Tarkovsky - Solaris (72)

This is a translation of an old piece I wrote on Solaris. It's just a sketch for a reading of the film, it is in no way extensive. It might be idiosyncratic, it might be obvious. I have a feeling Tarkovsky himself wouldn't have liked the focus I'm choosing. But I think it makes sense. And I've spend a lot of time with Eastern European culture recently, and I think about the same themes and problems with a lot of it. So I'm going to talk a bit about Eastern European culture at the end. But first: Solaris. Spoilers of course. I'm not going to write a synopsis, that can be found at wikipedia.

I really like this trailer. Makes the film seem like an actionmovie, which is quite the acomplishment...

There are three scenes in Solaris, where the characters sit down and watch a film-in-the-film. One of them is Kelvin watching recordings made by his old friend Gibarian. I'm not going to talk about that one, but focus on the two other ones. The first important - for my argument - instance of filmwatching takes place from ca 10:19-23:40. The pilot Burton has come out to Kelvin's cabin, to show an old recording of an investigation. The young Burton is asked about what he saw on Solaris. The interesting detail for my argument is the way the scene is filmed. It seems to be some sort of futuristic automatic camera. Every time another person speaks, the camera cuts to a new angle and a small 'ping' is heard. The camera always tries to catch the person in the middle of the frame, and in mid-distance. This is an official recording, of an official investigation. I will take this as an attempt of an 'objective' observer. The camera also mirrors the content of the scene, where Burton's claims that he saw it all 'with my own eyes' are brushed aside as the objective camera on the plane doesn't support what he's saying.

The second scene occurs from 19:19-21:45 of my two disc version. Kelvin sits down and watches old films with the new version of his wife Hari. It is old homerecordings of Kelvin and his family. The camera zooms in and out and moves about. The people in the picture stare awkwardly at the camera, and you can easily feel the connection between 'observer' and 'observed'. I will take this camera as an example of a subjective observer. In the last part of the movie, we see the old, dead Hari in frame, and we realize that the new Hari has been constructed out of Kelvin's memories of these old films.



In a key scene from 27:12-29:50 we find Burton and Kelvin discussing the mission to Solaris. In this scene, we learn how Kelvin views science pre-Solaris. His view is that science should be done without involving feelings. It should be done by objective observers, the ideal would be automatic observers such as the cameras in the clip from the investigation. The discussion makes Burton leave in anger, while he yells that Kelvin is an 'accountant, not a scientist'. In my reading, the rest of the film describes how Kelvin the accountant has to reevaluate his views on science because of his confrontation with Solaris. Hari and the other constructs therefore symbolizes the subjectivity of the scientists, which in the end inevitably affects there work. At the end of the film, Solaris agrees to stop making constructs aboard the space station for some reason, but does this mean objectivity is possible? If that is the case, then Kelvin turns his back to it, and ends the film on an island on the planet, in a construct of his childhood home. But what are the implications of this turning the back on objectivity? One the one hand, it could be said to weigh subjective art higher than objective science, and every one of the deeply personal and uniquely Tarkovskyan shots of the film supports this view, as does the long takes dwelling over the art of Brueghel and others. But what about the context of Soviet 1972? Isn't Marxism built upon an attempt at an 'objectively scientific' model of history? If so, you could say that this is a fundamentally anti-Marxist film. Not because it's against Marxist ideology, but because it attacks the attempts at making objective foundations to build an ideology on. If Solaris talks against objective science in general, doesn't it then contain a multitude of social and political implications? Isn't it then a deeply political film?



But there are many problems with this explanation of the film. For instance, most people will probably see Hari as much more than just a symbol of subjectivity, she is too rich a character to be reduced to that. Furthermore, Tarkovsky himself would probably be very much against this reading of his film. He was against symbols, and he was against focusing too much on social and political questions. But let's look at Hari for instance, why can't she be reduced to a symbol of subjectivity? In my mind, it's because the film is so focused on how Kelvin percieves Hari. She is a symbol, but she is also Kelvins wife, and the film is much more focused on this personal relation. This is typical for a film by Tarkovsky, they are usually concerned with the personal consequences of situations. In Ivans Childhood, the horror of war is depicted through how it affects a single child. In The Mirror, the war is only shown through the memories of a single man. And in The Sacrifice, the end of the world depends on a very personal relation... Tarkovsky focuses on humans beings, not on society as a whole. But that doesn't mean he cannot be seen as being political. It says more about how primitive political discussions often become. Apparantly, Italian Marxists criticized Ivans Childhood as being too bourgois in focusing on the tragedy of one. But what value has politics if it isn't concerned with bettering life for singular human beings? For me, a huge part of the point of left-wing politics is in pointing out how liberalism so often devolves into freedom for a few individuals, at the cost of less freedom and more pain for the vast majority of people. Yet very many left-wing people seem to forget this at times. Tarkovsky is political at times, but he never treats politics as abstractly as so many politicians does. No matter how abstract he can be - and he can undoubtedly be very abstract - it's always rooted in people.


And I have similar problems with how people view a lot of Soviet/Easterneuropean artists. From the films of Tarkovsky and Tarr, to the theoretical writings of Mandelstam or Bakhtin. People are understandably wary of putting too much of a political framework over their works, but a lot of their stuff has wideranging political implications. A huge part of the problem is, that the context they were created in / are occupied with, was so primitive and simplistic. The only proper (or allowed) political response to Stalin and the Soviet Dictatorship was praise back then, and is condemnation today, so the space for artistic expressions is quite narrow. If you say that a piece of art from this context is political, people would think that it means that they are concerned with their political context. Yet Bakhtin's writings has a huge antiauthoritirians potential, which cannot be reduced to him being against Stalinism. So while I completely understand why people wouldn't want to let this stuff be 'infected' by their contemporary context, perhaps we're so far removed from that context today, that we can take the discussion of political and social implications of Soviet/post-Soviet art on another level? The thing is, exactly because this art is working on a more fundamental level than just critiquing its day, it's still relevant today. Solaris for instance: Is it possible to observe the world from an objective position? Or will every observer also see the ghosts of his/her past? Is the objective position even preferable? Doesn't the subjective camera that Tarkovsky uses give is a fundamentally deeper understanding of what goes on, than the objective camera used in the interrogation scene. It's fundamentally philosophical questions, and that Tarkovsky focuses on how these questions has consequences for a single human being does not mean, that these questions aren't important in a larger context.

Gotye - Somebody That I Used to Know

I first discovered this video on a music board. Underneath the video, the person who had posted it had written something along the lines of: 'Weird, this is not normally the kind of music I listen to.' When I heard this song my first thought was: 'This sounds like a mix of Sting and Phil Collins' After listening to this song over and over afterwards, I began to think about how weird these responses actually were. It sometimes seems to me, that obssesive music-listeners such as myself and so many other bloggers, reviewers, critics and music-board-discussioners might actually be the ones who understand music the least. When you hear this number, obviously your not supposed to think about how it fits in with all the other stuff in your record collection, or which other bands it reminds you off. You're supposed to think of people that you used to know...



Music can communicate in a weird way. In this song, almost nothing of the communication to the listener depends on the lyrics. From the title and the opening lines: 'Now and then I think of when we were together' there is not a single line that is anything special, with several of them actually being quite cringeworthy, the lowpoint for me being 'But that was love and it's an ache I still remember' But something happens in the delivery. The way Gotye whispers the explanatory verses highlights their insignificance, and makes his emotional outpouring in the chorus that much more effective. He seems to understand pretty clearly what happened, it was all inevitable and probably for the best. 'BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE TO CUT ME OFF!' And what a marvel that chorus is. The drawn out 'cu-u-ut me off' and 'sto-o-op so low' (they are another example of an emotional outburst being shown through the melody jumping up, what I recently described as a 'scream', though that term isn't really accurate) that contrasts the next lines, where as many syllables as possible are crammed together to provide evidence for the wrongdoings of the ex. It's not poetry, but it is a pretty convincing picture of the mix of emotions and attempts of finding that one bulletproof explanation that would clearly put the guilt on the other part, that so often goes on after a breakup. So who cares about poetry? And then Kimbra enters the picture and obliterates the image of the wronged guy with the lines 'Now and then I think of all the times you screwed me over'

And then there is the musical context. This is what makes the song so universal, I think. As I heard this song more and more, it reminded me of more and more people I used to know. Breakups, potential relationships that never were, friends with whom I grew apart, dead relatives. Actually, the lyrics are quite specific, and describe a circumstance I've never been in, the line 'Have your friends collect your records and then change your number' especially describing something I can't really relate to. But while the lyrics paint a picture of a single breakup, the arrangement makes the song seem much more universal. That unrelenting guitarloop that provides the foundation for the song, the allmost childlike hook-line on the xylophone, the marching drums that enters the song during Kimbra's guest-verse. All of it creates a picture of inevitability, of life marching forward and onward, leaving situations forever changed, the past impossible to recreate, and making once extremely important people into, yup, somebody that you used to know. This is one of those weird creations, not just a song, definitely not poetry set to music. It's more like a carefully sculpted soundscape in which a small play takes place. The play creates a believable personal story, and the soundscape makes that story seem universal. Both parts are equally important.

Though this song is probably pretty obscure in most parts of the world, it was a huge hit in Australia, Belgium and the Netherlands. As with many popular songs, it might therefore be treated to different versions, liveversions, remixes, demos and acoustic versions. While some of these imaginary versions might be very, very good, to some extent they would be evidence of a misunderstood attitude towards pop. At times, people talk about 'stripping' a song to it's 'core', removing all the ornamentary arrangements from it to check if the melody and lyrics can stand on their own. Yet, in this song they really can't. Play this song on an acoustic guitar, and you're left with an average description of a breakup. But this isn't supposed to be looked at this way. This is not a core and stuff on the surface. This is a lot of different but equal parts, that relates to each other, sometimes supporting each other, sometimes opposing each other (i.e., they are in dialogue). It is a glorious, contradictory mess, that utterly fails to coalesce into a single statement. Which is part of the reason it's so great.

Here is an article on the creation of the song. Not surprisingly, it took a lot of effort to get it just right.

Dialogism vs Dialectism

At times, I need to write down the theoretical boring stuff, that somewhat are at the foundation of most of what I write. Write them down again, that is. Phrasing and rephrasing will hopefully help me get to the core of these things. Plus, as far as I can see, hardly anyone ever reads these theoretical posts anyway, so the risk of someone being bored by the repetition is hardly that large. I tried to explain something with my introduction to this blog, now I'm kinda trying to explain it again. And it probably won't be the last time either...

This time, it's because I read an interesting piece on Modern Classical Music some time ago. Actually, I found it because Simon Reynolds wrote about it. If you need a primer on what I think is perhaps the most essential discussion facing the art-world at the moment, go read it. It's on the question of heterogenity and 'too much freedom'. To put it simply and less eloquent than Reynolds and Davidson: The artists of today has too many choices, too much inspiration, so their art ends up eclectic but somehow inessential. It's all new and exciting, but it doesn't really do anything. This is all fair game, and I agree, that a lot of modern art, litterature, music and film seem to be new for new-ness sake, without anything essential to say. Where I think they are unfair, though, is what Davidson indicates when he ends his piece by saying: What they badly need is a machine to rage against and a set of bracing creative constraints. I think this is unfair, because it's a conclusion that doesn't follow from his earlier points. Davidson doesn't write a lot about what is missing, but the one time he does, he states on two works, that: Both works abound in sonic beauty, yet they lack, say, Messiaen’s violent awe at a landscape’s revelations. But this isn't describing something Messiaen was against, this is something he was in awe of, it would be more precise to describe it as something he was for.

And I find this emblematic when a lot of - older - people write about what I kinda think is my generation (warning, I'm going to set up a strawman here...). They say we aren't against anything, without really backing it up. It's unfair, because it paints us as lazy. How, with the state of affairs of today, can we be so passive? Neoliberalism, two wars, economical breakdown, tea party, so many things to be against, and we are not fighting against any of it. Well, back in their days, they were truly political and trying to change the world. But as I said, it's not that we lack things to be against, what we lack is true, strong alternatives. We lack something to be for. And obviously, I'm for a lot of things. I'm for love, truth, treating other people decently, warm cups of tea, Romanian Cinema, writing about stuff on the internet. Yet most of what I'm for is either rather vague or rather personal... Hardly any of it can function as the basis for what many in the elder generation is looking for: Collective Action. I think young people of today is for and against as many things as their predecessors, but since each has their own little thing going, it hardly looks like a lot.

Mikhail Bakhtin, the guy I spoke about in the introduction, also used the word Dialogism to explain himself. In his great essay Discourse in the Novel, he explained the way novels work. They are heterogeneus, mixing together all different kinds of words, speech, language. But a novel does not mix things to make the linguistic strands do battle with each other, but just to have them relate to each other. This way, the novel in itself works against authoritarianism, which is always trying to make language as homogenous as possible. Therefore dialogism is naturally opposed to any kind of authoritarian power, it will perhaps always be a force of freedom of possibility. Yet what Bakhtin never stated explixitly - and probably couldn't have done if he wanted to, he was writing this in Soviet Russia, after all - is that Dialogism is also seemingly opposed to Dialectism. Dialectism was described by Hegel as being the force behind history. A thesis meets it's antithesis and they melt together into a synthesis of the two. Karl Marx then wrote a political version of that, where the proletariat and the bourgoisie was supposed to struggle, and then a communist society would be born out of that (this is obviously massively simplified). But in that way, dialogism undercuts the mindset and philosphy behind marxism and class-struggle.

At times, it feels like that's what these - older - commentators abhor in the new generation. To be perfectly frank, it often seems as if they are angry/dissapointed that we are ambivalent about marxism. Yet we do still believe in socialism, I do at least, it's just that I feel that if it becomes the only allowed alternative to the establishment, well then that is almost just as suffocating. I don't believe in dialectism anymore, and I don't really believe in any big ideas. And I don't believe in importance. What I believe in is small but great ideas. And feelings. Some people think that dialogism amounts to little more than postmodernist relativism, just taking all kinds of stuff and mixing them together. And while that is definitely a danger, it doesn't have to be that way.



Last year, my two favorite albums was Slow Six - Tomorrow Becomes You and Yellow Swans - Going Places. The first of these could have been included in Davidsons piece: They are from New York, they are classically trained, and they play a somewhat new hybrid of a lot of things. Going Places was a very abstract noise record, that was first on Popmatters list of 'Best Experimental Records 2010'. Yet, if you go to these two records looking for importance, forward thinking and avant-garde newness, well then you'll probably leave dissapointed. Slow Six are basically Do Make Say Think with violins instead of guitars, and while that - and the influence from Steve Reich - make them somewhat original, the album would hardly be anything special if that was all they had. No, what I love about this album is that it seems to describe love and longing quite profoundly, in a somewhat original way. The pieces switch between being polyrythmic and in weird meters, and more 'normal' parts. They sort of switch between playing against each other and with each other, for me illustrating a struggle for people to find and fall in sync with each other. And Yellow Swans is all about leaving the known world behind, and finding your footing again somewhere else, illustrated by songtitles such as Opt Out and New Life.



What these albums do, is to Opt Out in the search for originality and avantgarde importance. They are not grounded in any kind of idea of the 'future', they are not grounded in any struggle against anything. They are grounded in feelings, and the elements on the album have been chosen to best support these feelings. This is art without creative constraints or rage against anything. This is mixing and matching bits and pieces, all in service of something grounded in feelings. That might be a basis for dialogic art to grow out of, though these records are probably too homogenous to be there yet. All in all, though, this is something I'm very much for.

Bakhtin's essay on 'Discourse in the Novel' can be found in the collection 'The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin', 1981, Texas University Press. Edited by Michael Holquist and translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. It can be bought here, here or here.

Sufjan, The-Dream, The Shins & The Wrens - How to Scream Believably!

So, I've been bogged down in a discussion over 'authenticity' in music these last few days. That weird, rockistic term, which no one really knows what means, and yet people still sort of feel it is useful. I kinda don't. I simply don't get what it means. My problem with the two words 'authenticity' and 'honesty' is, that they don't just relate to the music. That a record is 'authentic' or 'honest', seamingly means that the link between artist and art is in a certain way. Therefore, you have to include the artist in the discussion, if you use those words. So instead, I've begun to think that the word 'believability' is better. I mean, every piece of art is an attempt to express something in a certain way, judging it on how it relates to the artist seems wrong somehow. I'd rather judge it on how much I believe in the construction presented to me. Even though most songs are somewhat dishonest (Extreme examples: David Bowie wasn't really from Mars, Jeff Mangum hasn't had sex with Anne Frank, Stephen Merritt is not 69 People. Less extreme examples: Many songwriters keep writing that they have just fallen in love, even though they have been married for a long time.), many of them still seem believable, even though what they say is hardly possible... I still find it hard to explain what I mean, so I've found four examples. Four songs, where the vocalists does almost the same thing, two of which I find believable, and two of which I don't.



The first example is a song I've written about before, actually just last month. I thought about contrasting it with the next example back then as well, but I decided it would be out of place. It's the same moment, that high-pitched 'Oh my God' at 1:20-1:30. I simply don't believe in it. The problems are, that it's presented as if the singers are meant to sound surprised. The song talks about the victims, and then all of a sudden goes 'Oh my God', as if the singers couldn't stand it any more. Here, it clashes completely with the fact, that there are two singers singing in harmony. So the two of them was shocked in exactly the same way, at exactly the same time... I don't find it believable.



I'd wanted to contrast it with the song above, Right Side of My Brain by The-Dream from his album Love vs Money. The thing he does, he does twice, from 2:00-3:00 and from 3:30-3:45. He tries to do the same thing as Sufjan, use two voices explosively to show how he is overwhelmed by emotion, and even though I know it is just as constructed as the Sufjan-song, it works for me. The key is how he introduces the second voice as doing it's own thing. When it enters the song, it just answers the first voice a bit, but then it all of a sudden becomes a higher version of the melody. It sounds like two different parts of his psyche, all of a sudden united in anguish, not the same part doubled. And I know it's impossible, it's the same voice overdubbed, it's not 'honest' or 'authentic', yet it still works. For me, at least.



The third example is by The Shins. The moment in question occurs at 0:54 (if you knew the song, you'd probably already figured that out...). This actually doesn't have much to do with the song in question, the 'scream' is nicely foreshadowed in the instrumentation, which a moment before becomes a bit noisier. Yet this moment still annoys me, and it has to do with the way the song is posited on the album it's from. See, this is the opening song of the album Chutes Too Narrow from 2003. So this is how The Shins introduces themselves and their world to the listener, with a weird scream coming out and surprising anyone. On it's own, the song kinda works, but as an introduction, I find it annoyingly quirky. It crosses the line I spoke of in the Sufjan-piece and becomes clever because it doesn't know how to be honest. And that cleverness makes it seem too constructed, too calculated, and again, I stop believing in it.



This song above, This Is Not What You Have Planned by the Wrens is on it's own probably more quirky and annoying than the Shins-one, what with the weird way it's recorded and the way the singer clears his throat at the start. The key point is that this song is located at the end of the album in question, The Meadowlands, also 2003. So because of the way it's located on the album, it's positioned as meaning Go Away! instead of Welcome. And all of a sudden, I believe in it. It doesn't sound as calculated, it sounds frustrated and depressed. Both of these songs are off-putting, but the one by The Wrens is believably off-putting.

So what I've been trying to do, is to discuss why some tracks are believable and some are not, focusing only on the way the music is constructed, on the level of a single song or a whole album. I've done this to keep it on the level of discussing craft and composition. Some people use the words 'honesty' and 'authenticity' to give value to entire genres - i.e. music recorded live with acoustic guitars is more 'authentic' than music with samplers and autotuned vocals - and while it is undoubtedly statistically true, that the percentage of numbers that seem believable is high in some genres and not as high in others, there are no tools that can't be used to create believable music. It's all a question of talent and craft.

Sufjan Stevens - Illinoise : An Attempt at a Reconsideratione

In 2005, a young singer-songwriter made the first real misstep of his career. His albums were normally created around concepts, but until then, he had mostly managed to anchor these concepts in something personal, such as his homestate Michigan or his Christian faith. But when he made that aformentioned album about Michigan, he had stated that he was going to devote an abum to every state in the US, and so he dutifully set about creating an album on Illinois. As such, for the first time the concept seemed impersonal, it seemed to be something he felt obligated to do, rather than something he truly felt about, and the resulting album seemed researched and studied rather than felt, it felt much too constructed, and in the end, it simply rang false. Yet something weird happened: This album, his first one that would have to be called a failure, became his big breakthrough album. The critics, led by an internet publication coincidentally located in the state he was singing about, all declared it a masterpiece, and his fame increased tremendously. To the credit of this young artist, he didn't do what most would probably had done, which was to continue making albums that had proven popular even if it wasn't artistically succesful. Instead, he took a prolonged break, worked on other stuff, reworked an older album, which reminded people of how anomalous his breakthrough record actually was, and then returned with an album that was a complete departure from his popular style, plus statements saying that his 50 State Project was always kind of a joke. But, while the artist himself has seemingly recognized the lackluster results coming out of the undertaking, the public at large still hasn't realized this, with the aforementioned internet publication placing the album as the highest charting release of 2005 on their recently made list of albums from the last decade. Well then, this is an attempt at a reexamination. It will probably completely reverse the discourse on this album all over the world. Or it might be read by like, 20 people, and then be hidden on page 11 of Google, following blogs gushing over why Chicago is the best song ever. One of those two. Oh, in case the title of this post didn't tip you off, the album in question is Sufjan Stevens' Come On: Feel the Illinoise from 2005.



Actually, I've kinda already explained that the problem is the studied and impersonal nature of the record, but just to give an example: The second half of the title-track-suite is called 'The Ghost of Carl Sandburg Visits Me In a Dream', and it opens with the lyrics 'I cried myself to sleep last night / And the ghost of Carl, he approached my window' Well, if this album wasn't a concept album on Illinois, I might believe this, but now it just seems incredibly coincidental. No, he probably wasn't visited by Carl Sandburg, he probably read his books as research. And so, he probably didn't cry himself to sleep as well, he is just really exagerating. It just rings false. Perhaps, Stevens was aware of this problem, the song repeats the question 'Are you writing from the heart?' And no, coming after a quirky and funny rumination on progress and the Word Fair in Chicago in 1893, he seems to write more from books than from his heart.



The biggest misstep on the album, however, is the following song, John Wayne Gacy, Jr, about the infamous mass murderer. Well, when you are going to make art out of a tragedy, and in a best case scenario make money out of that art as well, honesty and purpose becomes even more important. If a song about seeing the ghost of Carl Sandburg rings false, it just seems silly. When the same thing happens to a song about killing young men, it unfortunately seems like exploitation. And the song on Gacy rings false. Again, it suffers from being located on a concept album about Illinois, that alone means the concreteness of the tragedy is disminished. But when Stevens actually tries to describe the humanity of his victims, he does it with the vague and inconcrete lines: 'Twenty-seven people, even more / They were boys with their cars, summer jobs / Oh my God' That high pitched Oh my God is probably the worst moment in his entire carreer, completely unearned and phony, fake outrage invoking more anger than anguish in me. When Jeff Mangum set out to make In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, he managed to make his ruminations on the murder of Anne Frank seem personal and from the heart, even though he alowed the creepishness of the concept to take center stage. This is the opposite of that. It reminds me of rubbish Oscar-bate based around Holocaust or mental illness, or something else that will make the studios and the stars seem more human. It's just horrible. And the ending of the song is even worse. After describing the murderer and the murders, Stevens reaches this conclusion: 'And in my best behavior / I am really just like him / Look beneath the floorboards / For the secrets I have hid' So many themes are touched upon in this song, and Stevens thinks the lesson we should take away from this, is that secrets are bad. This is such a weird conclusion, it both seems so safe in how it skirts away from for example the repressed homosexuality of Gacy, the mood concerning homosexuality at the time, which probably made Gacy repress himself that much more, the death penalty etc. And yet it is also infuriating in it's equating between secrecy and murder.



But two duds does not a failed album make. No, the problem with this album is, that the framework means, that the whole ends up less than the sum of it's parts. To illustrate, take Casimir Pulaski Day. It's a great song, an absolutely heartbreaking description of the death of a girlfriend from cancer, and how it makes the narrator question why God would let it happen. The last line, when the instrumentation cuts out and Stevens sing 'And he takes and he takes and he takes' is immensely powerful. It's a wonderful song, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Illinois, except that the woman dies on the titular state holiday. Well, the song is meant to inspire heartbreak and religious introspection, but I'll bet the most common response is to go on wikipedia and read about the Polish general mentioned in the title. The framework ends up hurting the song ever so slightly, it might not seem like much, but on the other hand the ties to the concepts doesn't add anything. The detail that the death takes place on this date does not make the story seem more real, on the contrary, it seems awfully coincidental. But again, on it's own, it is a great song. In context, it suffers. Just like that, I'm not saying Illinois doesn't include some great music, some great songs, an abundance of great ideas. But as an Album, it fails. Again, that might seem like stating the obvious, seeing as the album contains 22 tracks in 74 minutes, but this is Indie-rock we're talking about, a genre that has always prided itself on being album oriented, being both grander and yet more personal than glossy popmusic, and so it seems weird that an impersonal concept album that so obviously fails as a concept album just gets a free pass. I too, of course, adore Chicago and Decatur and some of the other stuff, they belong on a list of the best tracks of the decade, but the album itself has nothing to do on such a list.



Well, enough with the moderation. On with the thrashing and the implying. On to the thorny issue of Representation. The idea that, when you set out to make an album about a whole state, you have a responsibility to represent people of all kinds, ethnicities, sexuality, religious inclination, and not just paint an entire state like white surbubanites, with a few dead poets thrown into the mix for kicks. And, well, I actually don't really agree with this idea. I mean, I'm criticizing the album for being impersonal, it would be hypocritical to then on the other hand criticizing the album for not including enough other personalities... So for me, the hardly significant amount of blackness, in both the music and the lyrics, seems more archaic and weird than offending to me. But here we are, just 6 years later, and Illinois has been used as the foundation for the career of the first black president of the US, and is the homestate of the biggest rapper in the world (Kanye), and this album represents the feel of the state through banjo and Reich'ian minimalism. I've never been to the state, but it does strike me as odd. Of course, the archaicness is by design, the album is mostly concerned with stories from the past, and while the front cover invites us to 'Feel the Illinoise', that seems more toungue-in-cheek than a claim to accurately capture the spirit of the state.

This video shows how diminished the song can become: It's all just mentions and allusions, signifying nothing. I love those harmonies, though...

No, actually the album becomes much more problematic when Stevens actually touches on problems and issues, for nearly all of the time he leaves it at just touching them, and immediately skirts away to safer pastures. I've mentioned how John Wayne Gacy, Jr ends up blaming secrecy for the murders, but there are other examples. Take the second track, the instrumental 'The Black Hawk War, Or, How To Demolish An Entire Civilization And Still Feel Good About Yourself In The Morning, Or, We Apologize For The Inconvenience But You're Going To Have To Leave Now, Or I Have Fought The Big Knives And Will Continue To Fight Them' It's the ony mention on how the state is actually based on getting rid of it's original inhabitants, and it's played for laugh. Never mind that the track seems almost triumphant - it seems to describe a birth, the birth of the album, the birth of the state, and it seems to build on the first song, which describes something indeterminate and formless. In other words, it's way too clever for it's own good - the problem is, that the Native American experience is actually excluded from the rest of the album, and just mentioning them in a songtitle - no matter how long - just smacks of tokenism. The same problem arises when the next to last song is entitled: 'Riffs and Variations on a Single Note for Jelly Roll, Earl Hines, Louis Armstrong, Baby Dodds, and the King of Swing, to Name a Few' All fair and good, but actually incorporating their experience and their music into the album would have shown much more respect. Another example was apparantly changed before release, as I found reference in a review on Uncut to a track that was called 'To The Workers Of The Rock River Valley Region, I Have An Idea Concerning Your Predicament, And It Involves An Inner Tube, Bath Mats, And 21 Able-Bodied Men', which on the final tracklist has been cut after 'predicament'. Which is for the best, as it yet again just skirts over real problems and uses them for a joke. The problems in the aforementioned region seems to be outsourcing of industrial labor and high unemployment, but the more realisticaly titled 'To the Workers of the Rock River Valley Region, I Have an Idea Concerning Your Predicament, and it Involves Higher Taxes for the Richest, Socialized Health-Care, and Massive Investments In Public Education' would probably have been somewhat divisive. Also, while I really like that the upbeat Jacksonville, which seemingly praises the spirit of progress and of America, is followed by a ruminative coda, which to me seems to reflect on the fact that America, while undoubtedly in the running for best country in the world, still is fraught with problems, conflicts, and peope living on the margins. But then it is called 'A Short Reprise For Mary Todd, Who Went Insane, But For Very Good Reasons'. Mary Todd was the widow of Abraham Lincoln, and it just seems offensive to me to actually invoke the history of the Civil War, with all the horrific stuff connected to it, and seemingly asking us to remember the plight of the white women of that time. In this instance, black history is completely kept out of sight. To sum up, the word that best describes how Stevens deals with political and social issues in Illinois is perhaps 'escapism'. He mentions them, and then immediately skirts away, or plays it for laughs. It would actually have been better for me, if he just kept to describing his own childhood and relationship with the state, instead of touching on these issues now and then, but doing nothing with them.

But why, if this album is bookish, studied, impersonal, escapistic, and filled with unfortunate politics, why has it become a touchstone on the indiescene in the last decade? Well, parts of the discourse sorrounding the album is just wrong. In the blurb on the album in Pitchforks list of Albums of the Decade, the conclusion reads: 'Stevens' self-confidence manifests itself in having enough belief in his own voice to tell everyone else's story-- all geographical namedrops aside, Illinois could've been relocated anywhere and it would still be nothing short of universal.' With this, the studiedness and the impersonaity of the album suddenly becomes a strength. And well, it's just wrong. This album simply couldn't have been relocated to Denmark, for instance, it sounds extremely American, the serial-killers, the bible study, the banjo and the sense of expanse. Nope, this is a midwest abum through and through, and it suffers from sitting between the two chairs of the personal and the universal, without actually achieving either. But then why is this album so popular?

In The Recognitions, William Gaddis' massive proto-postmodern tome on Art, Falseness and Boho's - definitely one of the best books I've never managed to finish - several characters mouth musings on the same theme, first stated as: 'Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest' (p. 252) This is of course exceedingly true of the indierock scene, where a knowledge of styles and diffusive, allusive lyrics are very common. It is perhaps the cleverest music style, and unfortunately often the least honest. At times the contradictions in the music makes it capture the times, and makes it that much more relatable, at times it makes it able to rise above the clichés and prejudices of the day. At other times it just seems phony. Illinois rings false in my ears, but it still seems like the most purely enjoyable of Stevens' recordings. Michigan is filled with real anguish concerning the plight of the working class in a postindustrial age, and I feel uncomfortable with the Christianity on Seven Swans. Those two albums are uncomfortable listens. A few songs aside, Illinois makes me feel sophisticated and clever. But is that really the best indie-rock can aspire two? That Illinois, the only feel-good failure in the discography of this great, inventive singer-songwriter, has become the consensual pick for Stevens' magnum opus, unfortunately speaks volumes about the problems of the scene as a whole. At least in my humble, yet perhaps obsessive, opinion.

Agnes Varda's Le Bonheur + Thoughts on Women in Art

Sometimes you see something and a few thoughts seem to fall into place. Or at least into place a bit more. I saw Agnes Varda's film Le Bonheur from 65 last night, and it seemed to fit like a piece of a puzzle I've been trying to put together, on the topic of feminism, women artists, and the like. I've been trying to figure out this kind of thing for a long time, and jotted down several quotes from different places that I find helping. So this is mainly a bunch of pretentious quotes strung together into a half baked political framework, that in the end is probably still severely lacking, and only intended to absolve myself for my lack of activism in this regard. Nevertheless, it is nice to try and think stuff like this over from time to time, and a good thing about a blog is that it allows oneself to air thoughts that one haven't really resolved sufficiently, and that one might abandon in due time. Anyways, here they are. Spoilers, of course.

Talk talk talk. And then the scene in question from 7:00 onwards. Two unforgettable inserts at 8:30...

The thing that triggered these thoughts is the ending of the film. While relaxing in a park, Therese has heard that her husband Francois has begun an affair, an to begin with she seems to accept his explanation, that his actions has only made him happier and that this happiness has made his love for her even greater. But then, while he takes a nap, she wanders of and drowns in a pond. I deliberately don't say that she drowns herself, for the film seems a bit ambiguous on this point. A short shot shows her in the water, grasping at a stick, perhaps trying to stay above water. The ambiguity, and the shot where Francois holds the drowned Therese in his arms, reminded me of the fate of Ophelia from Hamlet. And immediately afterward, it reminded me of this poem by the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, named Reading Hamlet:

A barren patch to the right of the cemetery,
behind it a river flashing blue.
You said: ”All right then, get thee to a nunnery,
or go get married to a fool...”

It was the sort of thing that princes always say,
but these are words that one remembers.
May they flow a hundred centuries in a row
like an ermine mantle from his shoulders.

(from the collection Poems of Akhmatova from Mariner books, translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. Go find it on Amazon, it is really, really good...)

Akhmatova wrote a few of these poems, about women who gets lost in the struggle of men, such as Lots Wife who turned into a pillar of salt (Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem / too insignificant for our concern?), or Cleopatra (Tomorrow they'll put her children in chains...). As a Russian artist in the first half of twentieth century, she was of course a target of the Stalinist purges. But she was never hurt herself, her ex-husband was executed and her son was interned. She is very famous for the poem Requiem she wrote about her experience as the mother of a deportee. It begins with something Instead of a Preface, in which she is recognized standing in line outside the prison in Leningrad, and another woman asks her: ”Can you describe this?” / And I said: ”I can.” / Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face”



The French postmodern philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard began his work The Differend with a rumination on the then new phenomenon of Holocaust deniers. As he described their solipsistic argument, the only proof of the Holocaust they would except would have been someone who could prove that the gas chambers had been used to kill people. And since everyone who had witnessed the gas chambers in function had died from it, this could not be proved, and ergo Holocaust could be denied. He used this extreme example to, amongst other things, draw a distinction between a plaintiff and a victim (in §9 on page 8 of the English edition from Minnesota University press). ”A plaintiff is someone who has incurred damages and who disposes of the means to prove it. One becomes a victim if one loses these means.” It is to remain a plaintiff and not become solely a victim, that the woman in the line in Leningrad asks Akhmatova if she can describe this wrong that are committed against them, if she is able to bear witness to it. By giving voice to victimized women from the past, Akhmatova also tries to turn them into plaintiffs. As a plaintiff you still have hope for revenge, or recompense. Once your a victim, that hope has been taken from you.



But of course, the question remains: Could Akhmatova really describe these wrongs? Don't get me wrong, it is a magnificent poem, a masterpiece even, but can we be sure she actually described the feeling of this other women? Can we be sure that she captures the feelings of Ophelia or Lots Wife (disregarding the fact that they are constructs...). Is she not, in a small way, perhaps doing them another wrong by using them to make her own description stronger? If this woman from Leningrad perhaps had written her own account, it would probably be disregarded, for it is inconceivable that it would ever be as brilliant as Akhmatova’s Requiem. Another extreme example is Dante and Beatrice. Beatrice is immortalized in Dante’s Divine Comedy. She is described as the most perfect woman ever, who is sitting almost next to God and Christ in the highest realm of Paradise. But has Dante immortalized Beatrice, or has he removed the actual woman from the annals of history, and substituted her with his own cleansed picture?



And this brings me back to Varda's film. For while every person in the film seem inherently sympathetic, Francois, the adulterer, has at least one major fault. He talks. He talks and talks and talks, yet he never really listens. He perpetually tries to explain his own acts and feelings, but never wants to hear anything about anyone else. And Therese doesn't tell him. She just wanders off, and then she drowns. Francois might be the archetypal male thinker. He thinks and thinks and talks and talks but his thinking remains completely self involved. He doesn't take the feelings of the two women into consideration. And this might be the point, a point that I think only a female director could have made. When male artists want to speak out about women's rights, they have a tendency to create women whom they themselves think are strong and good. And then voice their opinions through these characters. This strategy can lead to great results – I'm reading one of the greatest examples, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina at the moment – but it is quite different from what Varda is doing. She didn't create any strong women in this film. In fact, they are quite weak willed, also the other woman, Emilie, whom Francois to begin with loves because of her independence, but who is quickly domesticated after she assumes the role of wife to Francois. But Varda instead perhaps showed why they are weak. Because they are not allowed to speak for themselves. They can therefore never be plaintiffs, only victims.

Such quiet, determined grace. Such beauty. Almost unnatural...

Another scene with a women drowning has been on my mind since the first time I saw it. It's from the Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi's beautiful Sansho the Bailiff. The young woman has helped her brother escape from their slave camp, but since she fears that she would probably disclose which way he went if tortured, she chooses to walk into a pond, and drowns herself. She gracefully wanders into the water, and then the film cuts to small ripples on the water, where she has subsumed herself. I've seen Mizoguchi described as a filmmaker with 'a feminine universe' (by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his Cinema 1 – The Movement Image, also from Minnesota, page 192), as a filmmaker who was interested in the plight of women. But in this scene, the action undertaken by the woman is supposed to be a sacrifice, it is seen as good and noble. But is it really a healthy picture of women? Someone who sacrifices themselves for the good of their family? (Admittedly, Deleuze points to Mizuguchi as feminine in contrast with Kurosawa, and he is definitely more feminine than him. But who isn't?) It is interesting to contrast these two scenes of women drowning themselves, for the moment that Mizoguchi has removed from the sequence, the moment where the woman actually drowns, as in dying with water coming over her and into her lungs and last breaths and all those grisly details, is the only moment that Varda shows the audience in her version. And I wouldn't be surprised if that is deliberate on Varda's part, the film is quite allusive, as films of the Nouvelle Vague are wont to be. But this also points to another difference, that the sacrifice of the woman in Mizuguchi's version actually accomplishes something, that the brother is able to escape, while the drowning in Le Bonheur just seems pointless and in vain. A few minutes later, Francois has married his lover, and life seems to go on without any one really mourning... This ending is another twist on Shakespeare: where Francois seemed like Hamlet when he held his substitute Ophelia, after her burial he acts much more like Gertrud... But this ending, with one woman replaced by another, and happy lives continuing as if nothing particularly important has taken place, this ending seems to me to show 'patriarchy' in effect, in all it's petty pervasiveness, where women are completely defined by men, and their only other choice is to 'opt out' of it, so to speak, since they can never ever hope to be allowed to define their own life. And I think that this ending could only have been created by a woman, a man would have done it otherwise, he would not have shown the bad effects of patriarchy so clearly, perhaps since he as a male artist, with a strong effect on defining societal discourse, he is in fact part of the problem. And even if he created a completely new path for a woman to take, created the strongest, best female character he could possibly create, then he would inexorably have created a new woman defined by a man, and would then sadly just have become an even bigger part of the problem...

Well, to get to the point of these pretentious ramblings – and wow, they ended up being even more pretentious than I planned them to be... - this points to a problem I have with a lot of my own writing. I'm a male, heterosexual WASP. And I think and write quite a lot about race, gender and sexuality. And I kinda feel like I'm wrong in doing it. I once came to the conclusion, that I wouldn't consider myself a feminist, for that implied that I fought and spoke on their behalf, and as I've tried to explain, that can easily turn into usurping their fight and using it for my own gain. So I promised myself I wouldn't do that. I try not to speak on behalf of women, and minorities of every kind. But I try to listen. And I do my own interpretations of what they say, which can never be done without doing some kind of violence to the original, and which I feel is kinda wrong. But what to do... I've gotta write about something.

Oh what a boring, obvious, noncommittal conclusion. Let me instead end with yet another poem by Akhmatova, let Akhmatova get the final word:

Epigram (1960):

Could Beatrice have written like Dante,
or Laura have glorified love's pain?
I set the style for women's speech.
God help me shut them up again!

White Mind / Black Feet: Race and Reason on TV on the Radio's Dear Science,

So, last week I posted a piece on the rift between rebellion and complacency in indie rock in general, and on Contra in particular. That piece was a translation of an older piece in Danish. There was a slight difference though, in the original piece, I mentioned TV on the Radio as another band, who wrote about the split between logic and emotions, sort of. But I felt like I wanted to work a bit more on that part of it, and look on one of my favorite albums from the last decade: Dear Science, To begin with, I want to apologize in advance, if people see this post as clumsy or condenscending or anything. Diplo once said: Having white kids talk about race on the internet is the dumbest thing in the world To make it even dumber, I'm talking in a language I'm not completely fluent in... So apologies in advance, please let me know in the comments, if I offend anyone or anything.



Well, if I'm claiming that the album could be about a fight between rational/irrational, then the title definitely speaks to that. It is the header of a letter to science, Rationality par excellence. We don't know what the letterwriter wants to say to science. It might be an appraisal, or a condemnation, or an inquiry, or anything really. But the title invokes some sort of unfinished dialogue with rationality. The album is perhaps the rest of this dialogue. Well, at times. One would have to contort some of the lyrics a lot to make them fit this theme (well, Owls are symbols of Athena, Godess of wisdom, and Storks... have long feet, so they are like dancing or something...). But at times the theme pops up. Often, it is conflated with questions about race.



TV on the Radio has a different problem with the rational/irrational schism, that I wrote about, than most other indie bands today. Still today, in this enlightened day and age, and within this elitist, snobbish, indie-loving subculture, the fact that they are black connotes that they are probably more 'funky' and 'soulful'. They are probably more in touch with their emotions, and... you know... bodies... This was to me an unfortunate, and no doubt unintended, subtext of Sasha Frere-Jones article A Paler Shade of White, from a few years ago - at one point he states that Wilco could stand to be more syncopated, as if that's what black music amounts too. It's also ironic that David Sitek are sometimes seen as some sort of production wizard, as if he's the 'mind' of the band, and it's not just because his production and mixing are actually one of the least rational parts of the package – though I've learned to love the jumbled, overstuffed and slightly out of control way his productions sound. The production geniuses in music has actually mainly been black, from King Tubby to The Bomb Squad to J Dilla... TV on the Radio never shone away from tackling problems related to racism and prejudice (and they didn't shy away from subverting prejudice either, Wolf Like Me could definitely be read as being about the white fear of black sexuality), but on their first couple of albums, what they incorporated of black influences was often something leftfield and slightly archaic like barbershop or jazz. It was first with Dear Science that they made numbers that could be considered 'funky'. Crying, Golden Age, Red Dress. These songs didn't sound like earlier tracks from the band, but they sounded perhaps more like what a stereotypical 'black' rockband should sound like. I've seen it lamented in some quarters, as if TV on the Radio had somehow succumbed to society's perception of how they should sound. But some of the lyrics shows that the band is very occupied with conceptions and connotations of race. There are the obvious ones, such as Family Tree, about a black man lynched because of his love, presumably white (and with it's dead narrator and two mothers 'raven haired' and 'silver haired' it somehow reminds me of Paul Celans Todesfuge). There is Golden Age, which isn't directly about race, but in the fall when Obama won the election seemed to sing to a promise of a post-racial America. But the three examples I want to use deals not so much with racism as with conceptions of race and what it does to ones self-perception.



First off, there is Crying. It is the first 'funky' song on the album, after the more rockish Halfway Home. It combines funk and soul, of course, but in it's lyrics and form, it is composed like a Spiritual. A song of lamentations, the people are crying and whying and stuff. But it also inverts the form of the Lamentation-song, people are 'calling God's name in vain' they suffer like the Lord with 'Coloured glasses. Can't see for the thorns' and in the end they should do something, anything, even 'Take this car. Drive it straight into the wall. Build it back up from the floor. And stop our cryin' It is a Lamentation song about the futility of Lamentation songs. But the lyric I wanted to focus on was 'Mary and David smoked dung in the trenches / While Zions behaviour never gets mentioned' The first many times I heard this song, I thought it was a comment on the behaviour of Israel. It probably is, but in it's context, it's much more than that. The songs of Lament in the Bible are exactly song by the children of Zion, in their exile in Babylon. The African slaves of course identified with the plight of the Israelites in Egypt and Babylon, and used used their songs to describe their own troubles. Today, the whole Zion/Babylon dichotomy is huge in Reggae, especially. So when TVotR point fingers at Zion in a song that seems inspired by Spirituals, it is a reminder that people should look inwards at themselves. Israelites. African Americans. And everyone else. Crying over how unfair the world, even though it is important to point out injustices, can hide our own transgressions.

Unfortunately, Red Dress isn't on youtube in it's album version. Go buy the album. It is a masterpiece.

Second example. Red Dress. It is probably the best lyrics on the album – and they mention 'the whore of Babylon'. What I especially love about them, is how the Red Dress / White Robes thing is reinvented in every chorus. The first verse is about defiance and joy in a cruel world. So the chorus says that we should put our Red Dress on instead of our White Robes, and dance away. But right before the second chorus, the lyrics mention 'blood of the saints shot down in the square'. So this time the Red Dress is actually a bloodied Robe. The time has come for sacrifice. And then there is the brilliant third verse. 'When the man cracks the whip / and you'll all shake your hip / and you'll all dance to this / without making a fist. / And I know it sounds mundane / but it's a stone cold shame / how they got you tame / and they got me tame' So now in the last verse, the Red Dress has become what keeps black people in their place, supplanting the white robes of the Klan, presumably. And yet this is a funk song, making people shake their hips and dance. As with Crying, it points to the problems of the genre it uses. It's a funk song partly about the problems with funk songs. It tells of the problems, but it shows the power.



Final example is the final song. It's a plottwist! After the world seems to go to hell in DLZ, due to the wrongdoings of some 'death professor' the band seems to find some glimmer of hope. In sex. In lust. This might be seen as completely succumbing to an African stereotype, not helped by the funk of it, the African sounding horns of Antibalas, and lyrics like: 'I hunger for you like a cannibal'... But another view would be, that they defeat the cliché by their defiant ignorance of it. Wouldn't not being able to sing about whatever you want, be succumbing to racism? If you have to be a counterexample to a stereotype, then you are still defined by the stereotype. I can't think of final lyrics more fitting than ''Yes dear, of course there are miracles / under your sighs and moans. / I'm gonna take you / I'm gonna take you / I'm gonna take you home' And not just because the first song was called 'Halfway Home'. They find a good irrationality, the miracle, in sexuality, and replace the crying and whying with moaning and sighing. After these lines, the only thing that remains is to allow for the marching drums and triumphant horns to get to the finish line. Brilliant.

So the lyrics are rational, but it is juxtaposed with emotional music. In a much more knowing way than on Contra. And in the end the band chooses life. And sex. It is a really great album, one of my favorites of the decade.

R.I.P. Gerard Smith, who died last week only 34 years old. Much too young. It is a tragedy, first and foremost for his friends and family, of course, but the whole world will miss his contributions to this band, and music in general.