die, but now you can be free!" we're meant to take this at face value. The score swells, she begins in smile, they embrace and press cheek to cheek and sob to celebrate their tragic good fortune.  The film ends with Quintana's obstetrician-partner telling him in the most tossed off way that the baby died as Quintana goes into Leonora's hospital room to start his new life with her.

Of course, one of the reasons why such a film could not be made today is that abortion is legal and no-fault divorce exists, even in New York. Caught is a film that demands a world in which women are fully subject to the whims of men. Absent that, it feels preposterous. Whether or not this makes the film feminist or not I cannot really parse without more coffee, but, given that the Republican VP nominee supported a personhood amendment that would grant zygotes full human rights, it's a fascinating reminder of the kind of world the GOP wants to return us to. 

Saving the Superhero Movie

by Isaac Butler

Exhaustion. That's the response I've been hearing most often from friends and colleagues of mine when we talk about superhero films, particularly The Dark Knight Rises. Whether they liked the film or not, most people I know are just worn out by the prospect of "having" to see another 1-3 of these films a year for the foreseeable future. It seems that, for many, it was a nice run while it lasted, from the first X-Men film to the last Nolan Batman but it just feels played out.  Too many origin stories, too many seemingly fresh tropes that have now calcified, too many shitty roles for women, thundering exposition, hints at large themes without really exploring them. Too much money spent, too many talented actors tied up for months on end, too much wondering Is this the best we can do?

A.O. Scott's now-needlessly-infamous review of The Avengers captures this feeling well: 

 It is not as if the number of movies featuring troubled guys wearing costumes and fighting evil has diminished since then. Quite the contrary. But the genre, though it is still in a period of commercial ascendancy, has also entered a phase of imaginative decadence. 

Scott pinpoints The Dark Knight as "peak superhero," but the summer of 2008 already showed the crow's feet in the aging genre. Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk seemed to herald an age in which every superhero film would end with its eponymous stars facing off against larger, more grotesque versions of themselves and we were already a year past Spider-Man 3, the less said about which, the better. Since then, the lack of good ideas in the superhero movie as a genre has become apparent.  This summer saw a new origin story for your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Next summer will see a new origin story for Superman.  

Today, superhero movies are facing a similar crisis to the one that mainstream comics have had to face again and again, and I think therein lies an answer for reinventing the Superhero film and making it more interesting.  

When DC and Marvel faced similar creative crises over the last twenty years, they responded in three different major ways. One of them was to hire big name writers from other mediums to script comic book stories. This had some positive results (Joss Whedon's first Astonishing X-Men plotline) and some negative results (Brad Meltzer).  The second was to embrace a kind of pop postmodernism as exemplified by Grant Morrison. The third was to hire a bunch of writers who worked in other genres-- most famously crime and thriller writers Brian Michael Bendis, Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker-- and have them work on superhero titles.

Those writers went on to pen some of the more interesting projects in recent mainstream comics. Bendis made Powers, which is a great idea (it's a police precdural with an office that investigates superhero related crimes lead by a detective who is a depowered superhero) with poor execution. Bendis also developed the much better Alias about a minor Marvel character who becomes a Private Eye. Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker then improved on the Powers idea with Gotham Central, which might as well be called "Homicide: Capes On The Street" and follows a homicide division that is trying to solve cases before Batman gets involved and shows them up.  Darwyn Cooke and Ed Brubaker also collaborated on "Selina's Big Score," which plugs Catwoman into a classic hard boiled heist plotline straight out of the 1960s and features Batman in exactly one panel.  

Herein lies a possibility for the fixing of the Superhero film.  For the studios have always been trying strategy #1 with mixed results. Ang Lee, Sam Raimi, Christopher Nolan, Joss Whedon, Joe Johnston and Shane Black were all hired for their individual sensibilities but often these amounted to putting grace notes on a formulaic facade. Option #2, the pop-postmodernism approach would likely be an artistic disaster, although if David O. Russell or Soderbergh want to try their hands at an experimental meta-Superhero movie, I'd be all eyes.

But plugging the Superhero into other film genres-- particularly crime ones--and seeing what new territory can be mined seems to me an exciting direction for the films to take. Maybe we could Batman, the "world's greatest detective" actually do some detective work. Or watch Catwoman pull off a heist. Or see Hawkeye or Black Widow do some espionage. Or plug Power Man and Iron Fist into Lethal Weapon's multiracial buddy cop dynamics and see what happens. Or put Daredevil into a legal thriller. The guy is a lawyer for superheroes after all. 

There are hints in these directions, of course. Joe Johnston clearly really wanted to make a WWII movie with Captain America, which made for some interesting tensions when he started replacing action sequences with montages. I doubt Edgar Wright's forthcoming Ant Man is going to be a straightforward Superhero origin film.

There's also a question of whether the Superhero Movie (a) is in any kind of trouble (financially it isn't) and (b) is something worth investing energy in trying to reinvent. But if we're going to have a handful of these things open every year and if they're the only kind of movies that can greenlit with substantial budgets and A-list casts these days, I'd like them to be a bit more interesting. 

The Adolescence Issue: Table of Contents and Finis

By Isaac Butler

It's been a really fun issue here at Parabasis and I'd like to thank all the contributors for their efforts on behalf of the issue. As in our last two issues (on Lanford Wilson and Fandom) we only mined a small chunk of the vast mountain of material related to our topic, but I think we still found some rich seams to harvest.  

Thanks everyone, as always, for reading. I'm debating between a couple of themes for the next issue. If there's any you'd like to see explored, please leave a comment!

This time around, the issue featured:

(1) Being Other People: Dorothy Fortenberry on our changeable teenage selves. 

(2) The Perks of Being an Underdog: Kate Petersen on why she learned from the Phoenix Suns.

(3) 46 Tapes: Jennifer Fossenbell takes a trip to her own adolescence, aided by a box full of mixtapes.

(4) The Voice Of A Generation: Danny Bowes chronicles his frought relationship with Pump Up The Volume

(5) Lonergan, Off Again: Rob Weinert-Kendt writes about Kenneth Lonnergan's brilliant This Is Our Youth

(6) Here Comes the Fear Again: Ben Owen on addiction, Trainspotting and Requiem for a Dream

(7) The Case For Hannah Hovarth and Bella Swan: Monika Bartyzel on instructional literature,  and the gulf between what we want adolescent protagonists to be and realism. 

The Adolescence Issue: The Case For Hannah Horvath And Bella Swan

By Monika Bartyzel

(We close out the adolescence issue with this great essay by M. Bartyzel on what our expectations are of our young protagonists and what this says about us.  

Monika Bartyzel is a freelance writer and creator of Girls on Film, a weekly look at femme-centric film news and concerns, currently residing at Movies.com. Her work has appeared in the likes of The Atlantic, Moviefone, Collider, Splice Today, Hooded Utilitarian, Toronto Screenshots, and the now-defunct Cinematical, where she was a lead writer and assignment editor.)

Children’s literature has a very specific purpose: It’s a creative form of instruction. Little tykes sit down and learn about objects, sounds, and letters. They learn good and bad ways of interaction, and are taught how to poop. Even their wildest fantasies hold some lesson – respect your elders, do your chores, and of course, don’t cry wolf.

Adult literature, on the other hand, runs the gamut of experience. If I close my eyes and reach out to my book shelf, I might pull a book about race, time-traveling, performance art, pen pal romance, extra-terrestrial rock stars, feminism, World War II, gastroenterologists, shipwrecked sailors, crime… Though we might learn through the experience, education is not a priority (in fiction). Entertainment and/or art is key. A book might simply take us into another world, or it might delight in the careful placement of every single letter, word, sentence, and paragraph.

The idea applies to other forms of media as well. Children’s songs and films seek to please the eyes and ears whilst teaching a lesson, and alternatively, adult entertainment mixes fluff and thought on the whim of the creator. Once we’re set up in the world, adult media allows us to choose whether we want to be educated and/or entertained.

Young Adult fare, however, is the creative limbo resting between the extremes. On a basic level, editor Cheryl Klein’s summation is apt: “A YA novel is centrally interested in the experience and growth of its teenage protagonist(s), whose dramatized choices, actions, and concerns drive the story, and it is narrated with relative immediacy to that teenage perspective.”

Outside of structural restraints, the function of YA is muddied.  We chastise much of it and its silliness – especially when adults begin to admire it (Harry Potter, Twilight). We also place wildly high expectations upon it. Young people, who have been instructed in the ways of the world, are now on a long quest to discover themselves. We expect their reading to help them discover positive role models and continue learning about life. We fear the irresistible pulp fare and the impact it might have. The form is further complicated by sex; YA is generally seen as a creative haven for young women, therefore feminist concerns are always applied.

In recent years, these concerns have led to a cacophonous roar against problematically popular protagonists. It started with one Bella Swan, a girl so swept up in lust and love with her sparkly vampire boyfriend that she let it run her life. Her saga is so fervently polarizing that the world was quickly split in two – the Twi-hards gushing undying adoration and the Twi-nots condemning her. Just as the roar began to subside, Hannah Horvath arrived, Lena Dunham’s identity-confused heroine in Girls (admittedly a bit outside YA, but invoking a similar spirit due to Hannah’s immaturity). Once again the lines were drawn to define two camps – the fans who instantly related to Hannah’s idiosyncratic life and the detractors who believe she “and her friends are a bunch of racist fucking untalented hipster assholes.”

These heroines haven’t just invoked stern criticism; they’ve courted downright damnation. Their problematic, imperfect selves have hit an apparent soft-spot in the media psyche with their mere existence. Two aspects seem to be at play. First and foremost, these are young women bearing the weight of historically shallow female characterizations that feminism is trying to fight against. Secondly, they’re uber-awkward characters that bite their thumb at the struggling heroines who always manage to be at least partially idyllic. (Think Rory Gilmore and her financial hardships matched with top-notch smarts and an uncanny ability to flawlessly banter, or Katniss Everdeen who must play in The Hunger Games, but is inhumanly skilled at archery and wildly charismatic.)

The whole brouhaha reminds me of my own youth. For years I had free literary reign. My parents loved that I loved reading and let me amass a small mountain of first children’s reads and then young adult fare. But then I discovered Fear Street, and subsequently, Christopher Pike. Horror/crime/mystery/otherworldly menaces were my literary crack. I began to love vampires and the vamp/werewolf drama that came long before Twilight – L.J. Smith’s The Vampire Diaries (an entirely different beast than the show and the current sequels).

Presumably due to fears that I’d turn into a deranged killer or occult conspiracy theorist, my intake started to be highly regulated. My beloved pulp was restricted and mandatorily peppered with classics that bored my escapist-yearning self to tears, as well as fictional tales set during historical circumstances. (Of course, the Sunflower series of romantic histories led me directly into the arms of Danielle Steele, which wasn’t exactly a great literary leap forward. [Damn you, Message from Nam.])

However, even restricted, there was a freedom in my fandom. No one was mocking my love of Stefan Salvatore, or the absolutely ridiculous things Elena would do for her love. My whims and heroines weren’t repeatedly labeled moronic, and I loved my novel escapes. Incidentally, I grew up to be an English grad who spends much of her time writing about feminist issues in film and loving essays by Henry Miller and authors like Joan Didion, Graham Greene, and Voltaire – a far cry from vampires, murderers, and ghosts.

While my parents’ concern was understandable, what I took out of the books wasn’t a critical reading of the text, but the parts that resonated. I read all of Agatha Christie’s work, but all that sticks out is the charisma of Tuppence Beresford and how an old spinster (Miss Marple) could live a wildly entertaining life on her own. I remember the best heroines and little of the questionable material and questionable literary merit (of which there was much), because that’s what I was subconsciously drawn to and looking for.

As I once wrote about Twilight: “Reading The Twilight Saga is like revisiting your old diaries rife with catty rants and condemnations, emotional explosions and angst, where what was once live-or-die is now embarrassingly hormonal. Bella is an unencumbered look into an adolescent mind that’s not over-polished.” No, she’s not a stellar role model young girls should model themselves after – in any way. She’s too introverted, too easily swept into romance, too disinterested in the world that exists for her outside of Edward. But she’s is relatable.

Bella isn’t completely devoid as some Twi-nots describe her. She’s a sarcastic girl who escapes into classic novels and caring for her parents because she feels out of step with the world – so clumsy and accident-prone that she feels like an alien in her own body – an extreme manifestation of the awkwardness of the teen body. She likes a cute boy, obsesses on his minute qualities, and is so thrown by his adoration that she doesn’t trust it. The novels are her inner monologue, essentially her “diary” of romantic teenage obsession.

There’s a truth to Bella. She might make terrible choices, but they ring true for many young women – as evidenced by the books’ wild popularity, the many fan-centric accounts, and by my own remembrances of teen life. Bella’s depression in New Moon is often cited as one of the most damning aspects to her personality, which certainly throws her out of the running for strong role model, but also points to a very real phenomenon. Kids get depressed by circumstances adults find ridiculous. Many need counseling, medication, and other forms of aid to hopefully get through it, if they don’t decide to take their lives instead. If we consider how fervently we’d mourn, hurt, or obsess over something in our teens that was ultimately inconsequential, we can’t deny that losing a boyfriend who had saved your life, multiple times, would be traumatic.

As a role model, the condemnation fits. As a teen girl with wildly fluctuating hormones, who is trying to find her place in the world, the condemnation becomes problematic. By condemning her, what are we saying to the massive group of young women who relate to her? Twi-hards feel a very visceral attachment to the novels, a result of what many describe as Stephenie Meyer’s uncanny ability to invoke the essence of young desire. I can’t help but wonder if there’s a part of this vitriolic backlash that stems from embarrassment – a disinterest in recognizing (or admitting) how ridiculous we all were during our YA limbo.

Girls’ Hannah certainly plucks at the awkward, embarrassing parts of life. Lena Dunham unabashedly reveals every perk and flaw to Hannah. She’s a goddess of stupid actions, a young woman wildly self-absorbed to the point that she doesn’t see other people’s problems. She expects her parents to support her, and when they refuse, she doesn’t take the responsibility upon herself, she shunts it over to her best friend. She chases after seemingly unavailable men, jumps from job to job, and has an uncanny ability to assert ridiculous beliefs. Dunham’s primary focus seems to be Hannah’s flaws – both literal and perceived.

She acts as a kindred soul to some, and a mirror of bad qualities to others, as Jill York wrote for Nerve:

“I still don't like Hannah Horvath, and I certainly don't like that I see so many of my own negative qualities in her, but I like that she and her cohorts force me to see them. And I think that's why Girls has resonated so strongly with us spoiled, lazy types: it takes these uglier truths about ourselves and how the rest of the world sees us and it spits them back in our faces, leaving us to think about whether we'll choose to stay on the Dark Side or take our first steps toward the light.”

Are, perhaps, flaws and stupidity just as relevant to young adults as heroes and role models? Some may relate to a piece, as York does, because they recognize their own inadequacies. Questionable characters become warning signs for the audience’s personal failures, which may or may not inspire improvement. Other audiences might be adolescents in that messy limbo who relate to the uber-emotional turmoil of a sparkly, fantastical modern fairy tale – flaws attract flaws.

The above focuses on young heroines, but the idea applies universally. Though often framed by heroic means, comics consistently pluck at inadequacies and trauma raised by bullies and angst. Before the superhero renaissance, comics were obsessive pulp that thrived because the audience could relate and subsequently escape into fantasy. Even The Dark Knight Rises takes a Twilight turn (though much more skillfully crafted) with overwrought romance-induced depression.

On a theoretical level, I think of the fear I invoked with my teenage book collection, of how many teens have already written about how they’ve moved beyond Twilight, and I think the mechanical definition leads to a bigger truth: Popular Young Adult fare reveals the “Dark Side” of both adolescence and adulthood – the questionable and problematic worlds that ultimately appeal to the youth, and the fear that such portrayals invoke in the adults, because as one old pop song asserted: “children are our future; teach them well and let them lead the way.”

Adolescence Issue: Quick Update

By Isaac Butler

Hey all.  We will be finishing the adolescence issue on Monday. There was an internet outage in my building yesterday and it came at a time where, for various reasons, I had to be at home. Ah, blogging!  So we will conclude on Monday with a great essay by Monika Bartyzel on YA protagonists, instructional literature, Twilight and Girls. 

The Adolescence Issue: Here Comes The Fear Again

By Ben Owen

(Frequent Parabasis contributor Ben Owen needs no introductions around these parts, but I'm still very happy to have him as part of the adolescence issue.  Here, he talks about addiction and the movies.)

There’s a bit early in Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead where he writes about how, when gearing up for battle prior to the 1990-91 Gulf War, the marines watched Vietnam movies—Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket. He makes the point that although these films might seem to most viewers, and probably even to their directors, to be anti-war statements, to American soldiers they read only as pro-war, as celebrations of “the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills.”

Recently my girlfriend watched Trainspotting. She found it upsetting. I understood what she meant—there’s that dead baby crawling on the ceiling—but wanted to find out whether she’d felt any of the same thrill seeing it as I had 16 years ago, when I was 16. She hadn’t. In an attempt to explain why I’d felt that way, I began, as I sometimes do, to talk about the mid-to-late-90s in a quasi-mystical way. My girlfriend is eight years younger than me and grew up in a household that believed solidly in public television, and so with some regularity I take it upon myself to educate her about the fine cultural weave of 90s pop culture, when surface was depth. She bears this risible codger-hippy act with even humor, as I rant on about how music attained mathematical perfection in the 20 or so days between the release of This Is Hardcore and Mezzanine.

But I realized as I spoke that, while the various Hornbyisms I was reciting were true enough, if only of possible interest to other people who had personal attachment to all this crap, I was avoiding saying the main reason I’d liked Trainspotting, which was that it made addiction seem cool. Not that you could construe Trainspotting’s narrative as unambiguously pro-drug. Danny Boyle and the writer John Hodge show you the nasty costs of heroin addiction in the film’s slow, formless second half, when all the manic energy built up in the opening “Lust for Life” montage gets lost in overdose, Aids, and withdrawal. But like Swofford’s marines, I didn’t read it that way.

Not that I ever did heroin. I was generally too anxious, too dorky, and too rule-abiding to manage the complex set of codes required to buy drugs on the street (when I was 22 and briefly living in London, I went out with friends round Camden Lock and successfully negotiated the exchanged of £20 for what turned out to be a very tightly wrapped piece of cardboard). Alcohol was my first and my last. But at 16, the part of me that liked the clarifying warmth of a beer before my first class of the day found justifying myths where it could. The death and depravity in Trainspotting, the aggressive disillusion in Hunter Thompson, and the paranoid gloom in Tricky’s first couple of records helped, actually. Alcoholics and drug addicts obviously tend towards the self-annihilating, and in the first blush of love with alcohol, death seemed kind of romantic, a metaphor for the loss of self-consciousness that I, like most teenagers, longed for.

Things went the way they do. The metaphor didn’t remain enough of a metaphor, and the romance flaked away. I saw the way things were headed a bunch of times, in flashes, before they got bad. One flash came during that other heroin movie, Requiem for a Dream. I saw it on holiday in Buenos Aires in 2001. I can’t remember what I said about it at the time, but as a movie I don’t much like it. It’s honking, obvious, and relies on stereotypes. It plays like a nightmare PSA, but without the humor that might make that interesting. And yet, as a PSA, it was devastatingly effective. I left the theater feeling that I’d been told, directly, that I was going to die if I continued living my life the way I had been. The film’s logic was dumb cliché and, like some of the dumb cliché things that I would have to recognize about myself later, when I was forced to do so, true. It took me several drinks to feel okay with the warmth of the night.

The Adolescence Issue: Lonnergan, Off Again

By Rob Weinert-Kendt

(Whether or not we've got the longest adolescence in the history of the world, we sure do keep returning to narratives about it all the time.  Whether or not this is a good thing is a debate I'm all for having, but for the purposes of this issue, I suppose I'm a little more interested in what we say with these narratives. We have two pieces on that very subject.  The first, from Rob Weinert-Kendt, focuses on Kenneth Lonnergan's "This Is Our Youth," one of my favorite plays:)

 

Josh Hamilton and Mark Ruffalo in the 2nd Stage Production

What does it say about my generation that its putative voice—the playwright who once seemed like he might be the John Osborne, the Arthur Miller, possibly the Lanford Wilson of Generation X—has all but gone silent? True, few artists worth a damn would ever claim the mantle of generational spokesman, and dramatists—generally a high-minded and thin-skinned lot, at once self-doubting and self-important—probably least of all. But even in his heyday around the turn of the millennium, Kenneth Lonergan seemed singularly uninterested in speaking for anyone, and since then, with just two Off-Broadway plays since 2001, in speaking much at all (it was reassuring, if painful, to read that he's been partly waylaid in the interim by an Herculean struggle to get a single film completed).

Of course, in this obstinacy to be cornered or to wear a label, even that of “working playwright,” Lonergan may be the quintessential Gen-Xer: unpinnable, unmarketable, hushed into reflexive passivity by the solipsism and apparent hypocrisy of the Boomers who came before. It's a shame, though, because his signature works--the film You Can Count On Me, the plays Lobby Hero and This Is Our Youth--in fact did speak, in their halting, layered, ironic, exquisitely observed way, of and for a generation marked by lowered expectations, thoroughgoing mistrust balanced by a private and often blurry idealism, and inconspicuous consumption. My people.

I lived on the West Coast until 2005, where I narrowly missed a chance to stumble upon Lonergan in his creative infancy: In 1993, a one-act called Betrayed by Everyone was first staged at the tiny Met Theater in Hollywood, starring a young up-and-comer from the local theater scene named Mark Ruffalo. It wasn’t until 1996, when an expanded version of that one-act, now with the portentous title This Is Our Youth and still starring Ruffalo, garnered rave reviews at New York’s INTAR Theatre, that Lonergan’s name came into my consciousness. I took a rooting interest in it based on Ruffalo's participation; by then he was something of an L.A. theater star, having memorably starred in plays by local hero Justin Tanner; I was happy to hear that his performance as Warren Straub, a troubled but lovable pothead teen, in Lonergan’s play was earning him comparisons to a young Marlon Brando. As for the play, it was reportedly little short of an annunciation: Here, those who’d seen it either said or implied, might be the next Great American Play, or at the very least the next Great American Playwright.

It was brought back again in 1998 by Second Stage with the same cast, but I never ended up seeing it—because, in fact, productions of this Great American Play have been startlingly thin on the ground, particularly compared to Lonergan’s widely performed 2001 play Lobby Hero, which I managed to see twice in just a few years in Southern California (and which my colleague Jason Zinoman has called not only the better play but the best American play of the 2000s). This Is Our Youth has had three runs at regional LORT houses: at Steppenwolf in 1999, at Philadelphia Theater Company in 2001, and at St. Louis Rep in 2005; and there has been no shortage of small-theater regional productions over the years (Frisco in 2002, Chicago in 2005 and 2011, Seattle in 2008). But to date, to my knowledge This Is Our Youth has never been professionally staged in Los Angeles, even by a 99-seat theater, as even Tracy Letts' Bug and Killer Joe have been (Youth was recently audio-recorded in Santa Monica with the original cast by L.A. TheatreWorks, which is how I eventually at last heard it). Its only commercial revivals thus far have been a starry West End run in 2002 and another similarly starry one early this year in Australia. That’s right—the play purported to define a generation has played in freaking Sydney, Australia, with American film stars in it—but hasn't yet been revived in New York or even staged in L.A. What’s wrong with this picture?

I don’t have an answer; over the years I’ve chalked up the relative scarcity of This Is Our Youth to something perverse or retiring in Lonergan himself--an advanced case of congenital Gen-X diffidence. That’s almost certainly unfair; the vagaries of theater production, particularly newish-play revivals, are surely more punishing and capricious than I can imagine. So I send hopeful vibes in the direction of Second Stage, which has lately become a home for just this kind of recent-landmark revival (Howard Korder's Boys' Life in 2008, Paula Vogel's How I Learned To Drive last year, next season Jason Robert Brown's The Last Five Years), and toward the Signature Theatre, where Lonergan recently staged his latest lark, Medieval Play, which would make a promising site for a Youth revival, as it was last year for another landmark ’90s work, Angels in America. 

In fact, reading This Is Our Youth again recently, I was struck by its only similarity to Angels: They're both Clinton-era plays about the Reagan-Bush ’80s, and that quality of recent hindsight is a defining (you might uncharitably say limiting) element of both. Of course, that’s where any similarities with Angels end, and not just in terms of scale—This Is Our Youth is a three-character, single-set, essentially-real-time two-acter, while Angels is—well, Angels. Lonergan’s play is also the clear progenitor of a divergent strain in American playwriting; while Kushner's thematic and formal ambition could be seen as clearing the path for the likes of Sarah Ruhl, Rajiv Joseph and Katori Hall, Lonergan's fine-grained neo-naturalism has clear heirs in Annie Baker, Amy Herzog, and Stephen Belber.

And if Kushner's prescient epic presaged both the right-wing retrenchment of the Bush II years and the velvet revolution in gay rights (and, it might even be argued, helped set the table for our culture's current Mormon moment), Lonergan's aimless-stoner portraiture seemingly had no such culture-wide reverberations. But it is no less a reflection of its ambivalent age; possibly moreso, because by keeping his scope narrow and his focus intense, Lonergan captures more of the texture of life as it was lived in the hangover-morning-in-America of the early '80s—1982, to be precise, the year Gay Mens’ Health Crisis was founded to address a troubling new “gay cancer” and Nancy Reagan started telling kids to “just say no” to drugs.

Major Matt Mason, A Key Figure In The Play

Indeed, it was a time when the Reagan “revolution” was making headlines but had barely begun to sink in. This accounts for some of This Is Our Youth's patina of innocence; these young folks have barely an inkling what's ahead for them, both personally and culturally. But apart from the play's stray references to the nation’s new president, most of them hostile or incredulous, there’s writing on the wall of This Is Our Youth if you know where to look: For one thing, the Upper West Side where Dennis Ziegler and Warren Straub strut like slacker princes, toking and fretting in the limbo between high school and the next indeterminate step, had in the early ’80s only fairly recently been gentrified, in the first wave of what would become the Giuliani/Bloomberg turnaround—which would in turn become an emblem of the way ascendant conservative ideas about wealth, property, and class seemed to trump (yes, I use the term advisedly) old party lines.

After all, Clinton Democrats—even the reluctant, Nation-reading lefties who thought he was a bit of redneck and would have preferred to vote for his wife—proved to be among the city’s most fervent gentrifiers, and many fit the profile of This Is Our Youth’s offstage parents. As Jessica Goldman, the brittle, argumentative 19-year-old who’s clearly into Dennis but settles, not entirely unhappily, for Warren, describes them, “kids from the Sixties who were so righteous about changing the face of civilization, and then the minute they got older they were all like, ‘Actually, you know what? Maybe I’ll just be a lawyer.’ ” The yuppie sellout was a popular trope at the time, and it had a lot of truth in it. But not only does Warren, with preternatural old-soul circumspection, seem skeptical that people change as much as Jessica imagines they do; Lonergan is also subtly sympathetic to those offstage parents, not least because he implicates us into feeling parentally protective toward the play’s confused teen trio.

The play’s final big speech, for example, puts the struggles of Warren’s dad—a self-made lingerie manufacturer whose wealth hasn’t been enough to shield him from tragedy and loneliness, any more than the $15,000 in cash Warren has casually lifted from him could do—into sobering perspective. And a stage direction just after that speech, “Warren looks at [Dennis] as if from a very great distance,” offers a key to the play’s sneaky wisdom about the passage of time, about the ways nostalgia can take root in the present tense, a stubborn bloom in the sidewalk cracks of our lives. Ruffalo famously argued with Lonergan about casting him and Josh Hamilton, both of whom were pushing 30, in the roles of 19-year-old Warren and 21-year-old Dennis, pointing out—quite rightly, it turned out—that with the benefit of hindsight they could interpret post-adolescence better than actors who were actually going through it.

That "great distance" stage direction is one clue why slightly older actors make such a good fit for the play, and why it's ultimately much more than a proto-Apatovian stoner sitcom. This Is Our Youth beautifully, I’d even say definitively, captures the terribly self-conscious purgatory between adolescence and adulthood, the point when young people start to wax preemptively wistful about their youth—both in recalling their already idealized past, and also, more poignantly, in speculating how they will recall the often ugly and seemingly pointless blur of their transitional present. Warren’s satchel full of vintage toys and records, ultimately sold off in a pinch, is only the most obvious loss-of-innocence symbol, and Dennis has a striking early speech in which he portrays himself as less a simple drug dealer than as the put-upon peddler of his peers’ future warm memories.

But the awakening from childhood to adulthood, with its own bounty of terrors and disappointments, is also embedded in the play’s arc; by the end, high-strung alpha-male Dennis, shell-shocked by a close encounter with senseless death, has gone from treating his clumsy, wayward friend Warren as a punching bag to all but supplicating for a return to Warren's good graces. This, for Dennis, is growth, while for Warren, who has clearly attained some quiet glimmer of insight within the play's not-quite-24-hour time span, growth is marked by that sympathetic speech about his abusive dad and that distant, almost contented look with which he closes the play.

As Dennis and Warren share a last joint before the final curtain, it serves as a rite to mark the passing of a worn-out childhood bond and the negotiation of different, necessarily more conditional terms of friendship. The world they face is the one we now know all too well, for better or worse. The rest is memory.

----

Rob Weinert-Kendt is Associate Editor at American Theatre magazine. He has written features and criticism for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Variety, Newsday, Village Voice, Time Out NY, The Guardian, and The San Francisco Chronicle, among others. He was the founding editor of Back Stage West.

The Adolescence Issue: The Voice Of A Generation

By Danny Bowes

(Editor's Note: As a second installment in our revisiting-old-totems, we have the wonderful Danny Bowes stepping up to bat, with a piece about discovering that one of his favorite films might not hold up as well as he had hoped:)

There is a sense, between the ages of 13 and 19, that all of human history has led to this, to now, that the present is the fulcrum between what was and what shall be. The future is alternately vague, ignored, or terrifying. Even the past is of interest only for having led to the now, which is all there is, because even more than other times in one's life, the teenage years are a time of extreme focus on present-tense self. The development of adult-level cognitive abilities coincide with being slammed by an array of hormones leads to everything being at times unbearably vivid. On top of the basic physiological chaos, my own teenage years were complicated by the (fairly standard) matter of my parents having divorced, as well as some (somewhat less standard) complications with regards to sexual orientation; nothing so simple as “gay” or “straight” over here. (That particular ship eventually ran aground somewhere in the suburbs of the latter, but as any city-dweller will tell you, the suburbs are not the city.) Topping the whole mess off was a natural tendency toward hyper-ratiocinative brooding. All of this is why, for a considerable portion of my teenage years, Pump Up The Volume was one of my favorite movies.

Canadian writer-director Allan Moyle's breakthrough feature, Pump Up The Volume is a jittery, brooding younger first cousin to John Hughes' iconic cycle of suburban teen movies, with a far better record collection. The soundtrack is an extremely important element in Pump Up The Volume,   not simply because it's a movie about a pirate radio DJ, but because it consists in great part of formally challenging songs, many of which feature EXPLICIT LYRICS (a huge hot-button issue in 1990). This mirrors the movie's theme of finding the courage to speak, and to speak truth. Obviously there isn't a universal one-to-one relationship between telling the truth and cursing, but to quote hip-hop don Redman, speaking indirectly but perfectly to this issue some years later, “If you say 'fuck me,' I'ma say 'fuck you.'”

In the movie itself, protagonist Mark Hunter (Christian Slater) takes inspiration from Lenny Bruce's memoir How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. That inspiration ends up being a bit on the nose, as that's literally how Mark spends his evenings: having recently been forcibly relocated from the East Coast by his father taking a job in suburban Arizona, Mark uses the ham radio equipment his parents bought him so he could communicate with his friends back home (even by these pre-Internet standards, a dumb idea) to set up shop on an unused FM radio frequency, whereupon Mark adopts the persona of “Happy Harry Hard-on” and every night at 10 pm alternates between holding forth philosophically, making sex and masturbation jokes, reading listener letters, and spinning (mostly) obscure records. Mark, so painfully shy he can barely speak to anyone face to face, becomes an inspiration to his similarly inhibited classmates, developing (even before the movie starts) a devoted cult following. In the grand tradition of sticking it to The Man, Mark pilfers an internal memo from his school administrator father and reads it out to his listeners, going as far as calling the guidance counselor who sent the (rather sanctimonious) memo at his home. This gets the attention of the school's authoritarian principal (Annie Ross), whose crackdown on any student caught with taped recordings of “Harry”'s show or spray-painting quotes from it on the walls ends up provoking a full-scale rebellion.

What's more, the story has Mark inadvertently stumble on actual criminal practices at the school. In order to maintain elite average test scores, the principal has been quietly expelling students whose scores would bring down that average. To a teenager, this is catnip. “Not only does school suck, but it's actually a criminal conspiracy? I KNEW IT!” Add a cool but relatable hero, a quirky-but-gorgeous erotica-writing love interest (Samantha Mathis), and that terrific soundtrack and it's pretty much the perfect movie for a teenager in the early 90s.

Around the 15^th anniversary of its release, I revisited Pump Up The Volume and absolutely hated it. Clunky direction, on-the-nose dialogue delivered awkwardly, very young people being very certain that they're right about everything, the unearned supremacy of self....and oh the fucking whining. This was, to clarify, as much an emotional, uncritical reaction to the movie as my initial love for it. My associations with Pump Up The Volume were were more with who I was when watching it than they were the movie itself. And who I was, toward my later teenage years, was a shithead who drank every day and gobbled whatever drugs he could get his hands on. This lasted throughout college, where the number of days I was sober(ish) were so few and far between I can point to an exact reason for nearly every one (that I can remember, that is). Now, it should be noted that Pump Up The Volume is hardly an endorsement of drugs and booze, aside from its casual, normal-for-its-time portrayal of smoking as fashion statement. It is, however, a movie sympathetic to the idea of escape from the bewilderment and frustration of being young. Having only just (and not very securely) slammed the door shut on my drug taking, I was a bit unfairly angry at my teenage self for not immediately being able to deal with emotional pain, and for not buckling down and being exactly the kind of responsible dorky aspirant to mainstream society I'd despised in my teenage years. I was, in effect, LARPing the Faces' single “Ooh La La” (you know, “I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger,” that one). And that's bullshit. The whole point of being young is not knowing anything. That's how you learn stuff.

When it was time to write this piece, I watched  Pump Up The Volume again, with no small amount of dread from the lingering memory of the last time. It was thus a bit of a surprise that it actually isn't nearly that bad. It finally dawned on me that it wasn't that I realized I'd been wrong about the movie the previous time, it was re-directed overly harsh self-criticism. To put it another way, I can wish that I knew what I know now when I was younger all I like, but that wish can only ever be a wish. Time is the great educator.

As for the movie itself, it's a sincere piece of work that takes the concerns of its teenaged target audience very, very seriously. It uses music—both Cliff Martinez's tres-late 80s score and the terrific songs—to excellent effect. Christian Slater's performance in the leads doesn't connect emotional extremes convincingly, but his teenage Lenny Bruce act on the radio and his near-mute bespectacled public persona are effective on their own. The other performances are at the mercy of underwritten or painfully subtext-free dialogue, and the script half-asses the school corruption business (shifting the blame for institutional corruption onto renegade individuals is, after all, how institutions solidify their power and calcify into uselessness; on the other hand, over-simplifying problems is something young people do all the time, so there's that). It is, on its technical merits, not a great movie.

But there's one brief passage that is absolutely perfect. For background, Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis end up becoming romantically involved, being, after all, the leads. One night Samantha Mathis goes over to Christian Slater's house (where, of course, he hosts his radio show) and they both end up topless, a cross-gender/orientation delight. Fun as it is though, that's not the perfect bit. The next day, when they run into each other at school, is. The previous night's boldness and nudity (both physicial and emotional) is gone, and for a minute or so the camera simply lingers on what's almost literally a dance sequence, of two young people just being OMG holy shit into each other. That particular thing is so specifically of the teenage years, where attraction and sex and romance are exhilarating and new and everything is so intense it becomes all of existence and all there is is now. It's not that that feeling goes away when you grow up, it just happens less often, and it never quite feels as OMG holy shit amazing as it does when it's brand new and you have no perspective on it yet.

That's why, to borrow the grandiose melodrama of teenage pronouncements on culture, Pump Up The Volume, for all its dated signifiers and artistic shortcomings, is adolescence: sometimes it's great, sometimes it sucks, it's consumed by music and sex, and it's an intensely personal thing not everyone's going to get. Pump Up The Volume, its very existence beholden to the pre-Internet era, is a thing of the past, like adolescence to people my age. But the movie and the memories both are always there to revisit. 

---

Danny Bowes is an actor, playwright, filmmaker, and film critic whose work has appeared in Premiere, Indiewire, and The Atlantic; he reviews new science-fiction/fantasy releases at Tor.com and blogs at Movies By Bowes.

The Adolescence Issue: 46 Tapes

By J. Fossenbell

(Editor's Note: One of the odd things about memoir is that there are multiple "I"s in the narrative. There's the "I" who is the character in the story and the "I" who is the narrator telling it from the vantage point of the future.  Adolescence, as Dorothy's piece showed yesterday, can heighten this tension. There is no time where our hindsight is more heightened, super -vision, beyond 20-20'd than with that time.  And because we discover various cultural artifacts during that period, it's an easy, Proustian exercise to call those times up again.  Sometimes what we discover fills us with wistfulness, or joy, or shame, or laughter.

Today, we have two pieces in which writers revisit artifacts from their past that have washed ashore onto the island of their present.  The first is from poet Jennifer Fossenbell:)

 

Apocalyptic romanticism means

nihilism and faith are strange cousins 

music is about everything else 

including itself 

and ourself

 

I’ve just unstuck one of my old mixed tapes from the bottom of a box.  The title of this one is from that grade-school song: I like to oat oat oat oat oat…opples and bononos… And so on.  Side A is Apples, Side B is Bananas.  Symmetrical, tidy.  The track titles are penned—yes, penned—in green ink from a Sheaffer fountain pen, ‘Italic M’ calligraphic nib, in a melodramatic, elongated hand.  The mix is badly ordered and amateur, but I still love it entirely; the songs are unified by one simple fact: I like(d) them.  Call it musical masturbation.  From me, of me, for me and my pleasure only.  I want I like is enough.  Mine.  I click the tape into place. My guts rearrange for some songs into some older version of my interior, trying to transplant the music like sonorous organs.  Some take; some my body rejects.  I giggle; I tear up—it tickles when adolescence pokes you in the ribs.

One week ago, my husband and I standing by my Grandma Zee’s new headstone in Missouri, singing “Amazing Grace” badly, my Aunt Janet pouring ashes out of a reused bread bag into a grave.  One month ago, blurry goodbyes then blurry hellos: an old dual ritual called “leaving home,” called “coming home.”  After two-and-a-half years in Hanoi of teaching, writing, eating, living good.  Made the rounds in Colorado, tried to talk but our mouths were upside-down and sideways, in the wrong hemisphere.  Unearthed boxes from storage, sorted, tossed, repacked, loaded up.  A U-Haul and a dolly, us and all our shit and the old Subaru wagon behind us.  We drove away at dawn on a Wednesday, split between a feeling of moving back and moving on.

Don’t know how we got here except by trusting none of this is real.  A good mix on the iPod helped: cocktail of old and new rolling us across the Great Plains.  A familiar soundtrack of our lives together—his favorite, my favorites—but as surreal now as we are to ourselves, repatriated as we are, a post-migratory species.

One month later, a six-month lease and two rooms.  A 1930s upper duplex in Corcoran Park, Minneapolis, run-down and cramped.  “Fringe” neighborhood, people tell us, but looks like a green Eden to us.  I miss Hanoi, though, miss it maybe for no other reason than it’s passed, unattainable.  Like ‘I’.  Whoever she was or was turning into in that place, she’s morphed now. Now we’re in this different-smelling place with all our stuff from a past life.  I unpack my stereo—one of those phony-old-fashioned deals.  It plays tapes, CDs and records: the flickering trifecta of recorded music media.

Of the three, all I have left now is this one box of tapes, a fraction of my teen collection.  If Jenny has eight apples and seven of them are stolen out of her car at a gas station, how many apples can she still listen to?  One shoebox is it, and I’ve unearthed it.  The top layer:  Oingo Boingo, Nitzer Ebb, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and a mixed tape from a high school buddy called Stroke the Pussy.

Things are coming back to me.  Devo, Primus, Mr. Bungle.  I touch the tapes one at a time, bob their rattling plastic cases in my hands.  U2, The Rolling Stones, James Taylor.  I test the hinges; some break off when I force them, glued shut by mysterious, age-browned liquids.  Skankin Pickle, Peter Murphy, Cabaret Voltaire.  Paper inserts sun-faded or wavy from being soaked and dried.  KMFDM, Ministry, Vivaldi.  Duke Ellington, The Clash.  Part time capsule, part self-portrait.   Sex Pistols, Nine Inch Nails.  I start listening.

 

SHRIEKBACK | Oil and Gold

Oh my God, Brad and Tom are beautiful vampires.  Stunning.  Antonio, too, and even the puerile Kirsten.  So beautiful I have suffered and cried with them six times in the theater, and dozens more at my house or at Rachael’s.  We weep at Louis’ transformation; we ache to exist in his tragic reality.  What makes Louis special is his interminable empathy for all the pain and all the suffering of the world, and of his kind.  He is an all-seeing creature of the night.  This I get.  I don’t want him; I am him.  Robust, Tolsoyan melancholy flourishes full-hearted in my poems.  I live inside my piano, finger its strings, learn to play Beethoven like River Phoenix in Running on Empty.  I weep often.  I am Keats’ dejection, I am Poe’s motherlessness, I am Whitman’s war.  I weep not because I have an intolerable life, but because I am lucky enough to see how intolerable the whole human world is, and how glorious.  And because I see it, it is my duty to express it.  Yes, me.  You don’t believe me?  Fuck off.  I’m fifteen and old enough to know.

I’ll bleed for myself and for the world that can’t bleed enough.  Like Cash, I’ll wear black for those who have no voice.  I will be the conduit of pain, not hide from it.  I will embrace disfigurement and suffering.  I have this privilege.

 

SISTERS OF MERCY | Floodland & SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES | Peepshow

Malia, my older sister and music umbilical cord, and I are in her red Toyota, Betty Pepper, on our way to Ground Zero, our favorite (the only?) goth-industrial club on the Front Range of Colorado.  Sisters of Mercy are on the tape deck, Siouxsie on Side B.  We sing along.  I love her friends Dana and Kim for their black-rimmed beauty, for their maturity.  They teach me how to act bold, feel powerful, boobs or no boobs.  These two albums are the soundtrack of our drive there, our drive back, again next month, and again.  Every time we go, I borrow an ID.  My name is Natalie, my name is whatever.  I smoke too many cloves, drink too many beers, pass out on the ride home.  Kim says I look like a sleeping angel and I arch awake like a staked vampire, puke in Betty Pepper’s back seat.

 

SINEAD O’CONNOR | The Lion and the Cobra

I too have walked through these huge landscapes of feeling, climbed hill after hill of joy that was anguish that was joy that was anguish that was joy.  I live in an emotional state that pre-dates duality.  It’s all the same thing: love, destruction, compassion, rage, harmony, injustice.  I’ve already learned nothing is fair and never will be, and so we’re all screwed from the very beginning.  But I know there’s more to it—something to do with reveling, or is it wallowing.  No, I am Zen, detached as shit.  Bring it on.   Sinead is a rocket, a mountain, a waterfall. 

I know that right now, I know all I’ll ever need to know.  I also know that when I’m older, I’ll look back and laugh at how little I know now.  My parents will turn out to be right, my sister will turn out to be right.  I hate that fact, but know I can’t change it.  I am wise, you are wise.  Everything will be just like you said it would be.  I listen to this album and smell my old bedroom:  dusty dried flowers, cheap incense, smoke—the smells of grafting part to part, soldering myself.  The smell of that old contradiction: the impatience to change / the belief that not changing is ever even an option.

 

THE MOODY BLUES | A Question of Balance

Malia and I both absorbed nostalgia from Dad, I guess.  His eyes watery sometimes as he sang along to “Melancholy Man.” Jubilant when the orchestra swelled up like a war was won.  Mom’s dreamy eyes, too, when Joan Baez sang.  I learned from them this formula, borrowed their past through their music.  They took us to see the Moody Blues when I was ten:  our first rock concert.

Dad used to sing us Simon and Garfunkle.  “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”  I strain to picture the time of my parents’ coming together, this almost tangible thing that preceded me but led to me.  Harmony balanced against chaos, inside it and around it.  It mattered only that I was there, that I had heard this, joined the Lonely Hearts Club.  It was all bright and melancholic, it was bohemian in full-color, it was never meant for me but I found it anyway.

 

DAVID BOWIE | Changesbowie

It’s October, 1995 and I’m standing in McNichol’s Arena, practically vibrating with anticipation.  It’s David Bowie’s Outside tour, with special guest Nine Inch Nails.  I am passionate about Bowie, his incarnations, the way he reinvents himself to stay ahead of himself.  There is truth in how he makes his image; he is the obviation of authenticity through malleability.  Others, I think, do this well, but none so well as him. Then there’s Trent, the other side of the David coin, in my world anyway.  I wanna fuck you like an animal is a more dangerous strain of You’re a rock n’ roll suicide…  Right now my long-time wish to marry them both and have a spectacular three-way seems within reach; who ever thought they’d tour together?

Nine Inch Nails opens the show.  Then the two bands do this amazing one-off-one-on thing to transition between the two sets.  Suddenly there are both of them on stage together, playing “Reptile” and “Hurt,” then playing “Hallo Spaceboy” and “Subterreaneans.”  David Bowie is in a white suit oh my god and he’s singing and there’s a red rose on the piano and oh my god he’s so beautiful and they’re singing together oh my god.  I always thought Beatlemania was just a bunch of idiotic, sexually repressed girls, but now I think I understand and I am crying too because I love these men and their songs so much and all I want is to become the music and be consumed by it. 

 

LEGENDARY PINK DOTS | The Maria Dimension

Louis is rolling around in the graveyard, moaning, having just swallowed blood from Lestat’s wrist.  Lestat tells him, “Pay no attention. You’re only dying.  It happens to us all.”  I know exactly what he means!  The moonlight simplifies and flattens.  Death is a lovely theory.

My little white cat Pearl is hit by a car.  Before that, Rachael’s little white dog Oscar is hit by a car.  I watch them both die.  I see them both burst, the boundary of the body and the world suddenly such a delicate, inflexible thing.  No room for error, no room to live with a dent in your skull or your guts halfway in, halfway out.  Impact is one word for this.  But this is not the death aesthetic.  This is blood that’s more brown than red, with chunks of gore and gravel in it, and snot all over my face from crying.  This is way too much violence and not enough violin glissandos.  Too much silence, not enough LPD. 

My grandfather dies, too, in Missouri.  I am fourteen.  I stay home with my sister for school, while Mom and Dad go to the funeral.  I take acid and smoke cloves and meditate on the voice of Edward Kaspell who is a genius and nothing about this is ironic to me. 

I take Brady to see them at the Ogden, 2006.  I could see what he saw: Edward looking washed up in a bathrobe, sounding tired, music that had been made of brilliant deviations worn down to weary ramblings.  All the times before that, with Malia in tiny, sweaty, smoke-filled places, they were truly gods.  When I listened and watched closely, I was a poem.  I’ll never see them again.

 

MINISTRY | Twitch

My husband and I are going to see a new documentary called Fix.  It’s mostly about Ministry.  The crowd in the Riverview Theater is a hundred or more couples much like us: thirty- or forty-something former punks, goths and rockers.  In adulthood you know us only by our off-black tattoos and Doc Martens.  A ratty Tool concert t-shirt, a lip ring, a leather cuff.  We’re all gathered for the promise of NEVER BEFORE SEEN! footage and interviews, of rock-induced destruction and hysteria. 

Trent Reznor has cut his hair and put on weight.  He looks over it, well-adjusted.  Rock was supposed to be this larger than life thing, Reznor says in Fix, and Al was the real thing.  Alien Jourgensen, he means.  Whatever else is real or not real, aging is real.  All these men (plus one woman: Siouxsie) who were supposed to be supernatural beings show up on screen with wrinkles and thinning hair.  Their minds and words are muddled from years of doping and partying like it’s 1999.  Which it was, thirteen years ago.  Past Jen covers her face with embarrassment.  Present Jen shrugs; she’s known the stupid punch line all along.

Here’s Ministry backstage, drunk and strung out past all realms of sanity.  Al swinging his cock around, thrusting it into the cavity of a whole roasted chicken.  Al deconstructing into a paranoid fit, tearing apart a room to find his lucky talisman.  Past Jen savors his annihilation.  Present Jen is sad for them.  Sad for Al’s thinning dreadlocks and heroin-fertilized egomania, for all of the bodies and brains of these feeble puppets who thought they were hands.

And all the aging rockers sing, Doo do-doo do-doo do-do-do-dooo.  This is what happens when one survives, when he doesn’t collapse into glorious rock n’ roll suicide: he becomes a deluded junky, becomes commercial, becomes old.  Laughs at the crowds of moshers, his reverent disciples.  Despises them, even, for their genuflection.  Rock makes immortality possible, but only in death.  Short of that, there’s only calming down.  It’s the one way to outlive every kind of excess.  I know as adults we should live responsibly and seek balance.  But I can’t stand to watch this loss of extremism, this ultimate grotesquery of a sane and normal life.

 

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS | Flood

I cheat on my misery every so often.  I find the Truth, then occasionally chose to ignore it in favor of pleasure.  Humans are like this.  America is like this.  So much of this place is so bright so clean so amusing, but I’m singing along, wondering What was it I was supposed to remember?

 

ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN | Ocean Rain /  BAUHAUS mix

Eleven is wistful for the glory of seven, ditches some of the stuffed animals but cries about it.  Twelve loves L.M. Montgomery and Diane Fossey, still plays with Barbies, crops their plugs of hair into mohawks and food-dyes it pink, puts tiny jump rings in their noses.  Thirteen finds hippie clothes and the Doors, the Violent Femmes, green hair and pot.  Fourteen wears black, builds fairy villages in the back yard, plays sinister new varieties of make-believe.  Fifteen falls in love, takes acid and plays in the park. 

I used to volunteer every month at the historic Avery House, giving tours of the upper rooms, the piano parlor at Christmastime.  My friend Ruth and I opened the upstairs shades, and we imagined we heard the ghost of Sarah Avery rustling her skirts on the dark oak stairs.  I imagined I was a Victorian girl.  Now my room is a twisted carnival.  There’s my neglected hamster, my posters of Snoopy, of The Beatles, mountain gorillas, Maxfield Parish, Robert Smith, and H.R. Geiger’s fields of dead babies and women in erotic machines. 

I travel to Germany to France to Italy, wander in castles and catacombs.  I dream in stone.  I fill my journal with gothic arches and rhymed verses.  I listen to my tapes, ignore my family, try to be alone at all times.  The music builds what I see.  Old wars underneath modern ones.  Destruction popping through the cracks of life.  The shame of an entire nation, the fall of whole empires.  There’s something churning and shimmering in these violences, some ancient coelacanth living in the deep ocean.  It has a beating heart, it has sex parts, it has a brain.  It stirs us.  We stoop to scoop it up, or we run away.  Beggars in the Acropolis, art on the Berlin Wall.

 

EINSTURZENDE NEUBAUTEN | Ende Neu

Vampires do not suffer from gastrointestinal distress or acne, menstrual periods or skin fungus.  They are unblemishable except by stakes through the heart or bad sunburns.  So where does the ugliness go?  The kings of underground German industrial taught me where it turns into art.  I needed more noise in my diet.  I still do.  It’s the only way to remember I’m demanding a rarer steak on the Titanic.  “New Ending,” the title track means.  Cycles and circles and circles again.  My sister’s eyes, blue eyes in gray stone, a black-and-white photo with a red licorice smile.  The best concert of my life.  Blixa Bargeld a congenial, wild-eyed deity, crazed inventor of sounds, deformed deus ex machine, singing in a suit, flirting with his front row congregants.  Neubauten the new end feels like memory, sounds like the future today.

 

REPEAT>>

I’m still grabbing tapes, typing in my corner of the bedroom, looking out the window at the street I live on, this town, this year.  So many windows I’ve looked out of!  So many exclamation points!  It’s small and cold here.  I’ll continue to raise the dead and the sleeping, resurrect a few more buried songs, let them feed again on my brains.  I am cursed by too much traveling, can think about nothing else.  I wake up to a feeling that I need to be getting back but don’t know where that is.  I have twenty-seven tapes to go, nostalgia to burn.  I guess the past, here, is as good a place as any to live for now.  When the tape stops, I’ll drop a crumb. 

 

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J. Fossenbell writes poems and other stuff.  Her work has appeared in Everyday Other Things, Cerise Press, Wazee Independent Journal, The Word magazine, and in translation in some Hanoi publications.  She lives in Minneapolis, where she goes to MFA school at the University of Minnesota and is an editor for dislocate magazine.