Gothic Tenderness

Posted on October 5, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today.
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Nick Cave is not known for restraint. His career has been mostly devoted to ravenous gothic excess; to teetering, gibbering show tunes about murder and hell and despair.

Which is why it’s so odd that his best album is also, probably, his quietest. The Boatman’s Call, from 1997, is filled with slow, gentle, piano-based tunes. Most of the lyrics are about love — often, even, about, requited love. “Lime-Tree Arbor,” for example, couldn’t be much more inoffensive.

The boatman calls from the lake
A lone loon dives upon the water
I put my hand over hers
Down in the lime-tree arbor

That’s the first verse. If you’re a Nick Cave fan, you’re probably expecting him to murder her and dump her in the water by the end of the song, or to reveal that she’s a corpse, or something grisly and gruesome. But nope; the lyrical music ripples on as gently as the loon diving down, and Cave’s baritone never wavers in its sincerity. The only thing that happens is that he touches her hand and she touches his. That’s the song.

And yet, somehow, even while sketching an idyll, the gothic excess hovers overhead. In “Lime-Tree Arbor,” the music’s measured tread, the minor colorings, and Cave’s mannered delivery all gesture towards a darker outcome, or at least a darker possibility. “There will always be suffering/It flows through life like water,” Cave declaims, and it flows through the song too, so that the touch of two hands seems like it occurs above, or next to, an abyss. Cave’s trademark hyperbole hasn’t deserted him; it’s just moved to the background, so that he seems to be not so much proclaiming love as clinging to it against a wailing blackness.

This is even clearer in the album’s best song, “Into My Arms.” Built around a simple, semi-classical repeating piano figure, Cave opens by stating with full-on, slow-burning romanticism:

I don’t believe in an interventionist God
But I know darling that you do
But if I did I would kneel down and ask him
Not to intervene when it came to you.

By proclaiming his disbelief in God, Cave paradoxically opens his love song up to the divine. When he declares, “But I believe in love,” it becomes, not a standard pop song trope, but an almost desperate substitution for religion, which is all the more moving, and all the more sexy, because of its desperation. As in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” atheism becomes all the more reason to “love one another” — God’s absence sacralizing the human tenderness upon which the world must now rest.

The Boatman’s Call doesn’t so much break with Cave’s past style as it rechannels it. Instead of laughing maniacally with the gargoyles on the rainswept chuch front, for this album Cave puts us inside the church, huddled together on a pew, listening for the storm outside we can’t quite hear. The album’s smallness is every bit as histrionic as Cave’s slavering murder ballads. The theatrically, ironically self-deprecating moroseness which only becomes more sincere because of its own self-conscious artificiality is reminiscent of the Smiths. Though I don’t think even Morrisey has ever managed a song as preposterously bleak and bleakly preposterous as “Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere?”

In a colonial hotel we fucked up the sun
And then we fucked it down again
Well the sun comes up and the sun goes down
Going ’round and around to nowhere.

Ennui becomes as portentous as a gallows dance. “The carnival drums all mad in the air/Grim reapers and skeletons and a missionary bell/O where do we go now but nowhere?” is sung at a funereal pace. The song may be about losing a child, or simply about losing a relationship, but either way, mundane grief bloats and staggers, emotions becoming hypertrophied parodies of themselves and then helplessly collapsing. Excess exhausted and exhaustion as excess roll over each other and whelm and wane, till you can’t tell if you hear a Brobdingnagian bellow from a long way away, or a muted call from your decadent heart.

Best Music of the Year…So Far

Posted on October 4, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

I asked what folks were listening to way back towards the beginning of the year. We’re 6 or 7 months further on…so what do you all think are the best albums of the year?

Here’s a couple of my picks:

I’m really into this awesome twisted space death metal by Artificial Brains.

SZA’s alt R&B floaty psych soul is great:

I’m just now falling in love with this Open Mike Eagle track:

Jason Eady is the best country album I’ve heard this year:

And I really do love the new Sunny Day in Glasgow album, Sea When Absent

So what about you all? What’s your best album of the year so far?

Utilitarian Review 10/4/14

Posted on October 4, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Deb Aoki on selling manga to grown ups.

Me on cartoonists drawing blindfolded to make high art.

Me on race, class and Iggy Azalea.

Kate Polak on Jeremy Love’s Bayou and the persistence of racism.

Chris Gavaler on being swamped with superheroes.

Kristian Williams on the anti-imperial message of the 2012 Red Dawn.

Kailyn Kent on what Lois Lane was drinking, and wine vs. cheerios.

Michael A. Johnson on Fabrice Neaud and autobiographical comics.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Reason I wrote about a new report which suggests that police engage in racial profiling in prostitution arrests.

At the Awl I argue that H.P> Lovecraft’s racism is the reason to read him.

At Esquire I wrote about Left Behind and Terminator and the joys of apocalypse.

At the Pacific Standard I explained why Gone With the Wind should be out of copyright.

At Splice Today I wrote about

— Gary Hart, Willie Horton, and how campaigns matter.

— Walter Mondale, and how voters don’t care if you promise to raise taxes.

— the New York Times and why you need to make a commitment if you want diverse writers.

For the Chicago Reader a brief review of alt country stalwart Todd Snider.

Other Links

John Gray neatly eviscerates Richard Dawkins.

Nicole Rudick on Anya Davidson’s School Spirits.

syvo on Black Adam.

Charles Davis on unpaid internships in the film industry.

Miles Klee on sexism in the alt lit scene.

Tracy Q. Loxley on Fox News and dim-witted misogyny.

Race, Class, and Iggy Azalea

Posted on September 28, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today.

From Elvis to Miley Cyrus, it sometimes seems like the only way white people can interact with black music is through appropriation. The latest example of this tiresome American tradition is Iggy Azalea, a white woman who has broken chart records for Beatles. “Iggy is..an heiress to white supremacy, the mix of unearned racial privilege and racial fetish that has historically made black music without black people big business,” Travis L. Gosa writes at The Root, while Britney Cooper points with disgust at Azalea’s adoption of a Southern black accent. “I maintain that there is no triumph and no celebration when we embrace a white girl who deliberately attempts to sound like a Black girl, in a culture where Black girls can’t get no love.”

Gosa and Cooper aren’t wrong — but it’s worth pointing out that Azalea has to some degree anticipated their criticisms. Or, at least, the debut single and video from her album The New Classic, seems to deliberately reject racial appropriation as a reading of her music. Instead, the video suggests that her connection to hip hop is based, not on race, but on class.

Class is right there in the title of the song: “Work.” The track starts with Azalea talking directly about working crap jobs.

Two feet in a red dirt, school skirt
Sugar cane, back lane
3 jobs took years to save
But I got a ticket on that plane
People got a lot to say
But don’t know shit bout where I was made
Or how many floors that I had to scrub
Just to make it past where I am from

The video is in some ways even more directed; Azalea walks through a desert setting, passing by a woman taking in laundry, a spitting, grizzled guy in a trucker’s cap, trucks, and a trailer park. It’s not clear whether this is supposed to take place in Azalea’s native Australia or in Florida, where she moved when she came to the U.S. (“No money, no family. 16 in the middle of Miami.”) Probably it’s supposed to be the latter, and to show the continuity between the two — being poor and white in Australia is not all that dissimilar to being poor and white in Florida.

Poverty isn’t just figured as a white phenomenon though. Instead, work is something that Azalea sees as uniting black and white women both. Early in the video a black dancer twerks in front of a truck; later Azalea twerks (more convincingly than Miley at least) in a strip club for a skuzzy patron while rapping.

“Valley girls giving
Blow jobs for Louis Vuitton
What you call that?
Head over heels?”

She then steals his keys and races out of the joint with a couple of black women, taking the guy’s car.

When I interviewed sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom recently about hick hop, a genre blending country and rap, she argued that “we don’t have any class stuff happening in popular culture, period.” She added, “Hip hop, country, and hick hop—the merging of the two—are all part of the larger cultural domain, which has become a place where we just don’t have class.” Hick hop, or country rap crossovers, are increasingly popular, as Cottom has written, but they tend to be built around black and white men partying. The shared interracial experience is lust, rather than class per se (as an example, check out this Florida Georgia Line/Nelly video.)

Azaela’s track doesn’t completely reverse that: the video certainly provides black and white gyrating female bodies for the pleasure of a male audience. But black and white women are not just the object of the gaze for Azalea; they’re also objects of class exploitation. Black and white women work cleaning floors; black and white women work as strippers — a job that doesn’t look like much fun given the guy Azalea has to cozy up to. And black and white women work in this video, stripping and twerking, almost as if the entertainment industry and the sex industry aren’t all that different. Florida Georgia Line and Nelly bond on the basis of their gender in a milieu which deliberately elides class. Azalea, on the other hand, presents herself as having a common experience with black women that is based both in gender and in class. “Pledge allegiance to the struggle,” isn’t quite a line out of the Communist Manifesto, but Marx would still appreciate the sentiment.

The class statement here still has lots of problems. While the track is in part about work as exploitation, it also presents work as path-to-success; the poor kid worked, and now she’s rich, like Horatio Alger. Moreover, appropriation remains a real issue; Azalea’s twerking while stripping seems like a way to define black women in terms of sex work, then associate herself with both the sexiness and the struggle to make herself look edgy and real. When a white woman declares solidarity with black women in this context, who is really benefiting?

Still, for all its limitations, there’s no way around the fact that “Work” is about work. Criticizing Azalea for racial appropriation is fair. But doing so can’t help but erase, or discard, her argument — which is that hip hop speaks, or can speak, not just to race, but to an experience of poverty and labor which is meaningful to people, and especially to women, of different races and nationalities. Azalea may not be entirely convincing, but still, there’s something to her claim that hip hop is hers because she worked for it.

Utilitarian Review 9/27/14

Posted on September 27, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU
Featured Archive Post: Caroline Small on why David Lowery is a lousy spokesman for the future of music.

Chris Gavaler on Superman in France.

A list of 10 books that have stayed with me (or possibly more than 10.

Kim O’Connor on Gabrielle Bell and how men and women’s autobio comics are treated differently by critics.

Ng Suat Tong on how to read Luke Pearson’s Hilda, for adults.

Chris Gavaler on how Watchmen lowered the number of words per page in superhero comics.

Qiana Whitted talks about how she self-censored the comics she taught to elementary school students.

James Romberger reviews comics he found at SPX.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Pacific Standard I wrote about stigma against sex workers and stigma against black women and how the two affect each other. N’jalie Rhee and Pia Glenn have a discussion about the article on TWIB Nation.

At the Atlantic I wrote about J. Lo and Nicky Minaj and lesbian eroticism.

I was on CNN talking about Emma Watson and misogyny; the Daily Caller made fun of my hair.

At Splice Today I write about:

—why people are more worried about inflation than unemployment.

— gamersgate and knowing the critics you review.

At the Chicago Reader I have a brief review of Marty Stuart and his Fabulous Superlatives.

Other Links

Alexis Coe interviews Karen Abbott on historical nonfiction and the differences in the way that historical nonfiction by women is treated.

Russ Smith on the greatest hippie song ever.

Jillian Keenan on how spanking should be for sex, not for kids.

Draw Better! Put Your Eyes Out!

Posted on September 27, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

In 1947, Life Magazine asked a bunch of famous cartoonists to draw their famous characters blindfolded. The result? Hilarious hi-jinks, of course…and something that looked an awful lot like high art.

That’s not exactly how Life presented the exercise. The editors instead emphasized the wacky wrongness of the characters; the anatomical, inconsistencies. Dixie Dugan is “almost a caricature of herself”, the eyes and “full lips” appearing “lopsided”. Gus Edson’s Andy Gump “loses nearly all resemblance to the original” and his moustache ends up by his ear. Suddenly, these folks who can draw can’t draw, and that’s funny.

Half a century further down the road of deskilling though, it doesn’t look all that funny. Rather, the drift off-brand is validating. Striebel’s tight, eyes-open illustration of Dixie Dugan looks like bland advertising boilerplate; the blindfolded version, with the loose, gestural strokes and the varied line-weights, has a lot more energy — a highbrow modernist sketch emphasizing individualistic brio rather than a commercial hack job. Similarly, Edson’s perfected Gump looks fusty and antiquated in its slick cartoonishness, while the stick figure outline looks like the work of someone who’s seen Fort Thunder, and knows the joys of messiness.

You could argue that this exercise exposes the shallowness of high art pretensions and the idiocy of contemporary art. “Look, my kid could do that,and with his eyes closed no less!” Or you could say that it reveals the dullness of the cartoonists, whose drab workmanlike images need a shot of modern art practice to give them life.

Less polemically, though you could instead see the exercise as an object lesson (with illustrations) of why deskilling has become so central to contemporary art, and to highbrow/lowbrow distinctions. Comic strips emphasize professional finish, reproducibility, and iconic characters — the point is a recognizable, consistent product, which obscures the contribution of the artist, so that (for example) Gus Edson can replace Sidney Smith, and the Gump remains the same.

But with eyes closed, the artists are no longer able to be professional. The practiced memes fracture and come apart; literally in the case of Chic Young’s Dagwood, whose head leaves his body. Imperfection equals idiosyncrasy. To draw the same thing over and over perfectly is to be a drone, an assembly line worker. To be an artist, you have to be less sure; the marks have to be placed, not out of habit, but from individual inspiration. Dagwood’s perfect collar disintegrates, and what’s left behind are pen strokes as pen strokes. By closing his eyes, the artist reveals his hand.

The fact that, in the blink of an eye, Frank King can move from cartoon to cubism is a reminder that the low-art/high-art divide is both more arbitrary, and less wide, than either side likes to admit. Once we recognize that, the juxtaposition can allow us to perceive some of the pleasurable oddness and wrongness in the original drawings — the weird way Dick Tracy’s mouth seems to curve up his cheek and head towards his nose, or those tufts of hair making a bid for freedom on Skeeziks’s brow. And it also lets us think about the cute, iconic professionalism behind modernist semi-abstraction, in which the artist’s tics become their own marketing meme.

Thisexercise also demonstrated, though, how absolute the high art/low art divide can be. Life’s editors were familiar with Picasso I’m sure; Boing Boing’s bloggers (which who reprinted the piece) have seen modern art. Yet the genre assumptions are a barrier, or a blindfold, to seeing what’s happening on the page and/or screen in front of their eyes. For Life (and for the artists themselves), the blindfolded cartoonists are still cartoonists; the drawings with eyes covered are mistakes, or failed attempts, or entertainingly silly errors. Deskilling is seen as a bug, rather than a feature; the drawings are comics that don’t look like comics, rather than something else which looks like itself.

I’ve mentioned before Carl Freedman’s point that genre precedes art — by which he means that preconceptions about genre determine what we see as art, and what we see when we see art. Are those images above bad comics? Or are they succesfully deskilled high art? Part of what’s especially enjoyable about them is that they’re both and neither. If genre determines what we see as art, then art that messes with genre can cross up the way we see — like looking with our eyes uncovered, or with a blindfold on.

Saul Steinberg, “Las Vegas”

10 Books That Really Stuck With Me

Posted on September 21, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Peter Sattler tagged me in this facebook meme asking me to list 10 books that really stuck with me, from all times of my life. I usually avoid these social media gauntlets, but I did this one, because I don’t know why. I tried not to think about it too hard and probably failed. I’ve linked to essays I’ve written about the writers/books (unless I haven’t written about them.)

1. Carol Clover, “Men, Women, and Chainsaws”
2. James Baldwin, “The Price of the Ticket”
3. Richard Wright, “Black Boy”
4. Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons, “Watchmen”
5. Jack L. Chalker, Soul Rider series
6. Marston/Peter, Wonder Woman
7. Sharon Marcus, “Between Women”
8. Jane Austen, “Pride and Prejudice”
9. H.P. Lovecraft, “Shadow Over Innsmouth”
10. Ariel Schrag, “Likewise”
11. Wallace Stevens, “Palm At the End of the Mind”
12. Ian McEwan, “Atonement”
13. George Eliot, “Middlemarch
14. C.S. Lewis, “Til We Have Faces”
15. Stephenie Meyer, Twilight Series
16. Foucault, “History of Sexuality”
17. Philip K. Dick, “The Man in the High Castle”
18. Ursula K. Le Guin, Earthsea Series
19. Cecilia Grant, “A Gentleman Undone”
20. Julia Serano, “Whipping Girl”
21. Gerard Manley Hopkins, collected poems
22. Octavia Butler, “Xenogenesis”
23. Julia Cameron, “The Artist’s Way”
24. Ai Yazawa, “Nana”
25. James Loewen, “Lies Across America”
26. Samuel Delany, “Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand”
27. Grace Llewellyn, “The Teenage Liberation Handbook”
28. George Bernard Shaw, “A Book of Prefaces”
29. Eve Sedgwick, “Between Men”
30. Tabico, “Adaptation”

Obviously, not thinking about it too hard meant in part not being able to count. I think the earliest one of these I read was probably Black Boy, which I believe is from fifth grade or thereabouts. The Earthsea books might be from around then too, and the Jack L. Chalker was early on — probably middle school. Oh, and the H.P. Lovecraft would have been from around then too. I don’t think there’s anything on here that I was actually assigned in college, which is a little weird, but I read “The Man in the High Castle” at that time. (I thought about including Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, but I can’t say it’s the book that’s stuck with me as much as a couple of the ideas; thought about Elshtain’s Women and War, too.) The most recent things here are the Cecelia Grant and the Ian McEwan. Most are books I love…and probably not coincidentally many are books that made me cry (Yazawa, Grant, Loewen, McEwan, Lewis). There are a couple that I don’t think are very good though; that would be Chalker, Meyer…and Cameron’s on the list because that’s the worst book I’ve ever read. The Delany was on my headboard in high school for years and years without me reading it; I dragged it all the way out to Chicago with me, I think, and finally got through it…and didn’t exactly like it. I still think about it, though, in a way I don’t with lots of books I’ve enjoyed more. I should reread it someday. (I haven’t managed to find any other Delany I like at all. I thought the essays might work, but I started a volume of those recently and was bored and irritated.)

Though I’ve only read Delany once, I’ve read many of these numerous times; probably read Baldwin and Austen most, and maybe Loewen and Shaw and Cameron (the last of whom I read multiple times for work reasons.)

The list definitely tilts towards the cis het white guys, but it could be worse in that regard, I guess. 17 guys, 13 women; only 5 non-white folks. 9 LGBT writers (Baldwin, Marcus, Schrag, Hopkins, Foucault, Delany, Serano, Tabico and Butler…who I hadn’t been sure was lesbian, but the web seems to agree she was. Sedgwick might fit too…her identification was complicated.) So that’d be 10 cis het white guys altogether (if you count Moore/Gibbons and Marston/Peter as one each). Only about a third, but the single most represented group, it looks like. I’m all about my demographic. (Though I think Schrag is the only Jew on there? Oh, and Eve Sedgwick. Might be another one or two; we assimilate and are hard to find.)

12 nonfiction, 2 books of poetry, 16 fiction, 3 comics. Sci-fi is I think the most represented genre with 4 titles (Delany, Butler, Chalker, Tabico — Dick might count too as alternate history, depending on how you look at it, and I guess Lovecraft might too depending on if you think evil creatures from outside of time are sf or fantasy). Romance is in there and personal essay and academic books and horror and superheroes and lit fic and some classics and YA and porn and autobio and even self-help (Cameron and Llewellyn), but no mysteries (unless you count Watchmen, I suppose). That’s about right; mystery isn’t a genre that I’ve ever had much of a relationship with. I thought about including Agatha Christie’s “Murder of Roger Ackroyd”, which I read when I was a kid; not sure I can honestly say I care about it too much any more, though. Also no plays; I thought about Pygmalion but picked Shaw’s essays instead. I’m sure I could pick some Shakespeare too…

All right, that’s enough babbling. If you want to put a list in comments, please do (you can copy and paste if you already did it on facebook). I’m curious to see what other folks would pick (whether 10 or more.)

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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