October 21, 2019 Arts & Culture The Charming, Ridiculous Romance Comics of Ogden Whitney By Liana Finck The thing about being a woman is you always have to pretend to be interested in characters in books and movies to whom you don’t quite relate. I don’t relate 100 percent to men in suits, or men with guns, or men pining after women, or anguished male artists in paint-splattered pants, or men sailing ships, or men making money. I relate, at best, 74 percent to these men. And then I do the work, make the mental leap, bring myself the extra 26 percent so I can really enter the story. What I can potentially relate to 100 percent is women. Women in flowing bow ties, women cleaning floors, women chopping wood, women knitting, women leading countries, women wrestling wild animals, women raising kids, women making eyes at men, women making eyes at women, women doing nothing at all. Some of the books and movies I come across are about women, but not enough. It’s fun to read books about people who are different from you, but not if your own story is so excluded that you feel erased. The women in Ogden Whitney’s comics live to find love. If they are distinguished, or distinguishable from one another, it is only in order to offer a different spin on the tried and true form of the romance story. They are vivid characters, but their vividness exists solely to attract the attention of men. Although there are plenty of talented and interesting women in the pages of Whitney’s Return to Romance, clichés still abound: if they know how to cook, that’s good. If they don’t know how to dress, that’s bad. The edgy beatnik character in “Beat Romance” turns out not to be a beatnik after all: she’s a polite, healthy coed, top of her college class—not a threat to the status quo, and therefore deserving of romance. Read More
October 21, 2019 Arts & Culture A Change in the Climate By Michel Faber On Nick Cave, Greta Thunberg, and our changing sense of urgency. Nick Cave, September 2019 (Thomas Ehretsmann for The Washington Post) Nineteenth-century Americans used to gather at the docks for the arrival of the ship that would bring them the latest installment of a Dickens novel. The story had gone to print months before—their presence wouldn’t hasten its arrival or change its outcome—but still, the fans stood on the wharf. In my youth, music lovers used to queue around the block, itching to be among the first to buy an album on its day of release. There was a fear that all copies might be snaffled up and there’d be none left for latecomers. Fans of Led Zeppelin or Nirvana would gather in the predawn dark, clutching their thermos and sandwich, prepared to wait as long as it took to show that they just couldn’t wait. Patient impatience. On October 3, 2019, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds unveiled their latest album, Ghosteen. Not in a record store, but on YouTube. It was described as a “global premiere,” and presented as a sort of cinema screening, with solemn subtitles and an intermission. By the time I caught up with it, a week after its debut, 625,130 people had already watched it. By the time I wrote this, a few days later, that number had risen to 660,436. I cannot know, of course, how many of those extra 35,306 were the same people coming back to listen to the album again (and again). Anyone who owns an internet-enabled gadget can listen to Nick Cave’s labour of love whenever they want: Ghosteen is in the machine. “There’s nothing wrong / With loving something you can’t hold in your hand,” sings Cave in one of the songs. He’s referring to the love we feel for those who will become estranged from us or move to far-off places or die (Cave’s son Arthur fell off a cliff in 2015). He may also be referring to God. But the lyric can mean something else, too. Compact disc and vinyl versions of Ghosteen are scheduled for release in November 2019, a month after the album’s virtual premiere. Those physical releases—things you can hold in your hand—are statements of the music’s tangible existence. Yet many people will be happy to listen to Ghosteen on YouTube without ever “owning” it. Critics or advertisements will tell them that the album is profound and heartbreaking, so they’ll check it out, verifying that it is indeed profound (especially in the shallow attention they can spare to give it) and that it is indeed heartbreaking (or would be if they had a heart available to break while listening to some stuff on YouTube through their phone). And Cave himself seems to be reassuring them that there’s nothing wrong with that. I listened to Ghosteen one Thursday morning, in the spare couple of hours before tackling my VAT returns. I confess: during the song cycle, I briefly answered a few emails, made a cup of tea, and sampled two blocks of peculiar dairy-free vegan chocolate whose flavors were “ginger ale” and “avocado,” trying to judge if I could taste any ginger ale or avocado. But the bulk of my attention, I swear, was on Nick Cave’s meditations on mortality. I noted how much more supple and well-controlled his voice has become. He used to have a narrow range, not quite the two-note bleat of John Lydon, but certainly a voice that was liable to falter, flatten, and crack when approaching the notes hit easily by the great singers he admires. He’s been taking lessons, it seems, or maybe just practicing a lot. The higher notes are unstrained, adding new potential for grace and intimacy to his artistic toolbox. The songs strike me as a kind of devotional chanting, similar to lullabies, the Muslim call to prayer, the humming to oneself that one does in deeply preoccupied solitude. I’m not convinced that any of them is a classic in the craftsmanly sense, a candidate for a busker performance to a public that might recognize the tune. The songs on Ghosteen seem more mercurial, less structured than that. Cloud patterns or unfurling flowers rather than architectural buildings. I like them a lot. Read More
October 21, 2019 In Memoriam Nick Tosches in a Trench Coat By Brian Cullman Nick Tosches, music writer and biographer, died at the age of sixty-nine on Sunday. I spent an awful lot of time around Nick Tosches in the late seventies. We’d wind up in the same places, we were published in the same crummy magazines, and we’d stumble into each other at St. Mark’s Bookshop or the Bells of Hell or Gem Spa. It was always midnight, and he almost always had a book in his pocket, maybe The Twelve Caesars or Ovid, and a wrestling magazine. I lost touch with him, but kept up with his writing, or tried to. After Hellfire and Dino and a few other astonishing books, his prose got overheated, but somehow undercooked. He’d throw a handful of twenty-dollar words and twenty-five-cent ideas up in the air, sort of hoping they’d take wing, but if they didn’t, he’d get bored and just watch them tumble to the ground, stare at them sadly, kick a few over to see if they were still breathing, then wander off to get a smoke. Though he wrote some of the best and most evocative books on music, his real gift was for rooting around the back rooms, the hustles, the shadows and the half-truths that make up the underbelly of show business. If the devil was in the details, he was perfectly happy to dig through the devil’s briefcase and read the fine print of the love letters and girlie magazines he found inside. He was part accountant, part private eye, part stumblebum, but his passion was contagious, and he always listened to the B-sides. Read More
October 18, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Freedom, Frailty, and Four Damn Cellos By The Paris Review Aria Aber. Photo: Nadine Aber. Jack Gilbert’s masterful poem “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart” ends with lines that remind us of the very limits of language: “What we feel most has / no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.” Hard Damage, Aria Aber’s debut poetry collection, pushes against those same limits, asking a great deal from the reader—emotionally as well as intellectually—while also allowing for comprehension and, ultimately, meaning. Aber’s work here is often about the very notion of what language can do when faced with a shifting geography that requires us to describe both the self and the world: Berlin, Afghanistan, Wisconsin, the gods of Olympus, the guitarist John Frusciante, the German language, the mujahideen, and, during a particularly striking section, Rainer Maria Rilke. Aber is not afraid of erudition or the hard labor of crafting poems that peel open in layers; at times, reading her work reminded me of poets who have worked across similarly broad linguistic topographies: Carolyn Forché, Frank Bidart, Paul Celan, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, and others. But Aber’s work here is hardly derivative of those masters. She is her own poet, her own voice, and her debut is my favorite volume of poetry this year. —Christian Kiefer Read More
October 18, 2019 Arts & Culture A Polyphonic Novel of Midcentury San Francisco By Jessica Hagedorn Protesters link arms in front of the International Hotel in San Francisco in an attempt to prevent the police from evicting elderly tenants on August 4, 1977. Photo: Nancy Wong. Via Wikimedia Commons. Imagine that you’re a sullen, sheltered kid from Manila who thinks she knows everything there is to know about the United States of America. But as soon as you and your broken family land in San Francisco, life slaps you hard in the face. Did you emigrate or immigrate? You don’t know. Are you mestiza or brown? You don’t know. In fact, you realize you don’t know anything. Your first year in America, John F. Kennedy is assassinated. Five years later, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. War rages in Vietnam and on television. You are reminded of the Philippines every time you see footage of Vietnam in flames. The universe is shrinking right before your very eyes. Marvin Gaye croons “What’s Going On” and breaks your heart. Mother, mother There’s too many of you crying Brother, brother, brother There’s far too many of you dying KSOL! KSAN! KJAZ! It’s funky, glorious, scary, druggy 1972. Martial law has been declared in the Philippines, Angela Davis has finally been released from prison, and Salvador Allende has not yet been assassinated in Chile. Who and what and where are your people? Read More
October 18, 2019 Re-Covered Emeric Pressburger’s Lost Nazi Novel By Lucy Scholes In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Today, the words “written, produced, and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger” are considered a stamp of genius. The mid-twentieth-century creative partnership between the son of a Kentish hop farmer and a Hungarian-born Jewish émigré is the stuff of legend. Powell and Pressburger met in 1938, when Alexander Korda, then the owner of London Films, hired Pressburger to rewrite the script for The Spy in Black, which was being directed by Powell. The chemistry between the two men was immediate. “I was not going to let him get away in any hurry,” Powell recalled. “I had always dreamt of this phenomenon: a screenwriter with the heart and mind of a novelist, who would be interested in the medium of film, and who would have wonderful ideas, which I would turn into even more wonderful images.” Theirs was a unique collaboration, not least because Pressburger should have been Powell’s subordinate; “in the 1930s,” the director (and Pressburger’s grandson) Kevin Macdonald explains in the biography he wrote of his grandfather, Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter, “the scriptwriter had about the same status as the electrician—the foreign scriptwriter even less so.” Instead, the two worked together on equal terms. When, in 1943, they formalized their relationship—what Powell called their “marriage without sex”—creating their production company, The Archers, “their separate creative identities” were, according to Macdonald, fully “submerged.” The two men shared equally both the financial rewards and the creative responsibility for the films they made together. The movies that followed in the forties, such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (“which may be the greatest English film ever made,” surmised The New Yorker in the mid-’90s), A Matter of Life and Death, and Black Narcissus, are today beloved and admired the world over. Yet mention the The Glass Pearls, and the title is unlikely to ring a bell. Read More