Song Of The Week - "Let's Go" - Matt & Kim

Confession: I never made it all the way through Matt & Kim’s 2010 album Sidewalks. Actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure I even made it past the third track. Anyways, the point is that whatever I did make it through, I don’t remember all that well. The general impression I retain is that the whole album felt over-produced—too slick to have come from the DIY dance punk duo from Grand Street, whose sophomore album was full of exuberant, lo-fi pop music.

Unfortunately, “Let’s Go,” the first single off Matt & Kim’s fourth album Lightning, to be released at some point this fall, does not represent a return to their cruder, more diverting days. It’s a little more spry-sounding than their last effort, but it still lacks the vital punch of “Daylight” or “Good Ol’ Fashioned Nightmare.” Those songs both had hooks to kill for and were—let’s be honest—the saving grace of an album that might otherwise have been considered a little forgettable. In the years since the release of that album, I’ve had several conversations about how good “Daylight” is, one or two about “Good Ol’ Fashioned Nightmare,” and exactly zero about anything else on the album. Regrettably, I can barely comment on any other track save for Kim’s frenetic drum hits on “Lesson Learned.”

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It doesn’t help the case for "Let's Go" that the main vocal hook is ripped straight out of the Earth, Wind, and Fire songbook. Never mind that dozens of other artists have taken stabs at rewriting that famous “oohing” section—the song practically begs for emulation—but I can’t but help have the feeling that other artists have done it better. (See Jenny Owen Youngs’s song “Already Gone” on her latest album An Unwavering Bend Of Light [hint: it comes in the chorus].) For Matt & Kim, it's just a clunky reference—my brother made a case for cryptomnesia on Matt & Kim’s part, but how could a Williamsburg-based hipster duo pass up the ironic funk reference?—that comes off sounding less like emulation and more like parasitism.

And what about the lyrics? In terms of “Daylight,” I found the nonsense lyrics generally charming. I’ve heard stories that Matt constructs lyrics based on a journal of scribblings kept by Kim—most of it nonsense to begin with, which he then wraps in even more nonsense by tossing odd bits and pieces incongruously together. Not only does that explanation make perfect sense, it adds a silly, sophomoric jubilation to the lyrics:

And in the daylight we can hitchhike to Maine.

I hope that someday I’ll see without these frames.

And in the daylight I don’t pick up my phone,

because in the daylight anywhere feels like home.

The lines reference Maine, hitchhiking, the wearing of glasses, ignoring phone calls, and the lazy problem of daylight. While it might be fun and most certainly is silly, I'm not sure it means anything. I’m tempted to make some sort of post-lyric, collagist attempt at justifying the inane lyrics, but it wouldn’t amount to much. There’s a way to read the lyrics as a reflection of a weird kind of cuddly, Brooklyn-based domesticity, but that’s about all I can get from it.

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The problem is that these kind of lyrics are a one-trick-pony kind of deal. They pulled it off once—memorably, absurdly, catching-ly—with “Daylight,” but part of me can’t allow them a second go-round. Or a third. Or a fourth. Let’s have a look at the second verse of “Let’s Go”:

I bought a megaphone

to use inside your home,

forgot the batteries,

but that’s the old me.

It’s a hideously composed thought. What is Matt/Kim trying to say? ('Does it have to say anything?' I hear the peanut gallery whispering.) I dare you to read something into this (comment below…). Later on, in the outro section of the song, Matt repeats the same lines over and over again:

Say what you wanna say,

make it mean everything.

Oh, Matt…dreaming of the impossible. There are some people who make a convincing argument for language to supersede meaning and mean everything, but I’m not ready to cede that power to an indie-pop darling. (Maybe Thom Yorke could make me feel that way?) Sorry, Matt—if you want to win, your words should at least mean something. 

The Intouchables Touches Down In The U.S.

This is a lovely film. By turns, it manages humor, sadness, reflection, and humanity…and then cycles back through those elements over and over again. The Intouchables presents the story of an unlikely relationship between wealthy tetraplegic Phillipe (François Cluzet) and his inexperienced, convict caretaker (Omar Sy). Fraught with far less dramatic tension than you might think from that description, the film derives all its power from the lead performances of Sy and Cluzet. Their relationship is a wonderful thing to behold over the course of the film; there are tears, laughs, car chases, paragliding, and dancing. There are lots of silly montages that I would scoff at in other films. But not in this one. I allow this film as many montages as it wants. It’s that kind of film.

A still from The Intouchables, with Omar Sy (left) and François Cluzet (right); via nytimes.com

There’s a weird irony in that the three great French film imports to the U.S. since the beginning of the new millennium have been consumed more like pastries than fine French reds. Sorry, that’s a bad metaphor. What I mean to say is that, once upon a time, the French imports—À bout de souffle and The 400 Blows among them—were more like cultural revolutions in their impact on the landscape of American film. They changed Hollywood forever; these three films—Amélie, The Artist, and (soon) The Intouchables—are light and easy on the mind. While some people (I mean me) are of a mind that a lingering darkness intrude on Amélie’s world, many viewers are of the mind that it’s just sunny entertainment. And, setting aside the question of whether or not it deserved all those Oscars, who didn’t enjoy The Artist? It was one of those films that went down easy. The same thing might be said of The Intouchables, which, while it ponders some deep, dark questions, skips light-heartedly down the road to comedy once it arrives at the proverbial tragic-comic fork in the road. Which is okay with me! Just not with some people…

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*Some spoilers follow. There are always naysayers. In the case of The Intouchables, Variety’s film critic Jay Weissberg stepped up to the plate to cut down the film’s buoyant feel-goodness to size. The film, he argues, engages in “the kind of Uncle Tom racism one hopes has permanently exited American screens.” He jokingly speculates that executives at Weinstein, who bought the American rights to the film, would have to endure some serious rewriting for the film to work for American moviegoers. He finds Phillipe’s birthday party scene particularly hard to stomach. Driss, who has just been subjected to a survey of the standard classical music repertoire by Phillips, trots out an .mp3 player with speakers and promptly plays Earth, Wind, and Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland.” That moment of cultural collision, according to Weissberg, places Driss in a “role barely removed from the jolly house slave of yore, entertaining the master while embodying all the usual stereotypes about class and race.”

But what Weissberg overlooks is the abundantly clear problem of ethnocentrism. It’s especially easy when it comes to the film world to assume that the U.S. (indeed, Hollywood) is the center of everything. But that’s simply not the case. People make films from across the world and they do not always conform to our cultural expectations. If someone made an American version of The Intouchables, based in, for example, New York City, then it would certainly come across as having some racist undertones. However, wrapped up in Weissberg’s assessment that Weinstein will “need to commission a massive rewrite to make palatable this cringe-worthy comedy” is the stinging assumption that Americans are somehow ‘fairer’ and, indeed, less racist than our neighbors across the Atlantic.

The situation calls for an application of what cultural critic Edward Said termed “contrapuntal reading.” Though it complicates the viewing/reading/listening experience in a myriad of ways, Said offered a method of engaging with artwork not only on our own terms, but also on the perceived terms of other cultures. It’s a complicated system and Said explains it better than me. (Learn more about it from a clever English student here.) The lesion is that we need to look at The Intouchables not as a film in U.S. theaters, but as a French film in U.S. theaters. This is a crucial difference.

Personally, I’m not familiar with issues of race and ethnic identity in Paris and France, so I feel uncomfortable commenting on how The Intouchables stands with regard to social issues on the other side of the pond. All I can safely say is that the film certainly makes no comment on race and ethnic identity in the U.S.; the background of slavery and the civil rights movement are not parts of Driss's character. Weissberg is free to point out that the film may well not succeed in American theaters and that moviegoers may overlook the nuances of ethnocentrism and proclaim it as racist spectacle, but the film’s intent remains far away from anything American.

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Weissberg’s commentary does highlight one important aspect of the film (important in both French and American terms, I mean): the play between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. The soundtrack jumps from Vivaldi to Earth, Wind, and Fire without skipping a beat. Modern art is beaten down only to be built back up again (and again dismantled, of course). Weissberg makes it sound as if the confrontations between Driss and ‘high’ art (and those relatively less frequent ones between Phillipe and ‘low’ art) are somehow without any resulting value. But these confrontations (besides the hilarious opera scene) open up important avenues of inquiry: why else would Driss pick up a brush and start painting? It’s not a mocking gesture; when Driss reveals his painting to Phillipe, he is sincere in his search for acknowledgement.

But the most important scene about art occurs when Driss goes in for a job interview at a shipping company after ending his stint with Philipe. Noting Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory on the wall, he comments on it to the interviewer. The mention of the painting is like the lifting of a fog; I can find no way to explain it other than that the conversation ‘opens up’ after that. Art allowed for a dialogue; it allowed for connection. If The Intouchables has a lesson buried in it, it’s the lesson that any art—high or low, big or small—has the power to transform and change. All it takes is an observation: here we are, there is the art. Now what to make of that?

Weegee Works Wonders On The Walls

The dark stain of blood on the sidewalk. The lurid glow of water hitting a fiery building. The observers of  tragedies: faces twisted in pain, flushed with fascination. The perfectly observed object: a gun, a hat, a shoe, a DOA tag, a lamppost. Weegee—the photographic pseudonym of Arthur Fellig—was the first master of news photography. Looking at his work today, with its heightened, grainy contrast from the flash that he used, it reads as the natural precursor to Hollywood’s film noir binge of the 1940s and 1950s.

A still from John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, starring Humphrey Bogart (center); via britannica.com

Of course, working the rough and tumble streets of New York City’s Lower East Side during the 1930s and ’40s, Weegee was less like a precursor and more like a contemporary to Hollywood cinematographers such as Arthur Edeson, who styled the rich blacks and whites of a wide body of films, including John Huston's 1941 film The Maltese Falcon. The crucial difference between Weegee and Edeson is not the subject matter (overlooking the rather large fact that Weegee’s subjects were very real and Edeson’s subjects were very…well…not), but rather the intent.

The worrisome part of Weegee’s legacy for art historians and critics is, surprisingly, not the merit of his photography or his gifted eye, but rather how his work sits on the walls of an art gallery alongside Steichen, Steiglitz, Cartier-Bresson and other recognized ‘art’ photographers. In hanging his photos on a wall, it almost feels as if we'd like to displace Weegee’s work from its original context. After all, he took photos not as a hobby or for the 'sake of itself,' but for money, for the newspapers. First and foremost, he was a journalist.

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The impressive part of the International Center of Photography Museum’s current exhibition on Weegee—Weegee: Murder Is My Business—is that the exhibition’s curators never undersell that aspect of Weegee’s work. Reminders are everywhere; supporting texts are careful to link his work back to his life—that of the photographer on the beat, combing through the lowlife of lower Manhattan, working out of the back of his car. Several of his photographs are paired with the work not only of contemporary newspaper photographers, but also the crime scene photography of police officers, pulled from New York City archives, establishing not only a critical relativity for evaluating his work, but also creating a larger context for his work.

I've found that thinking about his work as occupying the space between the newspaper and gallery wall is immensely rewarding. Photography, perhaps more than any other artistic discipline, suffers an extraordinarily large ‘gray’ area. What photographs are art? Some of the most famous photographs of all time are journalistic work, not really 'art' proper at all: Joe Rosenthal’s photograph “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” and Steve McCurry’s “Afghan Girl,” to name two examples. If “realism” is the argument here—that we appreciate the wartime spirit and the social concern captured, respectively, by these photos—I don’t buy it.

Steve McCurry's "Afghan Girl" is one of the most-recognized photos of all time; via wikipedia.org

There is something that moves us in these two photographs that is more than a simple curiosity being sated. It's not the mere transmission of knowledge. When I see “Afghan Girl,” I do not think: "So that’s what an Afghan refugee looks like." The viewing experience is nothing like that. I suspect that no one—save those who know her personally—can look at that photograph and shrug it off as mere 'information.' There is identification happening when I look at her; there is a dialogue opened up between us: I see her, she seems to see me, I recognize her recognizing me. There is a pull between subject and viewer, an experience far more like staring at Lady Agnew than staring at a television screen mutely spilling out images of refugee camps in the Middle East.

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Our fascination with Weegee, I think, stems from this capacity of news photography: to make us feel, to involve us deeply in a conversation with a freeze frame of reality. Weegee is a master because of this ability to make us feel acutely and powerfully—see the photo below of a corpse with a gun lying yards away. It’s a blunt image, brisk and to the point, but its effect is powerful; in most people (I suspect that a few feel revulsion), it elicits a weird, uncomfortable fascination. Weegee’s placement of the gun in the frame is practically begging us to ask questions, but mere curiosity is not the selling point of the photograph. Rather, it is fascination, pure and simple, that brings me back to this image—not questions, but wordless wonder; I converse, however odd that sounds, with the corpse on the street. I feel a connection to the dead man and the gun that killed him. 

One of Weegee's best-known works, this photo depicts a criminal shot on the street by an off-duty cop; via tumblr.com

Weegee not only knew how to make the viewer feel acutely when it came to crimes, accidents, and general mayhem; he also knew how to show the quieter, more familiar side of life. The ICP’s exhibit digs into these lesser-known sections of his work—including photographs of people sleeping on their fire escapes during heat waves, crowds of tens of thousands of New Yorkers at Coney Island, the smiling, slightly seedy bar scene of the Lower East Side, and a few hallucinatory, beautiful photographs of people at the movie theatre. The element of connection is so powerful in some of these photographs that it seems unlikely that they could possibly have been considered photojournalism. The exhibition proves (as if anyone had their doubts) that Weegee’s work belongs on the art gallery walls the same as any art photographer’s.  

A couple kisses while a film plays (the kiss, however, was staged by Weegee); via amber-online.com

Song Of The Week - June 18

Along with Food Will Win The War, the moniker of singer-songwriter Eric Elbogen—formerly Say Hi To Your Mom, now simply Say Hi—is one of the worst band names in the business. Ever-trusty Wikipedia credits the name change to a shift in ‘aesthetics,’ but the cited website—Say Hi’s FAQ page—not longer mentions ‘aesthetics’ or any reason at all. Instead, Elbogen offers up the concise, somewhat bitter, response: “Please don’t ask about the name change, [sic] it’s been more than four years.” He’s so sick of the question that the response appears twice on the page.

Complaints with the silly name aside, Elbogen crafts some cannily simple and affecting pop songs, among which is “Dots On Maps,” off Say Hi’s 2011 album Um, Uh Oh. Part of the charm is the lo-fi production values, which are basic and uncluttered, thankfully allowing the music to breath. Like The Wooden Birds, another indie act with a similar taste for melancholic pop, Say Hi populates songs with rhythmic and lightly catchy guitar patterns that draw the listener into the song without drowning out the lyrics. After pontificating last week on Fiona Apple and the sometimes (in)significance of lyrics, I could not help but relapse to a song whose lyrics I felt were peculiarly powerful in the mere sense of meaning—not sound and rhythm as with Apple.

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I’ve already noted that Elbogen practices a particular form of ‘melancholic pop.’ You could probably add Jeff Tweedy, Adam Duritz, and Ben Gibbard to that cast of characters. Their music, if often warm and melodic, is shadowed by lyrics whose various characters and narrators aren’t exactly ever happy. The narrator of Elbogen’s unsunny road trip tune contends not only with his own troublesome thoughts, but with the impatient commentary of his unnamed road companion. The sense of frustration begins in the first verse, pouring out in the underwhelming sense of not being able to make any progress:

Remarkable as it seems

turns out the night was much shorter

than you wanted to believe.

But we’re only in Dakota, dots on maps,

en route to bigger cities.

Elbogen sagely picks “Dakota” as the setting for the song—a kind of Everyman’s nowhere. He doesn’t bother specifying “North” or “South” because (well…probably because that wouldn’t fit into the line of the song) it doesn’t matter which one they’re in. Either state is a kind of ‘undesirable;’ it’s the sort of place that you would only ever pass through on your way to somewhere else. It’s a transitory place; the narrator and his companion (I assume a male narrator because of Elbogen) are “en route to bigger cities.” Additionally, it’s telling that no destination is specified; they are traveling simply to “bigger cities.” Elbogen communicates the sense that any city would be fine, so long as they can escape the doldrums of the prairie.

The second verse elaborates on the traveling situation; it moves the physical setting away from a geographical or conceptual plane—that of the two people “en route” in a car on a map—and into closer proximity with the interior of the car and the relationship between the two people. At first, the narrator focuses on the reality of the road—the “ebbs of traffic patterns reced[ing]” and playing the “only record front to back—infinity”—but he narrows in on an acutely personal thought at the end of the verse:

When it’s dark like this,

all that I can see is the whites

of her green eyes.

Not only is it an image that grabs the listener, it also provides the first concrete detail regarding the relationship between the narrator and his companion. The fact that he’s noticed this small detail implies a particular sympathy and even concern for this companion.

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What is not immediate, however, is the pronouns that Elbogen plays around with. It’s a small detail, but one worth noting. Although it’s easy to assume that the second person of the first verse—“you wanted me to believe”—is somehow the same as the woman of the third verse—“her green eyes”—there is clearly a disjunction. An explanation that might solve that conundrum is a grammatical one. Something that Elbogen is aware of, I suspect, is the non-textual reality of lyrics; they live in a world without punctuation, which allows songs a level of complexity not attained by other texts. (Poetry, of course, often sacrifices punctuation, but not so naturally as lyrics.) Perhaps the second verse ought to be transcribed as follows:

And the ebbs of traffic patterns recede

And we played our only record front to back—infinity.

(When it's dark like this

all that I can see is the whites

of her green eyes.)

The verse settles once some punctuation is introduced, once that last sentence is received as interior monologue of the narrator rather than a more general kind of narration. But that doesn’t quite square with the final pair of verses, which includes the second person thought: “But now you’re about as turned on / as a bottom feeder likes the sun”—not exactly the sentiment to be voiced out loud.

Another approach is, still viewing these instances second- and third-person as recording the same character, to view them as distinct lenses of the same person. In that sense, the second-person represents all that is uncomfortable about this relationship: the longness of this drive, the awkwardness of having grown up together, the lack of sexual chemistry in their relationship, the spirit of competition (“you suppose that ever reigning champ / eventually meets his better”). The third-person breaks through in the honest moments; when neither of them are overthinking this relationship and the commitment that they’ve made. The chorus, of course, represents the high point of honesty in the song; it presents a visceral acknowledgment of their difficult relationship, which is stuck in a stasis—in Dakota:

And she says, “Oh, tell me, this is all it’s gonna be?”

And I say, “Oh, I don't know just how it's gonna be.”

And she says, “Oh, tell me, is this all it’s gonna be?”

There’s a trigger somewhere, let's pull it.

There’s a trigger somewhere, let's pull it.

Ultimately, as we all sort of suspected, the song’s not really about a road trip across the Dakotas. It’s about, cliché though it sounds, the rocky road of life. There are Dakota stretches in life and in relationships, when people seem to fracture into different personalities. There are flashes of the person the narrator was first interested in, but more often, it’s this lingering second-person character, whom he knows perhaps better than he would like.

Ever the clever songwriter, Elbogen denies us the knowledge of which person is speaking that final, decisive line: it could be either the narrator or the woman. We can’t even be sure that that the “trigger” is a positive or negative presence; as far as the song is concerned, it simply represents a change. 

Joseph Cornell At Anthology Film Archives

Last Monday, I did something that I probably should have done a long time ago: I went to Anthology Film Archives. For those of you who are unfamiliar (probably most of you), Anthology Film Archives is, for all intents and purposes, the center of the avant-garde film universe. For a rather dingy-looking brick building in New York City’s East Village, that seems like quite a statement. However, despite its lackluster appearance, the building has served as one of the bastions of avant-garde film research, preservation, and, perhaps most crucially, showings in the world.

Anthology Film Archives, on 2nd Ave. and 2nd St. in New York City, NY; via wikipedia.org

Established by Jonas Mekas, P. Adams Sitney, Stan Brakhage, and Peter Kubelka in 1970, the Archives continues to function today as a preservation tool for experimental film (particularly American ones) and a theater for a wide-range of films, including not only recent works in experimental film, but also retrospectives on important figures in the experimental/avant-garde film tradition and even overlooked figures from Hollywood; currently, the Archives are running a “From the Pen of…” series, which takes a closer look at the oft-unnoticed role of the screenwriter in film.

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Last Saturday afternoon, however, was an offering typical of the Archives: the first part of a Joseph Cornell retrospective. Cornell, an American artist famous in the art world for his ‘boxed assemblages,’ is not as well known for his role as a filmmaker, although he occupies a pivotal role in the American film tradition. Famously, Cornell is often credited as the first practitioner of ‘found footage’ films, notably with his first work, the 1936 film Rose Hobart. Despite the film’s importance to avant-garde film history, it might be better remembered as the instigator of an infamous Salvador Dalí rant.

Dalí, who was present at the first screening of the film at MOMA, reportedly burst out halfway through the film something to the effect (there are differing accounts as to the precise wording…better not to favor one over the other) that he’d had the exact same idea to create a collage of film footage and that Cornell had somehow stolen it from his subconscious. Although the comment might strike most of us as hysterical, it seems to have had a sobering effect on Cornell, who showed his films only very infrequently to the public thereafter.

Which, I should add, is a shame, because some of his early films are wonderful and charming. Those who resent the prickly modern attitudes of Cornell’s sculptural and assemblage work might be shocked to see these films: the triptych of “Cotillion,” “Children’s Party,” and “Midnight Party” (all 1940) are an immediate delight. Combining footage of children at various parties, the antics of several infants, and several entertainment shows—ranging from a tightrope walker to a juggling seal to a knife-thrower, Cornell conjures up some of the magic of childhood and—even in the somewhat academic, overbearing atmosphere (for me, anyway…) of Anthology’s Maya Deren Theater—laughter.

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One of Stan Brakhage’s projects in making films was to recreate the experience of early childhood in his audience, which he encapsulates in his artistic manifesto Metaphors On Vision: “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective…” Some of Brakhage’s films, at points, are elusive and atmospheric his his pursuit of that eye. Cornell, to my knowledge, never offered any overt thesis of childhood perspective à la Brakhage, but he does indeed also pull us back into childhood. By eliminating narrative but retaining observable situations, Cornell brings us back to the viewing state of a child.

One of the several amusing infants in Cornell's triptych Cotillion, Children's Party, and Midnight Party; via tumblr.com

Of course, each situation, such as the children bobbing for apples, implicitly involves narrative, but the narrative is not an arcing one—it is slight. A child’s world is one of distraction, of bouncing from one object of interest to the next, of one successive, flitting narrative after another. Innocent, a child always follows everyone’s favorite live-better maxim—carpe diem—before being away of its implications. 

There’s space for reading the film critically, as one might do with Brakhage, but there’s also space, as I mentioned above, for simply enjoying the film. The scenes with the baby trying (and failing) to eat as he falls asleep would put a smile on the face of even the most deadened film scholar. The scenes of the knife-thrower, even as we’re sure of the inevitable (safe) results, still cause a nervous twitch and a fluttery sense of relief, an instinctive, child-like thrill.

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Other films were equally moving, although centered in nostalgia, rather than the retracing of childhood feelings. “Centuries of June” and “Gnir Rednow” were bursting with the longing for days past. The camerawork and composition of both films were especially notable and, as it turns out, for good reason: both were collaborations with Stan Brakhage. Although Brakhage is billed as ‘photographer’ on both pieces, the mere presence of his deft hand on the camera makes an argument for a ‘co-director’ tag. Brakhage’s eye for detail and his swift, hallucinatory camera style possess, respectively, a sureness and a warmth that I’m not sure Cornell could manage on his own.

Like Brakhage’s “The Wonder Ring,” the beautiful “Gnir Rednow” is a paean to the play of light created on New York City’s elevated subways. It represents an honest attempt to reexamine the world around us and find something new and original in it. By tackling the subway from so many different angles and perspectives, Cornell and Brakhage transform the oft-mundane experience of riding the subway into something giddy and ethereal, something worthwhile and wonderful.

“Centuries of June” is less interesting, focusing on a dark house on a seemingly abandoned property. The first few minutes of the film is largely tracking shots, which begin on the greenery of the property (sunlight through leaves) before panning over to the dark, foreboding exterior of the house. The film moves on to focus on a group of children playing on the property, as well as some wonderful tracking shots of a bird and a butterfly.

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Some of the Cornell work shown during this part one of the retrospective—looking specifically of “Legend Of Fountains,” “Aviary,” and “Nymphlight,” simply did not appeal to me. In comparison with the other work, these pieces seemed less polished and more informal—maybe a little too ‘experiential’ to be of interest to me. I’ve read that several of these films focused on some of Cornell’s favorite locations in New York City and that loose premise is evident in these films. While there are graceful moments in all of them (a shot tracking a group of pigeons as they flit through the trees), these films do little to create a lasting image of place for me.

With the exception, that is, of the final film “Angel.” Lacking in NYC-monument recognition, I cannot say for sure the statue/fountain at the focus of this beautiful film is, indeed, in New York City, but I assume it's somewhere in the borders of the Big Apple. Focusing on the titular angel and the pool that surrounds her, Cornell plays with the colors of the sky, the plant life, and the striking tonality of the water to create a brief, quiet film resonant with the watery peace of Monet’s Water Lilies—perhaps lacking the Impressionist coloring scheme, but with all the tremulous beauty.

A frame from Cornell's film Angel; via emory.edu

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But the most impressive film of the showing remained Cornell's first film, Rose Hobart. Not only is it an integral part of film history as the first collage/found footage film, it's a fascinating study of a relationship between a fan and a Hollywood star. Cornell discovered a copy of the 1931 film East Of Borneo in a junk shop and became obsessed with the leading lady, Rose Hobart. She portrays a woman on the hunt for her husband in the Borneo jungle; when she finds him, he is in the employ of a mysterious prince. A love triangle, naturally, results.


None of this plot, however, is represented in the film. Instead, the film is almost entirely composed of shots of Hobart, who is, at various times, talking, smiling, flirting, frowning, and generally playing the part of a romantic Hollywood lead. For Cornell, this distillation might have been the result of a self-directed obsession, but for the rest of us it serves as a fascinating study of the leading lady and how she comports herself. Watching her interact with the two principal love interests raises interesting questions about the presentation of women in Hollywood and how relationships are visualized. 

Song Of The Week - June 10

In light of Fiona Apple’s upcoming fourth album, The Idler Wheel…, which is set for release on June 19, I’ve been digging into her discography trying to get to know her better. I’ve listened mostly to her quirky pop masterpiece Extraordinary Machine, released to wide critical acclaim in 2005. The title track, in particular, has captivated me this past week.

Unlike her first two albums, the production on most of this album’s tracks is cleaner and less cluttered, giving Apple’s songs some room to breath. On “Extraordinary Machine,” I was immediately drawn into the curious, hiccupping backing track, which sounds like a mix of marimba, bells, keyboard strings, real strings, and bassoon. (Although I suspect some of it was thrown together on a bunch of keyboards.) At first, the vocal performance and Apple’s lyrics seemed almost like a secondary concern.

Repeat listens, however, draw out Apple’s performance. Starting off with a run of 14 (count ‘em!) notes that dance lightly on the same G# (if my ear is anything close to right…), Apple challenges the listener from the start. It put me in mind a little of Ingrid Michaelson’s song “Soldier,” which also bravely opens with a daunting 21 notes on the same pitch. When used correctly, it’s a masterful technique for building tension in the song, but Apple’s use is far more accomplished. While Michaelson releases that tension and never reclaims it, while Apple builds a series of jumpy rises and falls around how she stalks that G#.

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Of course, it’s not only about the notes she sings, but how she sings them. Blessed with a jazzy contralto voice, Apple shifts gears at the end of the first phrase (“I certainly haven't been shopping for any new shoes”) with the higher “and,” which releases the musical tension even as it lyrically creates more. That “and” moment, which she uses again in the next verse, provides a neat study lyric relating to music, a push forward and a pull back, two opposing forces caught up in a single word.

Lyrically, Apple seems less interested in meaning; the song is vague to the point of being unintelligible. One possible reading of the lyrics is that they are a woman’s reflection on the end of a troubled relationship and the happy circumstance of her being more “comfortable” in the aftermath than he is. She finds out, to the possible chagrin of the “opponent,” that she is an “extraordinary machine.” For starters, if that’s the storyline being pursued here, Apple makes some truly odd language choices—who knows what “he’ll hitch a ride with any guide” means? But, more than for meaning, Apple seems to choose the words she does for their sound

For example, take a look at the lines “I seem to you to seek a new disaster every day. / You deem me due to clean my view and be at peace and lay.” Unusual for song lyrics, this couplet is in iambic heptameter, something you can hear in how she stresses the lines. In the second line, every second syllable begins with a ‘plosive’ sound with the exception of the ‘v’ in “view” and the ‘l’ in “lay” (d, d, k, [v], b, p, [l]). But besides her play with ‘plosives’ and iambs, she also weaves in patterns of rhyme and assonance between the lines:

I seem / You deem

To you / me due

To seek / to clean

A new / my view

[Disa— / and be]

—ster e— / at peace

—v’ry day / and lay

Of course, Apple does not treat the entirety of the song with this complex weave of poetic devices, but she does maintain the iambic tone throughout. The question remains, though, of what use this lyrical trickery is to Apple, especially if the song lacks in obvious meaning.

~

Most people have heard the story (one that I long thought was apocryphal, but apparently is true) about how Paul McCartney used substitute lyrics for the song “Yesterday” when he was trying to nail down the melody. Instead of the famous first lines, the song once began with: “Scrambled eggs / oh, my baby, how I love your legs.” The songwriting practice of dropping in dud lyrics was a common one for both Lennon and McCartney and certainly one that many songwriters employ. But what does that practice tell us about the relationship between lyrics and music?

This song by Apple is lyrically fascinating, because Apple has made what seems like a conscious choice to largely disregard meaning in favor of ‘sound.’ She’s interested in the patterns she can pull together with words, the fabric that she can weave…not so much in what those sentences actually communicate. “Extraordinary Machine” finds her savoring the words as words. She opens up the space between lyrics and music within this song; the lyrics are not important for meaning, but for their sound, for the resonances she creates among these words. I look forward to seeing how she plays with words on The Idler Wheel...

"Lady Agnew" And Loving Sargent

The Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh is composed largely Old Masters—huge canvases by Velázquez, Titian, Raphael, and Rembrandt leanings down on the viewer off scarlet walls. The rooms are big and the ceilings are high; it’s an imposing gallery. But, at the far end of the gallery, a staircase leads up to a much smaller, less showy series of rooms that host the gallery’s small permanent collection of 19^th- and 20^th-century artwork. Among the painters gracing the walls there are Monet, Cézanne, and the American painter John Singer Sargent. There’s only one Sargent painting in the national gallery’s collection and it is on permanent display: “Lady Agnew of Lochlaw.” I visited the painting three times while in Edinburgh: the first time, I hardly noticed it; the second time, I sat in front of it for twenty minutes, scribbling thoughts in my notebook; the third time, I went to the gallery to see only it, nothing else.

"Lady Agnew of Lochlaw"; John Singer Sargent; 1893; National Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland

I’ve provided you with a photo of the painting above, but, as is always the case with pixels versus paint, the piece comes out the digital end of things a little worse for wear. That’s partly an excuse—if it doesn’t have the same magnetic pull on you that it did on me, then I’m willing to blame the technology. It’s also another kind of excurse—a kind of embarrassment: you see, I don’t know that you’ll feel quite the same way about “Lady Agnew” as I do even if you did see it in person, not one a computer screen.

In thinking about my reaction to this painting, it struck me how alone an experience with a painting is. You can’t share your look with anyone; it’s a moment just between you and the painting and it’s impossible to put into words. The second time I saw the painting, it was the same draining of emotion that I’ve felt at the end of great novels—a kind of emptying—as if the read world surrounding the novel had been drained of color. Everything else seemed to lack.

Someone—in this case, John Singer Sargent—figured how to capture that dizzying feeling of great fiction, the elation at the end of the story, and distill it into a frame, catching it there like an insect in amber. That sounds hyperbolic and silly, but there’s no easy way to explain it. Everything else looked uninteresting once I had really seen “Lady Agnew.” That might trouble some people, given that Monet and Cézanne graced the walls of the same room, but when I looked over at these paintings, I felt only appreciation, none of the same sense of experience that I felt with Sargent’s painting. I had lived, however briefly, within that painting. It changed me—and the way I think about art.

~

This past week has seen me (much as you could have predicted) in a major John Singer Sargent phase. I thought, somehow, that knowing more about Sargent would bring me closer to understanding this painting and my reaction to it. I read about Sargent’s early life with his family in Europe and his interest in art as a child. I read about Sargent’s training in Paris and his work under mentor Carolus-Duran, who introduced Sargent to techniques drawn out of extensive study of Velázquez’s works. I read about his later successes and his even later disdain for that same portrait-based success. I read about how art critics have long been at odds over how Sargent should be classified: as a member of the avant-garde Impressionists who retained ties to the academic school or was he more of a black sheep figure of the academic school, who took on Impressionistic techniques without ever fully entering their world? I delved deep into the minutia of these arguments, hoping for a clue.

In her concise, insightful book Interpreting Sargent, Elizabeth Prettejohn argues that the dependence of critical discussion on these categories—academic vs. avant-garde—has actually restricted our understanding of Sargent’s work. Prettejohn offers instead that the tonal system Sargent learned from Carolus-Duran via Velázquez was a third way; it was neither the academic painting of the Paris Salons nor was it the avant-garde of Monet. Sargent’s tonal method included neither the extensive preliminary studies and diligent finishing of the academic tradition nor the patches of color method of painting that was de rigueur among the Impressionists at that period. Prettejohn sets up Sargent not as a middle-of-the-road man, but as someone who forged a different road altogether.

~

But that didn’t get me anywhere. None of it did. I can confidently say that I love Sargent more fully now that I know more about his life and the context of his work, but I am no closer to ‘understanding.’ I thought—wrongly—that knowing the details would be the way into the painting. (God is in the details, is he not?) I don’t need to tell you that it didn’t help. To learn about how Sargent chose to arrange the posture of his subjects—often painting them leaning and at ease instead of properly erect as the art establishment would have dictated—was to understand the genesis of Lady Agnew’s curious pose, but not to understand me looking at the painting. And even if someone (Prettejohn! Please!) could have explained to me her inscrutable expression—that direct, confident gaze leveled at the view, coupled with her lips that verge on either a smile or a frown—it still would not have led me to understanding my own reaction. What is she thinking? What’s going on behind those eyes? Are those even fair questions to ask of the painting?

~

In her book, Prettejohn addresses just that—the crucial problem of psychology. Many art critics were dismissive of Sargent in the latter part of his career and after his death in 1925; they shrugged off his work as lacking in ‘psychological depth.’ In the wake of Freud and the boom in psychoanalysis, painters and visual artists—especially portraitists—were expected to imbue their subjects with a psychological profile. It would be anachronistic, Prettejohn points out, to apply psychological criticism to a painting like “Lady Agnew.” Freud—and the artistic fashions that followed—were simply after Sargent’s time.

However, there is still a case for finding loosely psychological perceptions in Sargent’s portrait work. As Prettejohn notes, the entire practice of portrait painting had already undergone a revolution thanks to the rise of photography. By Sargent’s heyday, portrait photography was already in full swing. If someone simply wanted a likeness of himself, he would go to a photographer; he wouldn’t bother with a painter. So when people paid Sargent for a portrait, they weren’t paying for just a likeness; they were paying for something more than that.

Drawing off the work of American philosopher and psychologist William James (with whose ideas Sargent would have been familiar as an acquaintance of William’s brother, the novelist Henry James), Prettejohn argues that the ‘more’ is the subject’s ‘social self.’ In his 1890 psychology milestone, The Principles Of Psychology, William James, introduces the ‘social self’ as “the recognition which [a man] gets from his mates.” James later continues, “a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind.” Prettejohn suggests that Sargent’s mission as portraitist of high society was to approach the portraits of his subjects as more like portraits of their social selves. In most cases, this perspective on Sargent’s work is especially fruitful.

~

Not only was Sargent’s era interesting for the riotous change happening in the art world, it was also notable for the sweeping social changes in Europe, especially in England. Social boundaries that were once seen as stable and impermeable were suddenly being fractured. Society was being turned upside down by a class of newly wealthy, whose appearance threatened the inherited positions of the landed aristocracy. American women who married into established European families, like Madame Gautreau (of Sargent’s infamous “Madame X”), scandalized the social words of European cities, reporters referring to them as  ‘professional beauties,’ essentially a 19^th-century synonym for ‘gold-diggers.’ Social classes were subject to constant redefinition and reevaluation.

"Madame X"; John Singer Sargent; 1883-4; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, USA

As such, Sargent’s task was to document a world in flux. His portraits reveal not confident stasis—as portraits of royalty by the Old Masters might have—but an encroaching insecurity and anxiety. Critics have noted the strange, ‘posed’ forms of some of his subjects; notice, for instance, the ‘pose’ of Madame Gautreau, the strain in her neck and the awkward positioning of her right arm. These signs, Prettejohn argues, are signs of the emerging ‘social self’ of Madame Gautreau. An American woman who is not European aristocracy, part of her ‘social self’ is contortionist, trying to play the part and make herself fit in. Several of his famous portraits bear out this thesis, including “Lady with the Rose” and “Mr. and Mrs. I.N. Phelps Stokes” (both of which I will hopefully soon see in the Met); there is a deep insecurity lingering in the subjects of both of those paintings.

But what about “Lady Agnew”? As everyone else in Sargent’s greatest hits looks at least a little discomforted, she exists in a state of odd ease. Why?

~

To tell the truth, I probably haven’t dug deep enough. I shouldn’t come to hasty conclusions. Neither of the two books I read on Sargent (the other, for those interested, was Sargent by Carter Ratcliff) addressed her in any depth. There might be some detail about her ‘social self’ that I could still dig up and explain it all away. But as of yet, I have found no key that might help me unravel the curiosity of this painting.

The more important discovery is the suspicion that nothing out there will fully explain my fascination—it will remain like that moment at the end of a novel, except without any words to latch onto…just a slouching figure and a suspect expression. And, as I knew all along, words might not be able to do it justice, but, goddamnit, I’ll keep on trying. 

The Rise Of The Princess Warrior: Stewart Breaks Out The Armor In "Snow White and the Huntsman"

Not so long ago, the sight of a woman in chainmail could only have served as the butt end of a joke in a Hollywood film. But by the time scenes of Kristen Stewart in armor roll around toward the tail end of Snow White and the Huntsman, her metal attire is not a laughing matter at all. “You look good in mail,” comments Chris Hemsworth’s grizzled Huntsman and, besides being a flashy pun on the part of the all-too-clever writers, the comment rings with sincerity. The Huntsman means no humor in pointing out Snow White’s dress; she does look good in the armor.

Kristen Stewart dons armor for her role in Snow White and the Huntsman; via altfg.com

Directed by first-timer Rupert Sanders and written by Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock, and Hossein Amini, Snow White and the Huntsman isn’t so much a return to the darknesses of the original Grimm Brothers fairytale (moving away from Disney’s light-hearted 1937 film, which has come to define the story in the modern day imagination) as it is a revisionist, feminist take on the tale, as both Disney and Grimm defined it: the helpless princess is a creature of the past.

More today than ever before, the archetype of the damsel in distress is an embattled figure in the modern film landscape. Twilight’s Bella Swan (conspicuously also played by Kristen Stewart) might be the last of a breed; the admiring eyes of tween girls seem to have shifted to The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence in the recent film adaptation) and Stewart’s incarnation of Snow White as potential role models. Not only are these young women strong and independent, they possess the warrior spirit, the special knack of roughhousing with the boys but escaping the tags of either ‘tomboy’ or ‘femme fatale.’

I like to think of Hollywood’s acceptance of something as a kind of societal measuring stick: how far have we made it? Take, for example, Sean Penn’s Best Oscar win for his portrayal of Harvey Milk in 2008; that acceptance into the inner Oscar circle represented an important cultural victory for gay rights in the U.S. As the final frontier of American culture, once a movement or social concept breaks down the battlements of Hollywood, then it’s there to stay—perhaps even to rule. The successes seen by Katniss and Snow White—The Hunger Games owns the distinction of being the first film in the top-grossing action films of all-time helmed by a female lead and Snow White and the Huntsman has already grossed over $100 million in the worldwide box office—will not be isolated ones; I suspect that we will see a parade of warrior princesses in the near cinematic future.

~

As culturally relevant as the film might be, the question remains of whether or not it’s any good. As it turns out, Sanders et al have turned out a pretty decent popcorn flick. Chief among its delights are Charlize Theron’s turn as the evil queen Ravenna and the stunning visuals, put together by cinematographer Greig Fraser, who served as director of photography for Jane Campion’s Keats biopic Bright Star, another film that played around in the lushness of nature. Fraser’s eye for detail sometimes feels overwrought, but he hits the right note in key moments, like the woodsy charm he provides the fairy paradise, which could easily have teetered into ham-handed hokeyness.

The plot is a bit convoluted and the characters, besides the queen and Snow White, are a little too shakily drawn to be of any enduring interest. Both the Huntsman and William, Snow White’s aristocratic love interest, beg for further development. All around, the acting is no better than you’d expect from a summer blockbuster; Stewart’s turn as Snow White is the one bright spot in the film. (Although I admit the talent I detect in her performance might be partly due to how little the Twilight series asks of her in comparison.) Either way, I admired how she balanced a character composed of equal parts muted anger and wide-eyed wonder, of singleness of purpose and self-discovery. She is both warring firebrand and sensitive caretaker. One might go so far as to say that this incarnation Snow White is even a series of paradoxes: a paragon of innocence edged with anger and violence, a damsel in distress who does not ask for our help.

~

Beauty, as a cultural entity, finds itself under attack in this film—not only literally, as in the case of Charlize Theron’s CGI-assisted facial wrinkles, but also conceptually, in terms of how humanity chooses to understand beauty and the pursuit of its ideal. After all, every story of Snow White—no matter how revisionist—begins with the same question: Who is the fairest of them all? It seemed like a harmless, natural question when I came across the story as a child (and probably still seems that way in the recent film Mirror, Mirror), but this film transforms the question into a much darker dialogue.

One of the film’s most successful scenes is that in which Ravenna is speaking to the mirror on the wall, which, it ought to be noted, has oozed off its Zildjian-cymbal surface and taken human form. However, Ravenna’s brother, whose point-of-view is picked up as he spies on his sister from around a corner, sees her speaking to no one; the mirror remains motionless on the wall. It is a brief, but powerful point about the captivating power of one’s own image and the obsessive battle that some people have with their own likenesses.

Additionally, the film implicitly questions the notion of an ideal of beauty. Once Ravenna asks the mirror who “the fairest” is, she enters into a relation with the world in which beauty is a measurable commodity, in which women can somehow be slotted onto a scale. It is, of course, a nonsensical notion—one that you hope could only ever exist in a fairytale…except for the fact that it doesn’t. Many people carry that kind of illogical conceptualization of beauty with them through their everyday lives.

~

The best moment in this film is the end. (Spoiler alert, if you somehow didn’t sense the parade of spoilers headed your way.) Snow White is crowned queen and the court, which fills the castle hall, looks on in joy. The film gives us close-ups of the Huntsman and the duke’s nephew William. They both flash admiring (adoring?) glances in the direction of Snow White. In the final shot, the camera backs down the hall’s center aisle, away from Snow White’s throne, and out the heavy wooden doors, which close in on us. The credits roll. Crucially, the closed door cuts us off from the romantic entanglements of the story; the film provides Snow White with a choice, but it doesn’t make her choose. The two male suitors are left hanging. They may or may not be chosen by Snow White. Unlike her counterpart Bella Swan, there is a third choice (outside of Edward and Jacob)…that being no choice. However, that’s not the end of the door’s significance.

The most famous door closed in the face of the audience is, of course, the door swung shut on John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards at the end of The Searchers. It might come off as humorous at first, but the closed door is, in fact, weightily symbolic, serving as a reminder of the separation between the audience and the character and vice versa. When the door closes on Wayne’s receding back, it contextualizes an obvious statement: we can’t get out there and he can’t get in here. It seems to me that the door at the end of Snow White and the Huntsman serves a similar purpose.

It remains to be puzzled out, however, who we, as the audience, represent and who Snow White, as a fairytale character, represents. In my reading, Snow White represents a new kind of female hero, who may or may not be separated from the rest of the world—the rest of Hollywood in particular. I think there’s room, however, for her kind of character on our outside. Indeed, I consider myself one among many who would like to see a world filled with young women who choose one version of Stewart over another—the Snow White version, of course. And who doesn’t want to be a princess?