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Also at @kingcrabigail and http://abigailgarnett.tumblr.com/

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Why you should see Rush, from someone who thought it was just okay:

I think it’s safe to say that Ron Howard is an inconsistent, if not completely uninteresting, director, and his work argues solidly against him having any particular ideology beyond “people believe different things!” And Howard is accordingly noncommittal (some might say “conflicted”) in his new film, Rush, which follows the competition between Formula 1 drivers Niki Lauda and James Hunt, culminating in the dramatic 1976 season.

Some critics have said that Rush is Howard’s best since Apollo 13 (I haven't seen any that actually compare the two, but maybe I'm looking in the wrong place.) It speaks to Howard’s erratic track record that I neither agree with that quality assessment nor think those two films are similar in any significant way. Rush has a more sensational script and lousier acting (apologies to Daniel Bruhl, who is fantastic) than Frost/Nixon, which would be my pick for “Best Ron Howard film recently”, whatever that means. And if my memory serves me right, Apollo 13 was drawn out and incredibly stressful, neither of which I’d say about Rush. If I had to compare it to an earlier work, I’d say that Rush is actually most similar to Backdraft, which has its hackneyed moments and traffics in over-the-top visual effects, but is actually pretty effective when it gets down to certain emotional realities. Despite some pretty glaring insufficiencies, I ended up liking Rush, which has proved to be a somewhat anomalous example of not-great pre-Oscar season fare that is nevertheless liked by pretty much everyone.

So here’s the fairly standard setup: two athletes who have completely conflicting approaches to their sport become obsessed with one-upping each other, leading to an exciting conclusion when, inevitably, only one of them will win. Hunt is shown as a reckless, womanizing cad, while Lauda is positioned as a quiet, pragmatic-to-a-fault genius who “nobody likes” (this assertion is repeated incessantly throughout the film, mostly by Hunt, who is in turn constantly labeled an “asshole.”) The bizarre psychology of professional car racing is reduced to devil-may-care pontificating from Hunt and exaggeratedly rational lectures about risk percentages from Lauda, and not much room is left for context. Secondary characters are left totally undeveloped--Hunt’s ex-wife is less significant than his grating, pompous team owner, and Lauda’s wife is little more than a beautiful symbol of the world that exists outside of racing. 

But if you take all of that with a grain of salt, the story is an extremely good one. The film’s most pivotal event is Lauda’s horrific crash at the Nürburgring in August 1976, which traps him in the wreckage of his vehicle, causing him to suffer near-fatal and permanently disfiguring burns. Daniel Bruhl does a wonderful job of allowing glimpses of his character’s complex inner life to show through dialogue (and a large set of prosthetic teeth) that predominantly offers things at face value. I’m excited that he’s in two big films this Fall, the other one being the upcoming Wikileaks thriller The Fifth Estate. There are several moments when Bruhl's deadpan delivery cuts through the film's artifice, bringing a plot that tends to follow Hunt through boring montages of boisterous activity back to the space where it works most effectively.

In real life, at the time of the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, Lauda had more than twice the points of his closest followers that season, a fact that the film glosses over when it expects us to cheer for Hunt’s resulting shot at the World Champion title. What’s more interesting is that the film also leads us to believe, via Lauda’s narration, that Hunt gave up racing right after his single World Championship. A closing montage that shows him working as a broadcaster effectively cuts the legs off of Hunt’s whole “live like each day is your last” philosophy and makes him appear to be utterly full of shit. In actuality, Hunt didn’t retire until three years later, and after that staged several comebacks. This misleading bit of voice-over is an example of the film's strangely rigid presentation of Hunt and Lauda's philosophies as logical opposites: it ends with a misrepresentation of Hunt that comes straight from Lauda’s mouth, mostly for the convenience of showing that they went in different directions. 

Nevertheless, the ending narration also serves to emphasize something that’s not obvious from the film’s posters, but becomes clear after Lauda’s fiery accident: he’s the real hero of this film, not Hunt, both in action and in reasoning. In the end, it’s Lauda’s pragmatism that unexpectedly allows him to weigh love over brief glory, a decidedly unconventional climax for a sports film.

If its reductiveness makes it a shallow film overall, Rush nevertheless provides a tidy view into the experience of someone who endured a potentially life-ruining accident, made a miraculous recovery, and then went on to continue dominating at the job that almost killed him. So accuracy is sacrificed to better describe an improbable force of personality. In a weird way, Rush’s sometimes detached look at an intimate competitive rivalry is an effective analog to Lauda’s own worldview, which values pragmatism over sentimentality and clarity over nuance. And if nothing else, Rush offered Lauda the opportunity to reinterpret his own experiences: 

“[After the crash] when I went out in public again in Monza and everybody saw me, they [grimaced] and then looked at my ear. I said “look in my eyes if you are going to talk to me, why are you looking at my burns?” Be polite. I never understood people’s reaction – I always wondered why they were being so stupid. I put a wall around myself and stopped caring about it.

But when I saw the movie, when Daniel Brühl [who plays Lauda] turns around in Monza, I got a shock too. Now I understand the other point of view. I was too busy getting going again and I never saw myself as other people did.”

One final note: word is that to this day, a tiny space on Lauda’s cap, which he has worn constantly since his accident, is worth €1.2 million to advertisers. 

(From an interview with Red Bull, here.) 

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I've been keeping a running Spotify playlist of my favorite tracks of the year, to which I add selections sporadically when I remember to do so. Obviously this playlist is limited to tracks that are released through Spotify in the U.S., but I recently synced it to my phone and found that it was an interesting, if limited, collection to revisit. One thing I found was that two of my favorite tracks, James Holden's "Blackpool Late Eighties" and Drake's "Started From the Bottom," were not musically dissimilar--both rely on a wistful loop characterized by an airy evocation of plunking keys. More interestingly, both tracks use this sound to express a sense of memory. Employing a similar foundation for divergent purposes, both songs emphasize certain elements of the experience of looking backwards.

Drake's song injects its nostalgia with a sense of urgency. In fact, his memories are a springboard for brash lyrics that channel an imperfect past into a present head-rush of immortality. One of the great things about this track is the way the beat is simultaneously crunchy and languid. While the harmonic progression, such as it is, borders on melancholy, it unfolds with a winking sense of amusement. Aubrey Graham's lyrics, interpolated with the stop-start beat, sound loose and good-natured even while he's tossing out casually aggressive phrases like "fuck a fake friend." This playful inconstancy casts a lighthearted tone over the repetitive loop, making the song's lack of development another tool for expressing its personality.

While that basically makes the song an extended riff, it's one that's full of meaning. He's celebrating his accomplishments, but he also seems to be acknowledging a role in a family structure that he used to feel alienated from ("I was trying to get it on my own".) "Started From the Bottom" sounds great, and the video showcases Drake's sense of humor, but like many of his songs I've found that it's more complex than the novelty-type video would initially suggest. Memory may be elliptical and hard to pin down, but with a little willpower you can force pieces of it into your own agenda. "Started From the Bottom" is basically an expression of that act--literally, in fact, in its incorporation of self-mythologizing references to "No new friends" and the chains he wears "just as a reminder to myself."

On the other hand, Holden's "Blackpool Late Eighties" is more formless, expressing no explicit motivation. Holden uses a beat that's less flashy but more purposeful in its uninterrupted plod towards the finish. Where the Drake beat emphasizes the bravado of being young and untouchable, this one settles into the background, only creeping into the spotlight in the last two minutes when the melodic line starts to lose its shape. But structurally, this seems to me to express the act of remembering, or maybe trying to remember, with a weird accuracy. After nearly two minutes of a moderately paced walking beat, a pretty, asymmetrical melodic fragment burbles into the mix. It gains intensity, undergoes a few minor changes in sound quality, and begins to fragment into a map of related sound points. Eventually, it recedes into the background, while other notes form a shape around the empty space it leaves behind. The last minute eradicates the beat and offers one last protesting twinge of sound before everything fades out.

"Blackpool Late Eighties" appears on James Holden's album The Inheritors, which was titled after the Wiliam Golding novel. While it's thematically consistent with the rest of the album, unlike a track like "Renata," for instance, it seems unconcerned with active manipulation of the song's content. Wikipedia's entry for the novel, which I haven't read, describes the characters as a group of Neanderthals who lack "the kinds of memories that create culture." The memory expressed here seems to be of a kind that works implicitly, containing little sense within itself of an identity or direction.

While the Drake song demonstrates someone remembering as an act of identity creation, the Holden song seems to be about how it feels to remember and eventually forget. To borrow a line from one of these songs (the one with lyrics), I just think it's funny how it goes. There's power in harnessing your memories, but there's also meaning in acknowledging the absence of the things that eventually get lost.

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This is a contender for my favorite Harry Nilsson song, because it’s lovely but completely miserable. It’s Nilsson’s plea to a lover not to leave him, but what makes these lyrics so dark is their confused, internal nature. Over the course of three minutes our singer makes his way through sad acceptance, defensiveness, sheepish penitence, angry accusations, desertion of all logic, empty bargaining, and desperate pleading. All of this progresses methodically, in Nilsson’s characteristically sweet tone, with both the arrangement and vocal delivery building in intensity until the final dolorous coda. Musically, it lifts and sags in a bittersweet analogue to the singer’s own tumultuous life.

One of the most poignant aspects of this song is the wrongful assumption that you can promise to feel something. This person is so desperate not to be abandoned that he pledges to develop an emotional connection to his significant other’s mother and “mother’s sister." On a realistic level, assuming that he has previously had a bad relationship with these two relatives, this amounts to proclaiming that he’ll fake his way through the next period of their relationship. But on the other hand, he really sounds like he means it. Only a profoundly misled person would believe that it’s possible to change your level of love for someone through sheer force of will, and the way he equates the process with simply stopping to kiss someone on the way to work every morning is brutally sad.

There’s a greater tragedy here than the dissolution of a relationship. At the end of the song Nilsson sings that “maybe…things would be better if only a letter would come." I don’t know what letter he’s referring to. It could be one he’s sent himself, or one that he’s expecting to get, but the reference is oblique enough to call into question whether most of this muddled argument is taking place inside the singer’s head. Either way the letter represents an abstract notion of salvation that once again ties the potential repair of a broken life to a specific event. Childish notions abound in Nilsson’s catalogue—often, they’re a source of humor and they comprise a fundamental aspect of his charm. Here he uses a somewhat jokey phrasing to make an uncomfortably candid observation about his perpetual adolescence: “You say I’m acting just like a kid/ but maybe I’m doing what I’m doing/ because I done what I did when I was a kid."

Nilsson loved double entendres, number games, hidden drug references, and crass jokes, but his musical playfulness could at times suggest both bitter self-flagellation and the angry, tearful mumbling of a little boy who has just been chastised. Listening to “Maybe," it’s easy to inhabit either of those emotional states. For my part, I remember very clearly being about 3 or 4 and having done something bratty that forced my mother to scold me. Observing that after an hour or two I was possibly more upset than I needed to be, she carefully explained to me that when she was angry, it didn’t mean she didn’t love me. It was an intense relief. I hadn’t known.

But the closest we get to relief in “Maybe" is a sense of falling action. Harry’s cover art, a photo of a young Nilsson taken after his mother had abruptly moved them from Brooklyn to California, emphasizes the impression (an accurate one according to the documented events of his life) of a kid forced to grow up too fast. Though we can assume that in this song he’s jealously addressing a woman ("maybe you have found another man/ well how can you enjoy his touch, knowing that I love you so much") he sounds through most of it like a child grieving for his parent, a bruised person who wasn’t told what he needed to know.

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If you’ve spent your post-college years, as I have, engaged in an elliptical, mistrustful relationship with rock music, then The Men present a great argument against deferring to experience. Here’s a band that operates firmly in well-trodden territory in terms of instrumentation and song structure, seems to enjoy (sub)genre-hopping, and are the proud bearers of a name that evokes archetypical masculinity as much as anonymity. On paper, I wouldn’t see what’s so special about them. And that might lead me to assume that, like some of their peers, they have more to offer those who actively participate in a subculture built around cross-pollinating live shows and clearly defined ideals. In practice, however, I like just about everything they’ve done, even as they swing closer to a well-trodden traditionalist path.

New Moon, their album from earlier this year, is as guileless as rock music comes these days. Everything from the song titles (“Open the Door,” “I Saw Her Face,” “The Brass”) to the sludgy mix of piano, harmonica, and percussion, to the shared vocal duties seems deliberately candid. Mid-album ode “I Saw Her Face” is a mild-mannered onslaught of nostalgic references—it’s hard not hear a distorted echo of John Lennon’s “Oh Yoko” in the words “In the middle of a dream…I saw her face.” Or to think of Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” during that slightly garbled bridge on “Freaky.”

This tendency to search for neat reference points is the reason I don’t trust myself to make judgments on a piece of music until I’ve shaken off my literal tendencies by listening a few times. The problem is that straightforward “rock” music often sounds boring to me in the initial phase, to the extent that I can’t separate it from an overarching tradition, (a tradition that I’ve found more and more difficult to enjoy as I’ve learned to recognize its exclusionary foundations.) The Men somehow tap into my desire for musical touch points while also retaining an interesting identity.

I think this is due to the fact that the references are not implied, but are rather explicit, and are based on tune fragments and lyrical generalities— the things that are gateways to the listening experience (this reminds me of an essay I read about David Cronenberg wherein the author basically claimed that because the misogyny in his films is obvious, it’s not damaging.) Their songs are also well-constructed enough that several of them sound like country standards. Those characteristics make their music an explicit invitation to interpret. Nobody comes to the listening experience totally clean, so why not let your listeners revel in their own sullied, biased hearing?

With that technique in mind, it’s to their credit that The Men’s third album is a pretty uncool move in musical terms. See for instance the charmingly back porch pronunciation of “GI-TAR” in “Open the Door”, which kicks off the album. But then comes the road-stomping follow-up, “Half Angel Half Light,” and the Meat Puppets-like “Without a Face.” This mix of abrupt moments of stylistic contrast into an album with such a strong overarching tonal character indicates an amusing self-awareness. Repeated listens reveal existential complexity beneath the alliterative imagery. A current of disillusionment runs parallel to the flow of the songs (“The rape of time, shifting the seeds of my mind”), but somehow the music is cut with enough passion that it retains its essential feeling of faith. New Moon deliberately reverses the effect of including “Country Song” and “Candy” on their previous album, Open Your Heart.

So, yes, part of the appeal is that New Moon sounds like The Men are acknowledging a relationship with musicians that came before them. When I first heard “I Saw Her Face,” I thought it sounded like Neil Young and Crazy Horse, a classic country tune fed through Weld’s looming amplifiers. There’s probably no better musical Virgil than Young to help you sort through layers of nostalgia. He was responsible for both lyrical vagaries and homages to rural life with folk rock groups Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and his later solo career has wavered between messy guitar rock, aggressive message music, and periodic revivals of his folk-country roots. Sometimes those traditions were harshly abrupt: Tonight’s the Night’s sprawled-open visceral jam sessions followed closely on the heels of the spacious, enigmatic On the Beach (and who could forget the deliberately out-of-place Everybody’s Rockin’?) And Young himself once beautifully interpreted that pristine example of country-pop longing, “Oh, Lonesome Me.”

Music functions differently when it’s new to you and when you know what’s coming. Then there’s the after-echo that comes when you’re not actively listening to the music, sometimes a significant experience in itself. These iterations of the experience make listening emotionally complex. It’s possible also (and I think it’s true for me) that when music snakes its way into multiple aspects of the consumption experience it leaves the listener increasingly vulnerable to emotional dissonance.

In reality, music that is functionally abrasive often creates an aesthetically democratizing experience. Turn the sound up loud enough and you can more or less assume that everyone in the room is feeling the same thing. But I think there’s also a physical response that comes from mixing noisy elements with familiar song structure or harmonies— a kind of nagging desire for the fulfillment of overwhelming noise, constantly struck down by the specificity of personal associations. Neil Young and Crazy Horse were the first band to give me that kind of experience, which may be the main reason I think of them when I listen to New Moon. It’s something you often feel at live shows when a band will string along a four minute song into 10 or 20 minutes of distortion. And it’s something that’s present in a strangely concrete form in the music of The Men, where they waver between plaintive country songwriting, blaring guitar noise, and ragged but impassioned harmonies. Though their newest album engages most straightforwardly with nostalgia, there’s an even stronger implication that what you hear is always a mixture of what the music does to you and what you are doing to the music. New Moon’s construction seems to acknowledge that fact, even invite it, and it gives their every-man music a strange power of clarity through flexibility.

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In his "Collaborators" interview about his role in the recording of Daft Punk's Random Access Memories, Chilly Gonzales states that "harmony is still an underused musical weapon these days in the pop landscape." He's correct in observing that pop today tends to place a previously unheard of amount of attention on timbre and texture. In its most simplified form this is the justification for recycling older hits into new  confections that maintain the harmonics but none of the surface quality or emotional content of their progenitors. But I do take issue with his use of the word "still," which glosses over the fact that harmony and melody were the primary factors in the composition of hundreds of years of classical music, were explored incessantly by most of the pop music of the 20th century, and remain the building blocks for the Western concept of "songwriting". 

Today's pop music is deep in the process of freeing itself from those constraints, and reorganizing the priorities that go into the mass production of music, which feeds that powerful, uninterrupted stream of noise that comes from radio, television, and various other unavoidable outlets. Youtube plays a large role in mass media delivery but also in guiding attention towards different aspects of sound and emotive communication. It seems unfair to imply that there is some sort of uninterrupted neglect of a musical concept when to me it looks more like the internet is just starting to loosen the grip that our musical past has on us. I'd be inclined to argue that we gain more by pushing beyond those traditional frameworks than by trying to re-orient them as the central concern of popular music.

I should say that I don't deny the value of focusing on one particular aspect of music--I actually think it's crucial to innovation, and if I had to pick an element that moves me most directly, it would surely be harmony. It just seems limiting to describe popular music as a culture in terms of what it isn't, rather than what it is and has been (or what it could become!) Musical culture overall will inevitably move beyond a particular mindset, whether it comes from a writer, a musician, or a fan.

On the other hand, creating sound with a reductive approach can be truly rewarding, as I'm sure fans of Gonzales' work would attest. One artist who stays focused on exploring harmony in a way that I find truly pushes my ear is Panda Bear, whose complex manipulation of chord structure and meter on his album Tomboy was both emotional and mathematical in the way that Gonzales describes. You can hear this very clearly in the track above, "Friendship Bracelet," which draws out a chain of chord changes as long as harmonically possible. His appearance on the Daft Punk album is probably my favorite after the first few listens. Interestingly, in his interview he didn't really talk about harmony at all, instead mentioning rhythm and "the actual sounds themselves" as the things that draw people in.

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Michael Haneke's Amour

After seeing Yves Montmayeur’s documentary Michael H--Profession: Director at Tribeca Film Festival a few weeks ago, I’ve been considering what I now know about Haneke as a person in relation to Amour, undoubtedly one of the most brutally direct films of the last year. Haneke’s interview style both confirms and complicates the viewpoint conveyed in the film. His blithe comments on violence (“In real life, animals die, children die”)* are sometimes punctuated with a smile or a spontaneous giggle. Meanwhile he acknowledges, at times explicitly, that the greatest act of cruelty is wielded by him, the director, against his audience.

Nobody does soul-crushing as well as Michael Haneke, which is why the title of the New Yorker's 2009 profile, “Happy Haneke”, was both hilarious and, as the piece revealed, apt. Although it hides a demanding personality, Haneke has an outwardly pleasant demeanor that stands in contrast to his dour subject matter. Similarly, while his visual sense is undeniably clear and beautiful, he uses it to frame narratively opaque films. This contrast between content and delivery allows Haneke to both present starkly undisguised philosophical statements and to insist convincingly that he has no single agenda. It’s hard to know what to make of such a person. As a human being and as a director he is somehow both passionate and coldly clinical. But really, why wouldn't someone like Haneke be happy? He's an avid participant in the meritocratic rat race, who also engages wholeheartedly in the aesthetic destruction of institutions. In that sense he occupies a uniquely comfortable position of truly having it both ways.

Haneke’s style of directing is shown in Michael H. to be alternately nurturing and antagonistic. Many of his actors express how taxing it is to work under a leader with such boundless energy and ruthlessly precise visions. Emmanuelle Riva is shown in between takes during the filming of Amour, fully made up as the mentally regressing invalid she portrays, and practically groaning with real physical and emotional exhaustion. In another scene, we see Haneke exuberantly leading a group of University aged theater actors through a scene from Chekhov. Later, Haneke orchestrates a scene from The White Ribbon in which a father beats his child, demonstrating the younger actor's cowering movements with both precision and a certain amount of relish.

Coming from this man, Amour is a punishing offering that in its plausibility is also something of a conciliatory gesture. Many of Haneke’s other films carry a kind of detachment in their distant settings (the dim past of pre-war Austria, a post-apocalyptic future) or their impossibly perfect progressions (the interweaving stories in Code Unknown, the steady march toward death in Funny Games.) Amour instead places us calmly in the center of the stable, settled lifestyle of an elderly couple, Anne and Georges, and then lets time contort it into layers of suffering. Haneke himself is 71 and married. He states plainly in one interview that he fears suffering more than anything else in the world. Amour then may have the distinction of being as much a punishment of himself as his audience.

In the film we are treated to certain details: Anne’s former career as a piano teacher, the couple’s love of books, a successful and emotionally distant daughter, etc. But the characters have hardly passed prototypical status before the intimate surroundings become a kind of pressure cooker, forcing the swift evolution of these persons, demonstrated to be “civilized” and “cultured”, into monsters. Haneke’s motivating force seems to be a disgust with the human need for order, and the perversity of bourgeois pleasures. In this context, professionalized society takes on echoes of Fascism, and the ties of modern comforts to the dehumanizing aging process are more or less direct.

Haneke was born in Munich during WWII, and raised in the placid outer realms of post-war Vienna. His worldview conveys a kind of strident, blanket social condemnation that goes far deeper than the surface shock value of his most "memorable" scenes. In fact, one thing I disliked about the documentary was its rigid dedication to showing clips of sudden violence, which did a disservice to Haneke's skill in creating an unsettled atmosphere that can't be explained by one event (Cache scared me out of my mind even though almost nothing happens in the first hour.)

Amour achieves this feeling of terror by marring its calm surface with disfiguring elements. These range from the desperate disruption of social conventions, like family and responsibility, to the visual style itself, which selects tropes from the horror genre to pervert this seemingly safe space. Accordingly, a rare scene in which Georges emerges from the apartment is in the form of a dream sequence impersonating a horror film. It's a pretty fertile setup: the nice old couple down the hall, normal to all appearances, are actually engulfed in a scene of unimaginably grotesque conditions behind the door of their apartment.

In Haneke's version, the apartment remains a kind of idyll, though a crumbling, contorted one.  As Anne devolves further into a childlike mental state, her descent is ragged and inelegant, the inverse of an infant's wonder at the world. Her monstrosity becomes a condemnation, and Georges’ devotion takes on a note of abuse. The few outside intrusions come from the couple's daughter, whose frightful fits of emotion in the film's second half clatter hypocritically against her earlier cold surface, and the mercenary nurse who Georges disposes of capably. These two minor characters seem to be deliberately similar, creating a parallel between an inability to provide appropriate care and an inability to appropriately feel. As the family's emotions are outsourced and professionalized to the same degree as home care, an impossible snarl is created, the only outcome of which is aggression.

When I think back to the film I remember two shots: the moment when Georges slaps his wife, a savage instinct overtaking him as he tries to coax life-sustaining food into her mouth, and the curiously long shot of him stripping the petals from a bunch of flowers that he will use to decorate Anne’s deathbed. Rituals, it seems, do not keep us from being animals. In fact, Anne's entire decline is dependent on the conditions we cultivate every day--the tidy apartments, clean water and available food, the luxuries of pupils, legacies, physical and emotional warmth. Haneke's version of the surreal draws from the same pool of experience we feed in our daily lives, and so it feels real and inevitable.

I think this is why I liked his 2009 film The White Ribbon so much. An austere fable about inhumanity, it managed to darken the idyllic haze of pre-war Austria enough to convey the inevitability of the Great War, that defining event of mass disillusionment, in the aftermath of which Freud wrote: “the state has forbidden to the individual the practice of wrong-doing, not because it desires to abolish it, but because it wants to monopolize it.”* The White Ribbon seemed to explain the root of mistrust in the rest of Haneke's work. The other horrors he's created reinforce the idea that social order is an illusion, and conventions nothing but a comfortable structure for moral degradation.

On a fundamental level it is terrifying to see your darkest conclusions illuminated onscreen. But if you carry a certain kind of fear around with you, the experience can also be rather satisfying. Haneke claims the right to resist interpreting his own work (in one of the documentary's most memorable segments he repeatedly refuses, with growing agitation, to answer the interviewer's carefully reworded questions). But I think he is very shrewd about the way it will be interpreted by his audience. So Amour gives us none of the gratification of a brutal spectacle and all of its pain, because Georges and Anne are sympathetic, because they are old, and because this isn't the way we are used to seeing violence portrayed on a screen.

Seeing people hug each other, cry, and shuffle out the door miserably after Amour ended, I felt a mix of anger and fascination at Haneke's willingness to exploit his audience's emotions and natural need for closure. But maybe that's where you can find the one shred of hope that Haneke offers us, that might explain his disconcerting laughter. I suspect that what makes Haneke's work watchable at all is that there is a strange sense of wonder to it. His specialty is examining ritual--be it self-mutilation, surveillance, or suicide--with a closeness that borders on loving. And in particular, his careful attention to the visual product implies a certain deference, a power in the beholder. At the end of Amour, Georges follows a vision of Anne out the door, grabbing his coat along the way. Maybe Haneke is more generous than we think: why be a victim of an imposed reality, when there's a view of the way out?

  *Quoting from memory here, so this is approximate.

*Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915)

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One of the reasons Hip Hop is so compelling is its fundamental investment in the idea that identity is a performance. It accommodates the possibilities of self-definition with a flexibility that is immensely powerful. This album brought that concept into conversation for me more clearly than most I've heard; at the same time it related the conflict between what's "real" and what's "created" to daily life with unusual detail. Arguably the Internet has made identity performance more obvious and more mutable all at once. That foot-in-two-realities feeling is replicated over and over in good kid, m.A.A.d. city ("Back to reality we poor, ya bish"). There's also the sense that looking for a pure experience is a tempting but ultimately hollow pursuit, only achievable through some sort of altered state and an implied dishonesty with one's self (as heard on "Swimming Pools (Drank)").  In that sense, even though the album speaks to a very particular experience, it also speaks to the wider experience of possessing a fragmented sense of self. Amazingly, Kendrick Lamar does this by repeatedly tearing down the ideal version of his "performing" identity. 

When I'm listening to Lamar's lyrics I often hear a refusal to let perfection stand for very long. Dreams are pure but also described with sarcasm, euphoria is coupled with alienation, and youthful hubris hinges on luck. These lyrics represent an interesting kind of self-sacrifice. They also make the yearning for perfection the domain of both the performer and the listener. The effect is that there's something in the music always nudging, tempting, dragging you on, and in the absence of any final conclusion you end up cycling back...as evidenced by the fact that I'm still wondering at it however many months later.

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Magic expresses itself above all in shape-shifting and metamorphosis; and in mythology and fairytales, the quest for love entails a quest for recognition of the self which challenges the barriers of conventional expectation. As such, transformations comment on the oppressive narrowness of the prevailing canon of beauty... ...Kobena Mercer's perceptive analysis of Thriller (1991, 300-16) discusses the two principle metamorphoses-- the werewolf and the zombie-- which, it is argued, evidence the horror fascination with sexuality whereby gender identity is codified in terms that revolve around the symbolic presence of the monster.

(Excerpted from Sheila Whiteley's discussion of Michael Jackson's complicated childhood and public image, in her book Too Much Too Young: Popular Music, Age, and Gender.)

When I read this, I was immediately reminded of a boy I knew in elementary school, partly because of the werewolf motif but also because of the connection to escapism, the childish love of dressing up in costumes, and the conflict of individual sexuality and gender identity with social constrictions. Mike moved to our school partway through the year in 4th grade. I'll never forget how on his first day, he asked to introduce himself by getting up in front of the class and singing along with great gusto to The Lion King's "I Just Can't Wait to Be King." My teacher, who ran the spring Operetta (a glorified sing-along that was nevertheless an extremely popular program) was thrilled to let him do this. But the kids in the class immediately branded him a weirdo.

Actually, the song was well-suited to his voice, which was high and strong, and he kind of had a Jonathan Taylor Thomas cuteness about him, although he was taller and thinner. His hair was blonde and looked styled, where most kids in my grade either had buzz cuts or (I think this started around this time) those frosted, gelled spikes. Basically, he was weirdly self-possessed for a 9-year-old, and he was immediately seen as threatening. My classmates latched onto his perceived flamboyance and talked about him meanly at recess.

I wish I could remember exactly how these conversations went. I just remember that it was generally accepted that he was weird, in a very particular way. And most of the shit-talking related to how he was too "girly." Mike's treatment is the most glaring, uncomfortable example in my memory of how homophobia was rampant, even at that early age, as a defense against any behavior that was seen as aberrational. I don't think, and really hope I'm right, that Mike was ever physically harmed, because most of my classmates were too intimidated by his brassy personality to really start anything, but verbal conflicts certainly occurred.

To his endless credit, Mike completely played into his outsider status, with the aplomb of a much older person. One of the most daring ways he did this was to tell anyone who would listen that he and his father were both wolves, and lived at Valley Falls, one of the town's public parks. According to him, they took their true forms at night and hunted together for deer. A few kids in particular got very angry at this, because even though they knew it was impossible, there was simply no way to prove that it was untrue. I was fascinated: here was somebody who had come up with what I saw as a very childish fantasy, fit for 4 or 5 year olds, not us 4th graders, and was insisting on its truth even as he was roughly challenged by his peers.

Mike's divisive storytelling distracted from the fact that none of us really knew anything about his home life, other than that he lived with his dad and his mom didn't seem to be in the picture. I didn't know anyone who had been to his house or maintained a strong friendship with him. Eventually, he moved away, I think after 5th grade.

Before he left, though, he made sure to cement his reputation. Because he had immediately become one of my teacher's favorites with that first day performance, Mike got a plum role when the Spring Operetta finally rolled around. The show was made up of standards and show tunes, and Mike was the only student who got a solo number-- he performed "Once in Love With Amy," complete with a top hat and cane, and to say that he killed it would be an understatement. He was just so far beyond the level of showmanship that anyone expected from us. If he didn't eventually go into show business, it would be a damn shame. All the parents were extremely impressed and gave him a standing ovation. I had this very clear sense that my peers didn't know a goddamn thing after all. Most of us hadn't even known that he was rehearsing the number.

At that age, I was so painfully shy that the amount I participated in any sort of peer interaction was probably pretty limited. I spent most of my recesses writing and acting out an elaborate parody of the movie Clue that involved aliens and intergalactic warfare with two friends who also liked that kind of thing. I wish I could remember being nice to him, but I don't remember talking to him at all, and it makes me sad to think about this kid being alone, nobly scorning his bullies with his fantasies and his preternatural charisma. And the worst thing about it is that Mike's character traits were a short step away from what it would take to achieve godlike popularity. But normalization is as harsh and fierce in this young age group as it is in adolescence, and deviations automatically assume a sense of perversion. It's a different kind of reaction than the self-conscious whispering that generates from kids collectively handling puberty. It scares me that I remember that gender-normative pressure so clearly, yet I don't understand exactly where it came from, why it was so fundamentally accepted, and why our teachers seemed to have no awareness of it.

Now that I've rambled through this story and away from the quote that originally spurred it, I'll just say that as a figure Mike had a lot in common with Michael Jackson, even if it was within a tiny microcosmic setting. I felt the same sense of distrust towards the way the world treated Michael Jackson in his last years as I did towards the way my elementary school treated Mike. But I know enough now to admire him and to be totally thankful that if the true, evil nature of group mentality had to be revealed, I also got to see how a creative individualist could defang it by being better and bolder than anyone else.

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This is quickly becoming one of my favorite videos of the past few months, as well as one of my favorite songs. It was directed by Melina Matsoukas, who apparently can't miss lately-- she directed the videos for Solange's excellent "Losing You," Rihanna's "We Found Love," and Beyonce's cafeteria dance-along "Move Your Body," (she's also developed a playful aesthetic in classics like "Upgrade U"/"Why Don't You Love Me," Lily Allen's "Not Fair," and Rihanna's "Rude Boy" that incorporates bemused images of wealth and class in its colorful kitschiness.) Matsoukas has proven to be not only an extremely capable director of big personalities, but also someone who's aware of how visual tastes change collectively.

She's a good match for Christina Aguilera, an artist who's undergone several image changes since the beginning of her career and was due for some kind of statement. "Your Body" is a tribute to nameless, loveless sex cranked up to its most rewarding potential. Aguilera hasn't come out with a single this aggressive since "Dirrty," but while that song was belligerent it was also a little self-conscious, and "Your Body" is thankfully free of any coquetry. Max Martin, who also penned many of the tracks for Britney Spears' recent comeback, has created an overblown (in a good way) track with beautiful production, and Aguilera's powerful voice gives a weight to this sound that even Katy Perry hasn't achieved. The whole thing adds up to what might simply be raunch-pop in less skillful hands, but here becomes a really direct expression of self-love--even more evident in Matsoukas/Aguilera's embracing of her now ample curves in skintight, eye-popping colors.

But, interestingly, the internet on the whole seems to be finding this video to be very funny, and I don't agree. Sure, there's humor in the trailer-park-vixen-turned-serial-killer concept, but to me it's more arch than actually laugh-out-loud ridiculous. Theodor Adorno wrote something about how kitsch is a parody of the catharsis that comes from high art, and the explosions of blue paint and pink glitter that stand in for blood and guts here are a pretty clever turn on that idea. Maybe there's something more to Christina's defiant everywoman-ness than hard work and sex positivity. She's been through a lot and she still has no problem talking up even the points in her career that are generally seen as low ones (i.e. Bionic.) She's never had any issues with her body, generally stating her love for any change it's undergone in a very public way. Aguilera has a very deliberate strategy of not letting herself be misunderstood.

And this is someone who's making good on the promise of an entire career flirting with the boundaries of good taste in both a clean/dirty sense and an inspired/pandering sense (she was as committed to selling the heartfelt "Beautiful" as she is to judging on The Voice.) Underneath everything, Aguilera is nothing if not a professional. So this video has none of the winking "I'm in on the joke too" ploys that Spears has been forced to use in the past couple of years. To me, delighting in how "ridiculous" this video looks is just a way to avoid giving credit to someone who's creating mainstream art in an effective and intelligent way. Possibly, we're just suspicious because this strikes such a perfect tone for her, it seems like it must be the result of some kind of fakery.

But I really believe in Christina Aguilera. I'm hoping that her new album will turn out to be as good as this song, but even if it doesn't, there will still be that amazing bridge: "I think you already know my name." It's a line that laughs off the idea of mistakes, either past or future. When you know exactly who you are, just being it is enough to carry you forward.

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Flying Lotus, Until the Quiet Comes

I don’t remember where I read it, but apparently Steve Ellison, aka Flying Lotus, was recently reading a book by Michael Talbot. It makes perfect sense, since Talbot’s work posited a connection between mysticism and the basic elements of the universe. Ellison has cultivated a similar approach since he started making music, and Until the Quiet Comes, which was released on October 1st, shows that his ideas have become less bombastic as they’ve gotten more refined. A recurring question has been whether the new material is a large departure from his previous work, particularly in relation to 2010’s groundbreaking Cosmogramma. In some ways, it sounds vastly different, and in some it sounds like it’s circling back to earlier efforts. But more than anything, it sounds like the feeling you get from turning the volume down and putting your ear very, very close to the speaker. Considering the articulate nature of his albums, a visual catalogue is sort of besides the point. But the often druggy imagery of his album covers are available as the short version of Ellison's shifting sense of scale. 1983’s nebula was neatly recalled/repurposed by Los Angeles’ close-up of melted metal veins, and now it’s morphed into UTQC's body in a free-floating costume, shot by experienced underwater photographer Dan Kitchens. That last image is redolent of a shift in approach that, while still founded on texture, recognizes how sound can be detailed without being sharp, and relatable without being overly specific. I have a great deal of respect for this careful intimacy. Cosmogramma was like a finely detailed Nintendo picaresque, with its protagonist reeling through a microcosmos of splashy color and unclear borders. Wildly diverse compositions asserted themselves as supporting characters that each toted their own history. And everything was densely packed with sounds, so that even a potential lull like “MmmHmm” layered shuffling and whooping thickly over Thundercat’s bass scaffolding. Tracks like “Table Tennis” made use of novelty sound bites, in that case a smattering of ping-pong sounds, that outlined explicit intentions for the listener. The luminescent “Galaxy in Janaki,” the album’s ecstatic final track, looked upward and outward, like there was no telling where Ellison might go next. So maybe it’s surprising that he ended up returning to a real, human-sized Los Angeles, but it’s a testament to his skill that the transition sounds natural. There are several familiar collaborators along for the ride (Erykah Badu, Thom Yorke, and Thundercat, who must qualify as Ellison’s spirit animal at this point.) Laura Darlington has been around longer than anyone, since first appearing on 1983’s waltzing “Unexpected Delight.” With her soothing choirgirl intonation (she sounds something like a diffused Alison Statton) she has been instrumental in shaping the unassuming tone of FlyLo’s oeuvre. She reappears here on the appropriately named “Phantasm,” a track that utilizes a characteristic rippling effect but replaces driving beats with impressionistic drabs of percussion. “All that we feel is virtually real,” Darlington’s voice imparts, a statement reflected in the hypnotic short film by Kahlil Joseph that predated the album’s release. Many of Flying Lotus’ compositions feel like they are reaching back into a mystical past while subtle threads continue to tie them to the current zeitgest. “Getting There,  (feat. Niki Randa,)” with its subtle invocation of Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You,” unfolds from a foundation of soul and jazz traditions and promises (“getting there, getting there”) a leisurely journey through its creator’s musical consciousness. After less than two minutes, it segues neatly into the woodpecker beat that pushes “Until the Colours Come,” (itself a burbling soundscape that hints at Ellison’s possible influence on something like Frank Ocean’s “Pyramids.”*) If you listen closely, you can hear Ellison echoing himself: the same way “Parisian Goldfish” prefigured “Computer Face/Pure Being,” “Recoiled” and “Do the Astral Plane” prefigured the bouncing “The Nightcaller”. Similarly, themes from the beginning of the album ripple outward through the rest of it.“ Sultan’s Request”/”Putty Boy Strut” are a one-two punch that are most in tune with what’s currently happening in Hip Hop and Dance music, but even those have a fine complexity that stamp them unmistakably as totems in Ellison’s LA rather than references to the outside. If Ellison has been something of a music-scene lurker in the past, tuned in but not necessarily directly involved, it’s because he’s so focused on crafting his own take on things. His hard work has reaped an entire arsenal of precise textures and arrangements that can be re-purposed, repackaged, and still evoke a strong sense of his unique character (Daniel Rossen of Grizzly Bear/ Department of Eagles is another contemporary musician who possesses this backlog of musical signatures.) Until the Quiet Comes is a work of alchemy that comes from years of tightly observed experimentation and a tireless sense of wonder at the possibilities of coaxing sound elements into cooperation with one another. Mixed in with all of the colorful synapse-firing are drawn-out moments of intimacy. It’s one more way that the new album differs from Cosmogramma, which was littered with interstitial pieces of orchestration that stretched it into a sweeping suite with classical undertones. Instead, on UTQC we get a dense concoction with most tracks receiving equal weight. Its shifts in tone are committed gestures: it’s easy to list pleasurably along to the album's light apex, "DMT," but also easy to overlook that its certainty is rooted in real wisdom. You may find yourself humming the simplistic refrain but the whole album is weighted by the song's less obvious closing line, "I belong where I'm at." Unlike Cosmogramma, this album doesn’t fight against every musical structure that tries to contain it. A track like “All the Secrets” builds slowly, flickers at the top, and comes back down in a way that accurately mirrors a mature sense of enjoyment. But the notion of this sound being more mature is a limited one--the idea that something needs to be shiny and brash to tap into a childlike sense of wonder is an adult projection. When you’re a kid, everything feels like an overwhelming moment, from struggling to reach something on the kitchen counter to concentrating on a single chord change in a song on the radio that you don’t even know how to find again. For many people, childhood is the only time when the colossal magnitude of the universe syncs up with the universe of your particular creation, when you have utter faith in your own perspective. Steve Ellison knows how to return to that place and, even more impressively, has managed to reconstruct his dream so that we can experience it with him. *Any affinity between those two goes both ways, as evidenced by Ellison’s remix of Ocean’s “Thinking About You,” which pitched up/intensified the track, while also echoing Ocean’s original release of the song by being posted hastily in an “unfinished” version and then taken down just as fast.

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Here's a ten minute clip from Robert Altman's 1973 adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, starring Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe. This scene is the most intimate one with Sterling Hayden's character, Roger Wade, an alcoholic writer, semi-famous but possibly not well-respected by the literally community. We see him earlier, very drunk, at a detox clinic where he is apparently receiving little help for his ailments. But this is the only significant scene where we see him in his element, at home, and relatively clear-headed ("You'd think I was drunk already, wouldn't you?" he says self-deprecatingly as he swigs from a mug.)

The Long Goodbye is a fine film for many reasons, not least Elliott Gould's mumbling, charismatic performance. Although it uses the story of the book to enjoyable, noir effect, its treatment of the Roger Wade character separates it from its source material in a strange, context-dependent way.

When Chandler published the book, it was acknowledged that the character of Roger Wade was a stand-in for himself--he was a hard drinker, and was deeply insecure about his work's place in the world of "literature." At the time of writing he was alienated from his wife by the long illness that eventually took her life. When the film came out a good twenty years later, the character was widely interpreted as being based on Ernest Hemingway. That impression was supported by Sterling Hayden's tall (6'5") stature, beard, and boisterous personality. Sterling Hayden himself was a fisherman and sailor, with little respect for acting and the sort of prototypical physically anchored masculinity that came to characterize Hemingway in the media.

While updating the setting, the screenplay for Altman's film also changed Wade's death from a murder to a suicide. Hemingway shot himself in Ketchum, Idaho in 1961. Chandler died a lonely man in 1959 in La Jolla, California, officially of pneumonia but really from drink, having botched several attempts at taking his own life in the years previous.

Central to the film is Marlowe's consciousness of being out of sync with current culture, and what might be seen as his noble response to that feeling of disconnect. Altman makes great use of the conflict between those archetypal views of the world nurtured by literature and its true nature: the culture of reputation that is greedy, disingenuous, and willing to exploit misunderstandings.

When Dwight Macdonald wrote an unkind essay on Hemingway's legacy, he received a response from another journalist, George Plimpton, who knew the man well: "He didn't dislike critics as much as you suppose. So much is made of his anti-intellectualism...You suggest that Hemingway's lack of confidence, his inability to write, caused deep depressions which he tried to relieve with shock treatments at the Mayo Clinic...I think your fundamental error is your assumption that Hemingway's writing, public personality, and private thoughts were all of a piece."

In Altman's film, Wade is at once central and peripheral. He embodies the dissociative nature of addiction and celebrity, and in another way, nostalgia. Chandler's autobiographical elements tether him to reality, but corrupted by too much analysis, his character is hazily, painfully lost. His presence implies that maybe the moral and stoic loner, Marlowe, is less alienated than exempt. Wade, in an evasive conversation by the beach, asks: "You ever think about suicide, Marlowe?" Marlowe replies: "Me? I don't believe in it."

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THE L.A. COMPLEX: IT'S BEEN UNREAL

I'm not against a season 2 makeover--in fact, having been spoon-fed season to season personal style overhauls by Degrassi: The Next Generation, I kind of salivate over them. But in the case of the newer effort from Degrassi's producers, The L.A. Complex, which ends its second season tonight, the makeover (symbolized by one character's crossover from brunette to blonde) has been a bit of a bleach wash. Some background: Linda Schuyler and Stephen Stohn, who are real-life partners and co-produced Degrassi: The Next Generation, are executive producers along with the show’s creator, Martin Gero, who previously worked on Bored to Death and Stargate: Atlantis. Even though it takes place in Los Angeles, it’s a Canadian production (orginally broadcast on CTV/ MuchMusic and re-airing on The CW) with mostly Canadian actors and a high, though lesser, proportion of Canadian characters. After a sure-footed pilot following a pretty simple premise of “young people struggling to break into the entertainment industry,” it continued for five more episodes and ended in a melodramatic but surprisingly symmetrical finale. Gero began the second season with what appeared to be greater control, both writing and directing the first two episodes, but somehow limited the show’s vision instead. Where the first season’s arc felt spontaneous and fresh, season two feels like a cake prepared too far ahead of time. It’s confectionary, but it’s also full of stale bits and invites you to regard its pleasant-looking surface with suspicion. You could take the title in a few ways. One kind of “complex” is the one that exists in the minds of the characters--conditioned by repeated rejection, each of them is both supremely self-confident (“I’m better than any of these girls!”) and fundamentally defeatist (“But it doesn’t even matter if I’m better than them!”) Consistent application of this muddled kind of arrogance to characters with different backstories made for some very interesting stories. At its best, the first season was an ensemble-based experiment in what happens to people under the stress of specific conditions. One of the things I liked most about it was that while its protagonists were cloistered in 1) the metaphorical pursuit of their dreams and 2) the hotel complex that each of them is too poor to leave (hence the most literal interpretation of the title), the show itself had larger concerns. Selfish though their characters may be, the writers exhibited a very real sympathy for working class drudges. When Alicia, an aspiring dancer who also works at a strip club, asks her floor manager for time off to go to an audition, he pleads with her not to talk to him like he’s “somebody”-- he’s just another person who’ll get fired if he breaks the rules. Later, the recurring comic relief, the hotel’s live-in super (Canadian comedian Ennis Esmer) says much the same thing when one of the tenants begs him to let her stay a few days longer rent-free. That’s where the third interpretation of the title comes in: the concept of Los Angeles as a massive industrial complex supported by interconnected streams of capital and its own shifting class system. And that’s where the show’s Canadian roots make it unique, not inauthentic-- the creators are outsiders, just like the characters. Conditions are inhospitable (A telling line from Season 1 was “It’s all bad mojo here,”) and they force the city’s inhabitants into all sorts of uncomfortable, awkwardly coupled positions just to maintain a sense of self. And there’s the problem: what do you do with these kids when they’re no longer alienated? The small successes they worked for in the first season all turn into dead ends for the second. Gone are the struggling working-class types that populated the outer sphere of the show’s universe (the hotel’s super is kept on but is reduced to a goofy, partying human interface for the building.) Gone are the carefully developed relationships, sacrificed to rapid-fire hookups. Gone are two major characters, practically out of nowhere! Alicia, whose dancer/stripper-turned-sex-tape-victim story was an interesting and sad look at her struggle to maintain control over her own body, has been completely forgotten. After booking a gig on an Usher tour in the premier, she’s never once mentioned by the friends she left behind. With both Alicia and Tariq, a character who was sidelined in favor of pursuing the exploits of his violent, closeted love interest (not originally a major character), the neat hand-washing feels even more obnoxious for having been pushed into the beginning of Season 2...if you don’t plan to follow a character, why make us wait for the new season to begin before abruptly “killing them off”? Part of the problem is that initially, conflicts were driven by the characters’ overconfidence. Stand-offs between characters who aren't telling each other everything led to escalating dialogues, often with genuinely surprising results. It was a winning formula that capitalized off of the idea that you have to be kind of delusional to commit yourself to this lifestyle. When the formula is reversed, and personality is driven by plot, most of the charm is lost. Another crucial downturn in the writing has resulted from the show’s falling victim to the cloistered nature of its self-created microcosmos. Where it was once episodic and suspenseful, it’s now repetitive and stagnant, recycling its constructions endlessly for the sake of avoiding resolution.  Some of the issues explored are still interesting--Raquel signs onto a Celebrity Rehab-like show and attempts to manipulate the other residents, while Conor becomes embroiled in a Scientology-like organization at the urging of his long-lost sister. But they’re treated with the same silliness that characterizes the campy love-triangle B plots. Without its perspective intact, the show’s well-developed cynicism constantly gets in the way of its plausibility. Ironically, the sad thing about the turn is that it leaves some very good actors laboring for little reward. Jewel Staite, who plays the former star of a wildly popular teen drama (and in real life got her start opposite Ben Foster on Disney channel's first ever original series, Flash Forward) is always delivering lovely, subtle performances. Her 180 degree turn from coy and flirtatious to displeased battle axe in a scene where she's unexpectedly rebuffed is lightning-quick and perfectly on point. Acting with increasing desperation, she’s the one character who wavers between several versions of herself with total, self-loathing conviction. Chelan Simmons, before she was cut out of the action, was endearingly headstrong as Alicia. And Jonathan Patrick Moore's golden boy, Conor, displays a childlike guilelessness in both comic and serious scenes as his character spirals downhill. I’ll admit I’m excited to see just how bad Conor’s involvement with “Scienetics” gets in the season finale. As the resident stunted child and also the only character who’s been successful enough to have some disposable cash, Conor’s a perfect target for a cult. But even though it’s obviously a timely plotline, so far it’s been presented in a dreamy, not very incisive way. Instead of talking about corruption, or misuse of funds, or brainwashing, Conor googles the organization he’s just pledged $5,000 to and demands “WHO IS ZENU?” It makes sense that he views his sister’s involvement with Scienetics melodramatically, since he’s gotten no deeper interpretation from the other characters-- “It’s not a religion, it’s a cult,” states the super gravely before failing to explain the difference to Conor, who is clearly completely ignorant on the matter. Still, something about the absurdity of the past few episodes has been intriguing, and I have a feeling that even though it will never strike the same tone it had in Season 1, this might be the plotline that picks up speed and helps the show take off again. If it’s not going to get deep, it’s definitely going to get campy, and arguably with The Master in theaters, there’s more of an open niche for that.

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Continuing on a mini-Nicolas Roeg unit, last week Larry and I watched Eureka, his 1983 hypnagogic epic set on a remote tropical island, far from the simultaneously occurring Second World War. I found this film fascinating and filled with the psychological complications that Bad Timing seemed to strive for and fail to express. Loosely following the real-life story of Sir Harry Oakes, who spent fifteen years searching for gold, struck it in Ontario, and was later murdered in the Bahamas, the plot stabs alternately at mysticism, American exceptionalism, the Electra complex, and the violence of capitalism. (If you haven’t seen Eureka and you’re someone who cares about that kind of thing, then I’ll be spoiling some plot points for you, so be warned...) As with Bad Timing, there are some aspects of the film that just don’t seem to add up. For a film that boasts a big cast (Gene Hackman, Joe Pesci, Mickey Rourke), it definitely avoids typical Hollywood expectations. Unlike Bad Timing, though, I actually liked it. Quite a bit, actually. Although there are plenty of bizarre plot points, violent moments, and surreal images, Eureka is really only an imperfect viewing experience because of its pacing and length. From reading descriptions of the film, you’d imagine that Gene Hackman’s character, Jack McCann, a disgustingly wealthy former gold prospector, is the anchor of the film’s narrative--crux of a youth-to-old-age-to-death Citizen Kane-type screenplay. Instead, the film culminates in a (very) lengthy set of exchanges between McCann’s daughter (Theresa Russell) and her egotistical, libertine husband (Rutger Hauer). Their relationship is so darkly passionate that it subverts courtroom conventions and drags the film on for about twenty extra minutes into disconcerting, inconclusive territory. Eureka obviously outstrips Bad Timing in the quality of its writing, which is by contrast pithy, purposeful, and injected with odd humor. There’s so much to unpack from the dense screenplay, it’s small wonder that attempts to summarize the plot are limp and misleading. But the winding, unpredictable plot is peppered with deliberately iconic lines (“Once I had it all. Now I just have everything.”) The characters are also given obviously melodramatic things to say like repeated moans of “Oh [this]!” “Oh [that]!” Everyone is either constantly inflamed by passion, inebriated,  or, as in the case of Joe Pesci and Mickey Rourke’s gangster-lawyer-types, calculating and money-hungry to the point of caricature. Gene Hackman, Theresa Russell, and Rutger Hauer all turn in great performances, despite Hackman (who is pretty well-preserved, even now at 82) looking a bit young-old in makeup and white hair. Joe Pesci’s role is small and sort of absurd, and Mickey Rourke just might as well not even be in the movie as far as I’m concerned, but overall the success of the theatrical script rests on the charisma of the actors, and they all commit and deliver 150%. Theresa Russell in particular is called upon (or given the opportunity, depending on how you look at it-- she was Roeg’s wife at that point) to deliver a fair amount of physically demanding and histrionic scenery-chewing. Arguably, Eureka’s most crucial epiphany occurs during Jack’s murder, in what could have been the final scene of the film if Roeg were not such a difficult and deliberate filmmaker. Truly, it’s one of the most disgusting sequences I’ve ever seen--we see Gene Hackman’s face literally melted off the bone by a blowtorch while his head is hacked (ha) off his body-- and it’s only watchable because it’s presented from a surreal viewpoint, spliced with the character’s memories as his consciousness lingers past the point of possibility. Like many other moments in the film, it feels like a vivid thanatic fantasy rather than an actual death scene. As Roeg constructs it, the falling action takes on a character of its own after Jack’s death, and exists in a disjointed relationship to the rest of the film and to Jack’s legacy. Both the problem and central interest of the film are, I think, contained in that scene. It’s so jarringly violent and crucial a moment that you can’t forget it, but still its brutality is consistently glossed over by the other characters’ seeming need to launch into hysterics of love, or assertions of masculinity, or smarmy, smirking attempts at feigned innocence (whatever, Mickey Rourke). Their strange reactions after the discovery of Jack’s scorched corpse mirror the audience’s inability to accept that this American archetype of wealth-driven megalomania is mortal. Jack’s murder is the centerpiece of Roeg’s vision for the film, containing masterful image manipulation and a litany of implied messages. As Jack McCann’s body is mutilated, we experience along with him a flashback to the moment when, as if from some divine intervention, he was saved from freezing to death in order to later stumble into a massive underground mine filled with gold. We remember how he goaded the gangsters into murdering him. But there’s also a connection to the eerie, disturbing moment in the film’s initial scene where Jack growls “It’s not over til it’s over” at a random, freezing derelict who then blows his own head off. His daughter, Tracy, declares in the “trial” scene (too surreal to be referred to as an actual trial) that Jack McCann couldn’t have been murdered, because he died on the day of the discovery that made him rich. But we see from her ferocity that whoever died birthed forth something else that couldn’t be killed. The murderers literally have to do so much to kill him that we get a taste of immortality, and it’s an awful, painful place. You get the feeling that it’s not a state of eternity, but an instantaneous delusion that could only be experienced by someone as perverse and powerful as Jack McCann--a man who, despite wishing for it, doesn’t believe in his own death.

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So, I watched this the other night:

Bad Timing, a 1980 Nicolas Roeg thriller, a vehicle for Art Garfunkel, and the namesake of experimental musician Jim O’Rourke’s 1997 album, is an exercise in detailing the effects of anger and disappointment. Although the film is known for its violent jump-cuts, its overall unpleasantness is serviced more by its sort of relentless plodding through its characters’ unravelling happiness, and what you eventually see as its inevitable reveal. I didn’t love it-- I didn’t hate it, either. Mostly, I was surprised by how disengaged it felt in the moments that were not depictions of overt aggression. Story-wise, the film begins with a woman named Milena (played by Theresa Russell) being taken to a hospital after an apparent suicide attempt, and then flashes back and forth between her terrible relationship with Art Garfunkel’s character and a nebulous investigation that hints at how he may somehow have been implicated in the incident.

Several things are odd or uneven about the film’s narrative and production-- for one, it’s set in Cold War-era Vienna, but all the major characters, including the investigating detective played by Harvey Keitel, seem to be American. Garfunkel’s character, Dr. Alex Linden, works as a psychoanalyst, but this is something of a red herring. The most we get out of that is a short scene wherein he leads a lecture and makes a cryptic comment to his students about maybe being a voyeur. It plays out as either a joke (all psychoanalysts work in Vienna, ha ha) or an element of the screenplay that was sacrificed during editing. The setting itself is made clear but seems totally inconsequential to the action. Also, Keitel’s haircut is so ugly and effeminate that I can’t help but think we were supposed to understand something about his character that never quite got across. What we see mostly plays out a fantasy of patriarchal oppression of the male psyche. Up until the end of the film, the violence is mostly emotional and, we are led to believe, occurring primarily within the mind of the male lead (we see shots of Milena spasming on a gurney and receiving an emergency tracheotomy cut with scene’s of the couple’s physical intimacy.) Alex is unable to express love for Milena except through sex and the exertion of control. Theresa Russell, who is very good, plays a character whose own mental stability is alarmingly vulnerable to suggestion, to a degree that it makes you think some of the action might not be real, or at least that a good deal of it has been deliberately left out. Art Garfunkel’s tactic of indulging in very little recognizable acting is actually kind of effective in terms of creating a detached, malaise-filled atmosphere, and I think that overall Roeg’s attempt to evoke the consciousness of a sociopath was a success. Unfortunately, the film’s success in that aspect also makes it pretty boring. By today’s standards, the dénouement is long in arriving and strangely lacking in consequence. It would take a lot more provocation nowadays to spur someone to describe it as “a sick film made by sick people for sick people.” Watching the film, I was reminded of Larry Clark’s Kids, another work that for me inspires more lazy fascination than real interest. Kids is one of those films that has amassed a legion of fans whose appreciation of its documentary-as-pornography aesthetic has led to its canonization as an example of rebellious (read: “cool”) art. Just this summer, a friend pointed out the singer of a fairly popular band wearing a Kids tank top while hanging out before a performance. I’ve never really understood this. Kids is sensational but it’s not progressive in its values, and if it’s realistic, it’s probably only as a document of how Larry Clark was able to get his young actors to do and say outrageous things for his own enjoyment. I’m not sure what one gains from putting a work of art on a pedestal just because it was found abhorrent by the general public. It’s not like the characters are really rebelling against anything except propriety-- if anything, Kids reinforces the shitty values of the bad parents in the film. In a similar sense, I think Bad Timing is usually received as a complex psychological drama when really its message is pretty simplistic-- watching someone do bad things is shocking. Kids probably deserves more cool points for its soundtrack (Sebadoh, Slint, Beastie Boys, John Coltrane) than for its story or visual style. On that count, Bad Timing is apparently notable -- Criterion describes it as “acclaimed for its innovative editing, raw performances, and stirring musical score--featuring Tom Waits, the Who, and Billie Holiday.” But, I mean, you do the math. Watching a psychoanalyst flirting with both mental illness and criminal tendencies peer at a stranger on a bus as “Who Are You” starts to pick up is not stirring to me so much as laughable. Similarly, the repeated placement of Egon Schiele artworks in front of the camera seems like a silly attempt to enrich the film aesthetically rather than by honing the story. I find it interesting that despite Roeg’s unconventional editing techniques (which were extremely abrasive to audiences in 1980) the story itself follows a very teleogical progression. It reminds me of a recent film that I was also not crazy about, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void. That film begins with a death and follows its subject through the process of dying--an inevitable endpoint if ever there was one. Along the way, a great deal of violence is presented within the character’s memory and his shadowy observance of the aftermath of his own death. Much of it, like the violence in both Bad Timing and Kids, is tied to the violence of patriarchal society. In Enter the Void, it culminates in the camera’s literal invasion of a woman’s vagina. I guess when I can clearly see the direction a film is taking, it makes it difficult for me to stomach distasteful content. It makes violence appear too deliberate and unambiguous to service anything other than itself. Used as pure spectacle, violence (whether emotional or physical) betrays a distaste on the part of the filmmaker for his/her audience. Whether or not you find that rewarding may depend on your idea of whether that distaste is deserved-- or, maybe, whether you find pleasure in the fantasy of doing violence to yourself, which I can understand. On the flipside is the undeniable fact that violent scenes are a fantastic venue for technical innovation. That can be its own reward, and Enter the Void delivers arresting special effects and wonderful camera work. Bad Timing, too, introduced influential ideas for sensational editing techniques, to the extent that rapid visual juxtaposition is pretty familiar now. Responses to violent imagery are so immediate and overwhelming-- exhilaration, disgust, surprise--that finding new ways to deliver it is sure to elicit strong feelings (and, dare I say it, garner you a whole lot of attention.) Regardless, the choice to value sensation or atmosphere over story should be deliberate, and in the case of Bad Timing, I'm just not sure it was.

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My My's Songs for the Gentle (2006)

Deep in the recesses of the Spotify catalogue, or Wikipedia cross-references, or Myspace music pages, you’ll find the work of My My, a team of two Berlin-based producers.* Lee Jones and Nick Höppner, from London and Hamburg, respectively, trade responsibility for the twelve tracks included on their LP Songs for the Gentle, several of which were previously released as singles or on EPs apparently beginning around 2001.

Because it's not brassy, Songs for the Gentle doesn’t fit in with my typical notions of pleasure in the synthetic. It bypasses many opportunities to rush into large-scale, angular territory--instead, its textures are full of earthy thumps, sonorous clanking, listing synthesizer tones, and a very tactile understanding of whatever is currently anchoring the beat. These songs develop with restraint, bringing in new elements subtly but systematically. Despite what often strikes me as a sheen of textural perfection, there is nothing cold or distancing about My My's sound. “Blue Skies”, for example, re-imagines an escalating techno motif in a softly cascading inversion. "When It Rains" anchors its twinkly, inquisitive theme with a repetitive, watery plucking that signals an affinity for atmospheric acoustics. Even "Reverse Charge," which falls within more clubby territory, tempers its skewed glitches with softly intonated vocal samples and chords that occasionally lengthen past their expected points of termination. Songs for the Gentle’s triumph is its marriage of dance-floor idioms with a rich sense of emotional introversion. For the un- or only slightly initiated, these songs have an intimate touch that seems less bent on bodily manipulation than some strange, spontaneous interpretation of the universe. The album is structured around a central block of three songs, its bookends stretching in two tonally diverse directions. “Blue Skies,” the understated “Pelourinho,” and the blissful “Propain” deliver a message, in triplicate, of wonder at the world and its capacity for pure sensation. These tracks are the radial heart and soul within what might otherwise seem a strange example of track sequencing, operating like a symbiotic question and answer. A few weeks ago, I read a New York Times opinion piece by author and naturalist Bernie Krause, who captures field recordings of natural “soundscapes” in environments all over the world. In this particular instance, he wrote about the drastic difference in lushness and diversity of sound in a California meadow before and after a selective logging operation. It turns out that the soundscape was changed not just by environmental depletion (i.e. a few trees being taken down) but also by the indiscriminate noise levels produced by humans and machinery. He explains: “Soundscapes reveal many stories about the world’s habitats, illuminating the vital signs of life at one end of the spectrum and the effects of human noise at the other. In fit habitats, the biophony shows cohesion between all of its acoustic sources. In other words, the mating and territorial calls essential to each species’ survival don’t get masked or drowned out by competing sounds. Insects, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals establish their own “bandwidth niches,” which can be expressed as frequency (from the lowest to the highest sounds) and temporally (as when one creature vocalizes, followed by another, like exchanges between the chestnut-winged babbler and the Malaysian eared nightjar calling for mates in Borneo). “ In much the same way, My My’s approach is to allow each part of their compositions to naturally establish its role, and the result is that even obviously man-made sounds are not construed as disruptive “noise”. The synth squeals that float above the main theme on album closer “Swiss on Rye,” for instance, sound just a bit like bird calls. Each sound effectively implies the space around it, giving the recording an overall feeling of warmth and invitation. Within that space the various configurations of attack and decay seem meticulously figured for each separate part. The illusion of the whole thing is that it's too complex and variegated to be inorganic. (As soon as "Secret Life of Pants" appears to be narrowing into a splash of whooping dance-floor egotism, the introduction of what to me sounds like police whistles disrupts the solipsistic trance and forces a startled recognition of the outside world.) The effect is much like standing in a meadow, listening, in early morning-- one can just as easily marvel at the whole as be surprised by the distinctive integrity of its component parts. Maybe it is odd that something produced by humans, in perhaps one of the most technologically dependant genres of music, reminds me of naturalistic ideals. But Songs for the Gentle seems to me to be concerned with sounds that are harmonious with our own physical characteristics--the ways the ear interprets things, like the difference between walking through a cave and walking through a forest. Even its thumping “house” bass does not seem overly disruptive as it adapts to the atmosphere of each song. This music is something to sink into, to let surround you, that doesn't attack but rather nurtures the impulses for life and its everyday functions. You can bury your head in it or stand up and call out, and this universe seems open enough that you might be heard.

*(Their name is so unassuming that, as a search term, it literally dissolves into the Google-indexed ether. Finding the right “My My” requires you to either dig through redundant and irrelevant results, or to anchor your query with the attachment of empty, grasping nouns like “music” or “DJs” -- creating the exact species of division-enabling platitude that their music lightly shrugs off. Your best bet is to search the names of their songs directly, and get to the thing before the source.)

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"Musically speaking, the [disco] era is replayed through the rotation of happy-go-lucky seven-inch anthems on daytime radio, seventies compilations, and tongue-in-cheek cover versions. This form of pop disco didn't finally survive within a nightclub context because it didn't sustain all-night dancing, but that hasn't stopped it from flourishing at school discos for nostalgic adults, office parties for worn-out worers, and karaoke nights for wannabe stars where, iconic and recyclable, the music has become synonymous with drunken fun. Having become an unrivaled source of scapegoats and gripes at the end of the 1970s, disco now functions as an aural reminder of an age of innocence--an age when work was less driven, the mention of drugs didn't produce instant hysteria, and sex was relatively risk-free."

-- Tim Lawrence's Love Saves the Day (2003)

Some disorderly thoughts:

In the process of listening to a variety of disco records from the 1970s, I’ve been struck by the fact that time has greatly altered our notions of auditory gratification. Dance music, because of its axiomatically functional nature, has a unique relationship to the idea of dispensing, or withholding, gratification. Among other things, the idea of rhythmic constructions being distilled to encourage a prolonged physical response leads to different interpretations of the body’s role as a receptor. On one end of the spectrum, the body is the site of sensory onslaught, often unleashed with the objective of dulling the mind. On the other, the body is the site wherein manipulations of the brain’s perceptions of sound reveal themselves in physical responses. In a sense, the “maximalist” bent of recent dance/electronic fare is a return to the form as it has asserted itself at various times since its birth in the 1970s (like the elaborate session arrangements of Philly-style disco, the zonked-out assault of Detroit techno.) “Less is More” vs. “More is More” seems to be the abiding conflict, albeit an often misleading one, that pushes and pulls the narrative of dance production into shape. It’s a narrative that is too cyclical to be solely informed by which sounds are in vogue. It raises questions about what the producer's intentions are, and about what the music is really trying to do. Implicitly, dance music acknowledges that the song's message is not dictated by the song itself but by the listener/dancer's response to it. Still, the tension in rhythm-driven music between external and internal factors is such that a genre once populated purely by party music (disco) has now spawned permutations that are only appropriate for listening in headphones, in dark rooms. We now have music that, cloaked in club idioms, plays with our biologically engineered perceptions of space and atmospheric conditions. And that can lead to music as anesthetizing as Drexciya’s, or to something as acoustically warm as Herbert’s Bodily Functions (to offer two random examples). Somewhere along the line, it may be that becoming master of one’s own reality gained as much cache as shaping the reality of the dancers on the floor--at least, that kind of personal meditation offers an alternate notion of compositional value, as well as the approach one takes towards the listener. I’m not saying that these are new developments, but dance music’s enclosing, ecstatic, reality-compromising potentialities often make dates and messages dubiously significant. The most enduring records still seem to be those that are physically engaging in an unexpected way. The interesting thing is that sometimes the most counterintuitive combinations of sounds can conjure up feelings of warmth and familiarity. To some extent, those feelings rely on an ancestral sense of nostalgia (musically speaking) for the era mentioned above, and dance music that willfully distances itself also carries that mark by the very nature of its denial. Aural quality is significant physically but also in a storied sense, that invites personal responses to the derivation, mutation, and evasion of particular sounds.

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On Heaven 17, 20 Years After the Fact:

In conjunction with a unit on some play or novel I can no longer remember, my sophomore English teacher presented our class with the problem of Fail-Safe: the horrifying possibility that a nuclear strike on Moscow could be launched by mistake, with no hope of halting the process once it began. She described the inescapable situation and demanded that we provide an appropriate solution. As hand after hand went up with such lame suggestions as apologizing profusely, sending reparations, etc., a smile grew on her face-- an expression that I took then to be smugness at our evident stupidity, but that I now suspect was irrepressible glee at the thought of our country's self-immolation.  Obviously, she told us with unmistakable relish, the only way to restore equilibrium and avoid nuclear war was by sending our own bombers to destroy New York City. This teacher gave me A's but acted like she hated my guts, ran the National Honor Society like a tyrant, and once gave the same exact lesson plan two days in a row with robotic consistency. The satisfaction with which she described the imminent demise of unsuspecting New Yorkers (men, women, and innocent children, she took pains to point out) may actually have been the most human moment I ever saw from her. Looking back, we probably had more in common than I thought. I take it for granted sometimes that humanity is most aptly expressed by sincere examinations of the soul. On Heaven 17’s 1981 album Penthouse and Pavement, humanity is examined by way of economic conditions, and serviced by glossy, artificial-sounding music. "Geisha Boys and Temple Girls", with its proto-techno squiggles, addresses the disconnect between the Hollywood vision of life and the reality of the working class. “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang” combines frenetic drum tracks with a deadpan condemnation of political conservatism. Highlighting the disconnect between sounds and the capitalist system that distributes them, Heaven 17 often walked a line between sincereness and cultural parody. The cheerful synthesizer tracks on “Let’s All Make a Bomb” in particular corroborate the story of a technologically spectacular but deeply threatening Cold War existence. When Glenn Gregory’s voice urges us to "take the ‘M’ out of M.A.D.”, the phrase contains both more bitterness and more positivity than its pithy sloganeering would suggest. Where "Geisha Boys" points out the insurmountable obstacle of relationships cordoned off by consumer culture, "Let's All Make a Bomb" offers an escape in a voice that is both impish and commanding: “Although the war has just begun / Ignore the sirens, let's have fun / Put on your best, go out in style.” Within that seductive exhortation lies a vision of human nature that is often obscured by the structured delivery of approved culture, but is nevertheless fundamental. The song’s dual message of mind-control/ release from mind-control is funny and insidious partly because of Heaven 17's self-proclaimed association with the fake corporation, B.E.F. (or British Electric Foundation.) Although the organization was in actuality the production company formed by Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh, they played up the vagueness of the initialism for image-enhancing purposes on their album covers and promotional materials. The faceless appellation may also have been a nod to the stardom-abnegating group names of the mid-70s disco era, a period when music distribution lines began to reorganize themselves according to the grassroots demands of disc jockeys and the dance floor. Similarly, Heaven 17 were born from a burgeoning Sheffield music community, its performance spaces (and later its famous Red Tape recording studios) funded by the City Council in opposition to Thatcherism. My English teacher was a rare specimen, sometimes diabolical (she wasn't afraid to hand out an F-) but her lesson plan relied not only on a past threat of annihilation, but a fictional one at that. I wonder how she would have responded to the direct confrontation of "Let's All Make a Bomb." I imagine that she would have ignored it. For most of us, the apocalyptic fantasy is an exertion of control (in her case over a captive audience of ignorant Sophomores.) Heaven 17 ask us to experience it as the pleasure of generosity ("Let's celebrate and vaporize".)

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Maybe the best illustration of what intrigues me about the joyful terrorism in “Let’s All Make a Bomb” is something I came across in Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: the Chinook concept of “potlatch”. As both an economic system and a ceremonial action, potlatch (which literally means “to give away”) dictates that when gifts are exchanged between meeting chiefs, each reciprocation must outdo the previous offering. “The game might begin with the presentation of a necklace and end with the burning of a town-- with a tribe burning its own town, thus raising the obligations of its rival to an almost impossible level.” (Marcus, 393.) This system of elevating generosity is described in Lipstick Traces as an important symbol for the Lettrist and Situationist International, two 20th century movements that attempted to replace the restrictions of daily life with moments of explosive potential. Marcus quotes Marcel Mauss: “after all the skins and animals were gone the potlatch could end in an orgy of enslavement and human sacrifice...the first round table, ‘from which none need be excluded.’” Behind the potlatch system is the assumption that a unit that is not prepared to give all of itself, to the most literal extent, is lacking in honor and deserving of contempt. Accordingly its escalation could follow the lines of either friendship or war. Ultimately, the revelation of the potlatch concept lay in its displacement of material value, which allowed its participants to sidestep stratifying conditions. In theory, the door was then left open to spontaneous realities--moments that were powerful in their potential to hold anything from utter bliss to cataclysmic loss. Heaven 17 acted by their own model: they were entrenched in a local scene but were musically  indebted to Kraftwerk and African-American culture. They used their own technical advantages to describe inequality and trans-Atlantic capitalist paranoia. They supplied little of themselves but demanded everything. In that sense, they may have fallen short of that ideal system which the Situationists hoped to exploit. But the impulses they expressed are nevertheless ones that are real, and present, and human. “Human” meaning not the controlled finality of confession, with its implicit mediation by morality, but the inconsistency that surfaces before the unmatchable fury of our own demise. The interesting thing about "Let's All Make a Bomb" is that since its release it has hung in the air as an unanswered demand, its impossibility sharpened by the passage of time. Today's pop music offers little room to engage with its ideas. Pop stars are consistently engaged in a surreal, product-driven march towards total self-idealization. Our biggest statements in pop music right now are heady assertions of personality (I could mention Drake, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, and Nicki Minaj under this umbrella.) Endless self-reflection is a natural result of being trapped in the cycle of popular iconography. I don’t mean this as a value judgment, or to say that this aspect of pop culture has changed greatly since the early ‘80s. I do think that Heaven 17 operated in a specific moment when a fear that had consumed the Cold War era could be both exploited and softened by new aspects of musical production, in particular the use of new technologies (like the synthesizer) and the introduction of new marketing channels (like music television.) "Let's all Make a Bomb" may not have enacted potlatch--in the end nothing was given up-- but it nevertheless conveyed the potential power of a gift that could not be returned. That offering might tear down the shaky relations of world powers, nullify the hard-debated truce of Mutual Assured Destruction, or allow a pop group to be subsumed into the embrace of both their audience and their enemies. That fissure, in which music and its listeners were vulnerable to suggestion, is now layered over with scar tissue from years of periodic hysteria and suppression. We’ve reached a kind of stasis that has less to do with the political climate than with the perceived illimitability of aesthetic production and reproduction. The potlatch system offers a neat philosophical analogy for Heaven 17’s suggestion that self-destruction can be productive. But it also illustrates the distance between society’s “ineradicable attraction” to reckless destruction and the empowerment of that potential chaos “as a negation of division, as an affirmation of community.”* Ours is a culture that can’t imagine its own end, so how could we possibly offer it? *All quotes from Marcus, p. 393- 394