February 14, 2023 First Person The End of Love By Merritt Tierce Illustration by Santeri Viinamäki. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 4.0. I’ve had a hell of a time with online dating. I haven’t had much fun, and I haven’t found a mate. I hadn’t been able to understand fully why it “wasn’t working” until I read Eva Illouz’s book The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations. Illouz has studied the relationship between love and capitalism for twenty years, and in this book she describes the ways that consumer culture has shaped social bonds. She focuses specifically on what she terms “scopic capitalism”—how the modern free market creates economic value primarily through images. On practically every page I underlined some insight that matched my own experience; my personal travails began to make more sense. Choice—sexual, consumer, or emotional—is the chief trope under which the self and the will in liberal polities are organized. In the fall of 2016, my second marriage ended in spectacular concert with the presidential election. My second husband was running for office, and we couldn’t tell people we were splitting up until after the election because it might have disrupted his campaign. He lost anyway. The night of the election, I was at home alone with our dogs, mourning the end of my marriage but thinking At least at the end of this horrible night we’ll have a woman president. In April of 2017, I started dating. I was thirty-seven. I had moved from Texas to Los Angeles, where I knew almost no one, so online dating seemed like a promising approach, especially in a metropolis of ten million people. The pool of prospects would be both deep and wide. Read More
February 14, 2023 On Music Love Songs: “Being in Love” By Robert Rubsam Jason Molina. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 2.0. I am not a terribly romantic person. An ex once described me as “stable,” which is hardly the most erotic quality. It’s not that I’m unfeeling, per se. I just prefer to keep these particular feelings at a slight remove, a step or two apart. So in those rare periods when love enters my life, the results are disastrous, consuming every private moment of my day. Even something as simple as a text message can make my body feel like it’s falling apart. Yet what other agony gives so much pleasure? For “being in love,” as Jason Molina sings on his song of the same name, which he put out under the moniker Songs: Ohia, “means you are completely broken.” When he sings of breaking, it is as the prelude to being remade. “And for the first time,” he croons with delight, “it is working.” Molina, who died ten years ago, makes this statement of ultraromance sound like a dirge, all creaky organ and quaking drum machine with a single electric guitar keening softly overhead. The song exults even as it prepares to mourn. For as he notes, this passion—all-consuming, overwhelming—can burn through the fuel that fires it. I think back to Gillian Rose’s description of desire as something monstrous, driving the lover onward, onward, until they burn out or their beloved withdraws. It can be a pitiless sensation, love, especially love unreturned, love held in suspension. “There is no democracy in any love relation,” Rose writes in Love’s Work, “only mercy.” And there is no guarantee. Read More
February 13, 2023 On Music Love Songs: “Someone Great” By Daniel Poppick LCD Soundsytem in Chicago, 2017. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 2.0. This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. Out of nowhere, like an ambulance approaching from a great distance or a bedside alarm boring a hole through your sleep, a sound fades in, so subtle and liquid that at first you might mistake it for your own thought—a mid-tempo drone. The first time I heard it, at a sweaty dance party in a cramped room at the tail end of college, I wondered for a moment if this sound would last the entire song. Then the drum kicks in, heavy on the backbeat, a steady thump paired with an agitated tapping that skitters ahead of and behind itself, as if that initial sound were an object of worship to be chased but not quite approached. That sound, gathering momentum, amounts to a test—how far can a collection of tones speed up, fall back, pitch rising and falling, and still remain whole and anchored to their original pulse? How far can a series of relations be stretched before they break? When James Murphy’s baritone finally enters, glockenspiel chimes cling to his every syllable: “I wish that we could talk about it / But there, that’s the problem.” “Someone Great” sounds very much like an elegy for a lost relationship, and in a sense that’s what it is. But it might be more accurate to say it’s an elegy for a way of relating. The album it appears on, Sound of Silver, is dedicated to the memory of Dr. George Kamen—Murphy’s longtime therapist, and an innovative practitioner of group therapy. Kamen died in 2006, the year before the album’s release. Narrating the feeling of a dreaded, ill-timed phone call, Murphy sings, “To tell the truth I saw it coming / The way you were breathing / But nothing can prepare you for it / The voice on the other end.” The way the synth works, slinky and mournful, you could be forgiven for thinking of it as a love song. Read More
February 10, 2023 On Music Love Songs: “Water Sign” By Addie E. Citchens Mosaic in Maltezana. Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 3.0. This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. Parliament’s “(You’re a Fish and I’m a) Water Sign” is an unabashed ode to passion, to the base and the sensual, to the possibilities of love in the juiciest ways it can exist between people. The song moans into being, a beseeching follows, then there’s a bass so low you can’t possibly get under it, and finally the central question is posed: “Can we get down?” In true Parliament fashion, the tune doesn’t follow a traditional verse-chorus-bridge structure; it consists of an ever-evolving chorus that departs from the lines “I want to be / on the seaside of love with you / let’s go swimming / the water’s fine.” The arrangement is magnificent and the execution velvety, and the soulful, overlapping ad-libs of George Clinton, Walter “Junie” Morrison, and Ron Ford are just romantic lagniappe. Add the production of the track itself, with its big band-y rise of horns and whimsical flourishes atop the funky bassline, and the song is a liquid love affair that pulls you under and takes you there. It’s orgasmic.“Water Sign” is the B side to the much more well-known “Aqua Boogie (A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop),” from Parliament’s 1978 hit album Motor Booty Affair. While “Aqua Boogie” is told from the point of view of a person who is afraid of water, having never learned to swim, “Water Sign” shows us how beautiful and liberating it can be to get swept away. Addie E. Citchens is the author of “A Good Samaritan,” out in the Review’s Winter Issue.
February 10, 2023 The Review’s Review My Boyfriend Nietzsche and a Boy Like a Baked Alaska By The Paris Review Hans Olde, from “Der kranke Nietzsche” (“The ill Nietzsche”), June–August 1899. Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv Weimar. After two vodka tonics and a cosmo, my ninety-year-old grandmother lifts her glass and says, “But you know that Nietzsche is my boyfriend?” “He is?” “He’s my boyfriend.” It’s all right—we’ve shared boyfriends before. The actor Javier Bardem. Errol Louis, anchor at NY1. Her new neighbor. Her many doctors. She tells me that Nietzsche is her boyfriend because Nietzsche also hates the German composer Richard Wagner. I tell her Nietzsche hates a lot of people. She nods. “That’s good in a man.” Read More
February 9, 2023 On Music Love Songs: “Mississippi” By Sophie Haigney Bob Dylan. Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 2.0. This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. Someone once accused me of being unrealistic about love’s aftermath. This was in the middle of an interminable argument, one in a long series of interminable arguments. I am not really someone prone to interminable arguments, which probably should have told me something about this person and myself sooner than it did, but at the time I was experiencing a new experience and not every aspect of it was entirely unpleasant. What he said was something like this: “You think there are never any consequences! You think you can go around hurting people, and that everyone you hurt will still want to be in the same room as you, having a drink!” I thought about this for a second. It wasn’t true but it wasn’t not true either. Then I said something stupid, which was, “Do you know the Bob Dylan song ‘Mississippi’?” Is “Mississippi” a love song? Yes and no. I think it is among the most romantic songs ever written and also among the most ambiguous, which are not disconnected qualities. It is not even clearly about a romantic relationship—some people hear it as a sociopolitical song about the state of America, which isn’t wrong. It might be about a guy who has literally stayed in Mississippi a day too long. Yet it contains, I think, every important kernel of wisdom about love and the loss of it; it hits every note that matters. Is that too much to believe about a single song? “Mississippi”—and I am talking about the Love and Theft version, the heart likes what it likes—is about the love that outlasts love. I think often of the line: “I’ve got nothing but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me.” And I think, Yes, that’s how I feel! This is true! Read More