Superworse

Why I’m Sad And A Little Disgusted That Danny Brown Got Head While Performing: A Simple Thought About Artlessness

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 12:02:00 -0400

You might have heard (or might not - it’s not really that big of a deal) that onstage in Minnesota Friday night, a fan rushed on stage and gave Danny Brown a blowjob while he rapped with his usual aplomb. This makes me sad and a little disgusted, but probably not for an obvious reason.

First off, this is not a moral argument. I’m not against blow jobs or sex. I’m not out to critique any practice or power structure.¹ I just think getting head on stage is bad form. And more than that - representative of bad art. It shows a fairly glaring (if overlookable) problem that permeates Brown’s music.

The basis of art is representation. Cave paintings, epic poems, Catholic mass, the tango, impressionism, expressionism, the young adult novel, and the advertorial. Every form of art works through representation, which can be accepted generally to function by means of metaphor. A tango might mean Argentine nationalism, a poem may be about mortality, and a rap can tell its listeners that the rapper is the most powerful person in the world. In none of these cases does that entail the pair of dancers opening fire on enemy combatants, the poet killing herself, or the rapper actually murdering all his enemies. Because, metaphor.

What if we got rid of representation and metaphor in performances? Picture the Watch The Throne tour, stripped of all pretense and metaphor. It would be all Jay-Z walking you through the 10-K forms and quarterly filings of his investments while Kanye negotiates loudly with a realtor. Instead of jamming out masturbatory guitar solos, picture Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix mic’d up, grunting, jerking off under a bright spotlight on center stage. That’s Danny Brown getting head on stage.

And I guess, maybe, part of the problem is that I’d like to think that all the money, cash, hoes stuff in music (not just rap, obviously) is about more than just money, cash, and hoes. Like the Caramanica profile of Atlanta strip clubs and their sort of necessary evil role in marketing some of the best music being made today. But maybe it’s not about anything else. Maybe there is no metaphoricity to some music. Maybe a lap dance is just a lap dance. Maybe there’s no art to a big part of Danny Brown’s music.

I sat around all morning listening to different Danny Brown tracks, eventually settling on one of my favorite mixtapes of all-time, XXX. Think about a few songs. The pair of incredibly condescending toward the end, “Nosebleeds” and “Party All The Time” — both about a woman who goes out, snorts blow, and starfucks. Between the low-key production, even lower-key delivery, and patronizing lyrical tone it’s pretty clear Danny thinks these girls generally live life ‘the wrong way’. The girl’s scummy life in “Nosebleeds” leads to her own sexual arousal. The one in “Party All The Time” sounds like an annoying bitch:

Always wanna go
Always tell her yes, never tell her no
Know you think you know everything but don’t
Wanna do the right thing but probably won’t
So you chase the nightlife, blinded by the lights
Bottom of a empty glass, where you find life
Always left behind, because she think she right
Thinking that she grown she don’t need your advice
And always in situation that she needs your help
But wouldn’t help another only care her about herself

Come on, really? The protagonist in “Party All The Time” is probably the most complex or extended picture of a woman in any Danny Brown song, and it’s just to illustrate that she’s a needy, confused asshole who likes to get high and fuck. This sentiment, just a few tracks after Brown, straightfaced and approving, claims that getting fucked up is in his “DNA”. I mean, I really, really like Danny Brown’s music. He’s number one on my pointless and personal Greatest Living MCs list. But at some point, I have to wonder whether the metaphors for sexual adventure are very entertaining, or whether the straightforward and lavish descriptions of sexual conquest are a metaphor for anything greater. “Outer Space” is a pretty cool, DOOM-ish romp, but then lines like “Love a feminist bitch, oh, it get my dick hard / So no apologies for all the misogyny” and “I’m Wes Craven with X cravings / Fuck a bitch mouth until her fucking face cave in” make me think there’s not a lot of there there.

The (probably) greatest song of ‘our’ generation, “Ignition (Remix)” is just an extended metaphor for fucking, but it’s by turns hilarious, witty, and, most importantly, makes you feel really good. It would be a lot less great if Kelly just repeated variations on “I’m gonna fuck you because I’m famous”. Perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t really create a rewarding experience when Danny says he’s going to cave in some bitch’s face with his dick.

The things I like about Danny Brown are in descending order: his ridiculous, entertaining flow; weird and funny imagery; impeccable (and off-center) beat selection; semi-relatable struggle tales. Nowhere on the list are Brown’s gaudy and literal sexploitation jams.

I wasn’t there. Maybe it was tastefully done. The thing is, when you utterly drop any pretense of metaphoricity or artistic purpose, you start to verge awfully close to the utterly narcissistic and self-serving films of Vincent Gallo or, say, Sarah Palin’s vapid and vacant “you betcha” politics. A triumph of force over mastery, outcome over process, or want over need.

It’s incredibly difficult to make music that’s catchy, technically good, and about something. Most of the time, I’ll settle for just one of those. “Molly Ringwald”, a song about fucking a redhead on molly - ok, that song sounds cool and it’s catchy. But there are really diminishing returns on the general subject, so it becomes more and more about execution. Entirely artless Danny Brown performances (public, on record, whatever) make me think I’m sort of a fool for overlooking his missteps. Danny Brown is still, don’t get me wrong, my favorite rapper, though the gap is closing between him and a score of guys ten years his junior. It’s not like anyone’s keeping score, though. There aren’t really any aging curves for artistic performance (I mean, there are, but there aren’t). But it’s also pretty clear to me that if Danny Brown is going to put less and less effort into coming up with either 1) more artistic ways to say stupid shit or 2) more stupid ways to say artistic shit, then I’m going to put less effort into listening.

This all is to bracket one of the more obvious points, which is that a few days earlier some fans groped tour opener Kitty Pryde, which seems obviously to have upset her. That same night, of course, Danny Brown or someone whom he retweeted mentioned that a female fan ran on stage and grabbed Danny’s dick - an act he was pleased with. A few nights later someone comes on stage and gives Brown head. What’s the analogous progression for his young, female opener? Of course, you can look up her own personal thoughts on the matter. This is all my own sort of conjecture. ↩

On Taste: A Not-That-Quick Primer On Really, Really, REALLY Liking Perfume

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 22:00:00 -0400

I don’t know why it was that, of all the obsessions in my notably obsessive life, my most expensive habit came to be perfume. What I do know is that, for a very long time, I would not talk about this to a single living soul.

Things are different than they were when I started out. Fragrance-smelling and fragrance criticism are not weird, outre hobbies any more. They do it on The Awl. Writers I like outside the smell world – Emily Gould, Judy Berman – have mentioned or written about Perfumes: The Guide and Now Smell This. P:TG is incredibly highly-praised, even among people who aren’t nerdy about fragrance, because it’s just a fascinating and well-written book.

When I started, it was around 2006. You had to dig and Google and – in my case – read the editors’ retraction of a plagiarized article on Slate to find out about the weird, intense world of perfume fandom and criticism. It wasn’t okay to like perfume; it was kinda tacky, and having a whole lot of perfume was (a) a waste of money, and (b) vaguely pathetic, like you’d stocked up on weapons of seduction because you were actually 55 and lived alone with your cats and sometimes made them get married to each other. I once had an office job and a fucking legendary collection, including several vintage Roudnitskas, about 5 Lutens, and a Malle (you might not know what this means; that’s fine, this article is about how you might not know what it means, and why that’s OK) which I then gave away because I was moving in with a dude and I didn’t want him to know I had it.

So, on the one hand, I feel relief. Finally! I can talk about this! YOU GUYS. I HAVE WANTED TO TALK ABOUT THIS FOR SO LONG.

On the other hand, I miss my vintage Roudnitskas. And I think it’s important for you to know: I have been way, way more into this than the average person for about seven years. And the guys behind the counter at Aedes de Venustas – the best perfume shop in New York, maybe America, maybe anywhere; high-end, critically beloved designers like L’Artisan make perfumes just for their store, including one that is supposed to smell like their store — still scare the shit out of me.

Learning about scent can be difficult, weird, intimidating; it seems like such an abstract, arcane, pointless form of knowledge. Worse, it’s wrapped up in high-end style and cosmetics, so there’s always going to be an unfortunate Ladies Who Lunch vibe overshadowing your enjoyment. And then, there’s the Aedes De Venustas Counter Dude Fear: Perfume can be great, or it can be terrible, and you have to choose one. And the dudes at Aedes know everything about what is good and terrible, because they run the best perfume store in America, and they are watching you, right now, and THEY WILL KNOW IF YOU CHOOSE WRONG.

All of this can, very easily, divert you away from smelling things and into considerations of “taste.” Your taste, good taste, bad taste. Whether your taste is the correct taste. Whether you have taste at all.

I found my way in through the language. I was in my early twenties, working a temp job, meaning that when I wasn’t answering the phone or filling in cells on spreadsheets, I read the Internet for a living. One day, I read an article on Slate which argued — apparently controversially— that not all celebrity perfumes were awful. I had no interest in perfume, or debates about celebrity perfume, but I remember that I was fascinated by the skill and discernment apparently involved in the writing.

The writer not only gave impressions of the scent itself — detailed ones, involving mood and effect and apparent influences, not just “flowers” or “sweet” or “bad” — but also broke each scent into its components, and wrote about how those components related to each other, which seemed like an impossible trick. J.Lo Live, for example, had pineapple, violet, and caramel in it. What on earth could it smell like if you put caramel and violets on a pineapple? How could you sniff a small puddle of liquid and know you were smelling those three things? In combination? All the scents were like this, apparently composed of dissonant things; strawberry syrup and wood, dead leaves and tobacco. This was perfume, apparently, putting different real-world smells together to achieve an effect. The idea that someone could identify the different fragments, name them, and judge them, was both bizarre and strangely enticing.

I mean: I hated perfume. On principle. It was so gross, so fake; it reminded me of being a little girl, watching my mother get ready for work, and being deeply disturbed by how her face changed when she put on makeup. I was horrified by this, full-on Cronenberg body-horror grossed out; it felt like a profound physical violation, watching your mother’s face change, and even worse was the idea that, just because I was a girl, I might have to do that to myself one day. I was afraid of makeup as a little girl for the same reason I was afraid of clowns and the guy whose face melted at the end of Roger Rabbit; it was a human face made to look distorted and unreal, a dip into the Uncanny Valley. I was 100% sure that even if I grew up, no-one could ever make me wear lipstick. (And, to date, no-one ever has. I eventually did try it, just to get over the phobia, but I still mostly don’t wear it.) Putting an artificial smell on your body felt like that, too. Fake and boy-pleasing and grown-up and just… just not me. But still. Caramel, violets, pineapple. In, like, a puddle of liquid. How weird was that? What was that even like? So I went to Sephora to find out. The answer, it turned out, was that it wasn’t that bad, or hard to figure out; I loved the scent of pineapple, that was easy to find, and so was caramel. But the weird thing in the middle? That sort of powdery, Sweet-Tarts-but-not-sweet haze? That had to be violet, right?

Because violet, it turned out, was good.

When I went back to re-read the Slate article, to compare it to my impressions, it had been retracted. That article, it turned out, had been almost entirely plagiarized from the scent blog Bois de Jasmin. Which — MY GOD — was entirely composed of detailed, thoughtful writing about what things smelled like. I spent the evening reading it. By the time I was done, I was about to own five bottles of perfume, and The Problem had begun.

The bottles I bought online were Narcisse Noir (highly praised, plus I remembered reading that Anais Nin had worn it), Mitsouko (same), Angel (apparently a masterpiece, plus, it had caramel in it, and I knew I liked that), Insolence (a Guerlain, I knew that was good; plus, it was the biggest launch that season, it was for young people who were new to perfume, and it was all violets), and then one that I had just liked the smell of from Sephora, even though the reviews weren’t that great: Stella.

I wound up wearing Stella or Mitsouko to work every day. Insolence would have been popular, if only my boyfriend hadn’t commented on how Sweet-Tarty it made the room smell; I was deathly afraid of wearing a perfume that would be perceptible to other people. Angel was… perceptible. Also, a lot like being hit on the head by a caramel-coated brick. Narcisse Noir smelled recognizably like “perfume,” and not much else, and I didn’t like it. (What I was smelling was probably mousse de saxe, a famous element that used to signify high-end luxury in a scent, and that some people still love; it signified “perfume” to me precisely because so many famous perfumes used it.) But Mitsouko was interesting — actually interesting, the way a book might be; it lent itself to analysis and re-visiting, it had dozens of unidentifiable components and was spicy or bitter or sweet depending on how you looked at it — even though it didn’t smell “good” by any of my known standards.

And then there was the one thing I actually just bought for myself, despite the reviews, because I actually just liked the smell. That was, of course, the one I actually just wore. Stella smelled dark, to me, autumnal and serious, but with something wet and lush and inviting in there; it was reserved, but not sharp or mean-smelling in the way Narcisse Noir could be. It was like a little perfume Tina Fey, not loud or boisterous, a little buttoned-up, but somehow more likable for it. Smart. Grown-up, but in a good way. The fact is, I would probably still wear Stella to this day, if it didn’t smell exactly like being a 24-year-old office temp. I made sure to write down what the main note was; roses. I liked violet, and I liked Mitsouko, and I liked roses. That was a start.

I’m trying to get to the essence of liking perfume, and — more importantly — to the horrifying question of “taste.” My taste, especially when I started out, was undeniably bad. I liked J.Lo Live. I should not have been trusted at a perfume counter without adult supervision.

But it turns out that, the more you actually learn about this stuff, the more the “taste” question is recognizably bullshit. It helps if you realize that it’s a huge mistake to think of perfume as being primarily related to clothing. Clothing is visible and outer-directed, a way you identify yourself to others, very much subject to subcultures and trends. Perfume is much more like cooking, or knowing a lot about beer or wine, or being into music; it’s about cultivating your ability to have a particular kind of experience. After all, the only people who are likely to experience your “taste” are (a) you, and (b) the people in your life who get close enough to physically touch you. Who cares about taste when you’ve got headphones?

The fact that perfume is about subjective experience doesn’t mean that some things aren’t objectively better than others. Some of the stuff out there – in point of fact, the vast majority of it – is just plain bad. But it does mean that you can generally trust yourself, after a bit of training, to instinctively perceive the difference, in the same way that you don’t have to be “stylish” or on-trend to know the difference between a Big Mac and a steak. Perfume “taste” is mainly about flavors, sensations, learning to recognize subtle components that other people take for granted. Just like a good cook will be able to pick out the specific spices you used in a dish and suggest adjustments, and a music critic will be able to refer to parts of a song’s structure or arrangement or influences you never really heard — the first time someone told you Vampire Weekend sounded like Paul Simon is the first time you smell Flowerbomb and think “oh, a polite Angel” — having “taste,” in perfume, is mostly about honing one particular sense.

There are a few stages to this process. All are easy as hell. First, you’ll be learning to identify particular smells, or “notes.” You’ll learn to spot civet, or grapefruit, or lily, or sandalwood, and to tell the difference between, say, a rose and a violet. This seems imposing, for about five seconds; the first time you read perfume blogs and see people going on about the precise type of orange blossom they’re getting from Scent X, you will think “I know no types; I know flowers. Does it smell like a flower? ARE YOU MAKING THIS UP,” and you will want to walk away. But in many cases, you already know these smells; you’ve smelled a leather jacket, the inside of a cedarwood trunk, cake batter, oranges, clean laundry (which is mostly the scent of musk they put in the detergent), any number of spices and flowers. You just haven’t gotten into the habit of putting names to these smells. Once you’ve consciously smelled a few rose scents and a few violet scents, you’ll have made the link from scent to language, and the distinction will seem incredibly obvious. You’ll also know which one you like better.

This, it turns out, is where things develop a learning curve. There are notes that are very easy to like (fruits, citrus, vanilla, many spices — anything that your brain can connect with a pleasant taste tends to work) and there are notes that are far harder to appreciate (leather, smoke, bitter greens and moss, “animalic” scents that verge on fecal or sweaty, and weird flowers like dirty-vegetal iris or wet-vaginal tuberose). This isn’t empty pretension: There honestly is a learning process for the average nose, an increasing degree of difficulty or complexity you can handle while still processing it as “pleasant” or “interesting” and not “what the fuck is that, O my sweet Jesus Lord.” If you doubt it, just consider how you’ve almost certainly gone through the same process at least once before, with food. Kids are drawn to uncomplicated, instant-gratification things like peanut-butter-and-jelly and Chicken McNuggets and chocolate milk; they’re largely averse to coffee, or bitter vegetables, or intense spice. No-one orders caviar for their seven-year-old. As you’ve grown up, you’ve learned to process and enjoy more complex flavors. But, because you don’t live in a time and a place that places a high value on smell, your nose is probably still stuck at Square One.

This becomes very irritating when you realize that critics invariably tend to praise the “hard” notes and look down on the “easy” ones. It makes sense: Like all critics, they primarily want this stuff to be interesting.For equally understandable reasons, mainstream houses tend to avoid the “hard” notes and rely on the “easy” ones; like all capitalists, they primarily want this stuff to sell.For the past ten or fifteen years, most new perfumes for young women have relied on fruit and dessert smells, with a little bit of flower in there to cut the sweetness – pineapple and caramel with violet, let’s say – and most perfumes for young men have relied on citrus. These scents really please people whose noses are at the early stages of the learning process, and they inspire critics to heights of pompous, fancy-pantsing vitriol, the kind of thing that makes you want to read all their posts in a fake British accent.

The point is: If you love something, and you haven’t trained your nose much, don’t be surprised if you find out that the critical consensus is that it’s Kool-Aid and laundry detergent on a cupcake. That’s fine. That’s how early-stage perfumes usually smell to more seasoned noses. You’re not fucking up; you’re not a bad person; you don’t have awful taste. What you have is normal taste. Just as you learned to read harder books and watch more challenging movies over time, you’ll learn to enjoy more complicated scents over time, too.

But you should, in fact, take the time to learn. The thing is, as irritating as their anti-commercial fervor can be, those perfume critics aren’t being difficult for the sake of being difficult. Tough, “alien,” complex notes really do add something. Mostly, they add personality. I’ve owned a lot of scents, and I’ve owned a lot of critically acclaimed scents. The two scents that people have routinely, genuinely complimented — and I mean to say that they just pulled me over, out of nowhere, to point out that I smelled great — are Prada’s Infusion d’Iris (an iris) and Serge Lutens’ Daim Blond (a leather). Both are cool, austere, unsweetened (the Daim Blond has a little bit of apricot, but not the sugary, juicy kind you’ll find at the top of Lady Gaga’s Fame; it’s tart and dry) and nominally “difficult.” They also smell fucking amazing.

Which brings us to the third frustrating factor: Time. Perfumes, like music, do in fact go in and out of style depending on the time period. Here’s one very popular example, which I first saw outlined in Perfumes: The Guide: If you are in your early thirties, like I am, there are two styles of perfume that you will probably never be able to wear. In the ’80s, the style was big, loud overkill. HUGE rose (YSL Paris), HUGE tuberose (Poison), HUGE sandalwood (Samsara), HUGE HUGE HUGE spice (Opium). By the early nineties, people had gotten so sick of this stuff that perfume itself was unfashionable. (Which is a stigma that still lingers; the fact that I grew up in the ’80s was probably the main factor in my being embarrassed about liking perfume in the first place. But to be honest, anyone who has smelled Poison can be forgiven for taking any steps necessary to ensure that they never, ever, ever have to encounter it or anything like it again.) Ideally, you were too cool to wear perfume at all; if you did wear it, the most popular scents were incredibly light, and were supposed to smell like green tea (CK One, Bulgari Eau The Verte) or water (L’Eau d’Issey). It was like switching from death metal to 4’33. But if you put on CK One now, it also smells dated — to be precise, it smells like being in sixth grade. You can’t wear it because it’s the olfactory equivalent of hearing that one Collective Soul song: You (okay, me) (okay, there was a year of my life in which I begged for a bottle of CK One) are instantly transported back to the early ’90s in vivid, un-nostalgic, oh-God-adolescence-is-a-hideous-wasteland detail. It’s not that these smells are all objectively bad; as someone who loves roses and violets, I should by rights love YSL Paris. But, even though it smells exactly like my favorite grade school teacher, it also… well, it smells exactly like my favorite grade school teacher.

Generational differences are a touchy subject in perfume; smell-nerds get angry when you call something an “old lady” scent, because lots of those scents are decades-old masterpieces that are perilously close to being killed off or drastically changed because they don’t sell. (Miss Dior, which I recall as a gorgeous green-gardenia-patchouli thing from the 40s, has been all but literally replaced by the strawberry-and-caramel beginners’ scent Miss Dior Cherie; Cherie is now called “Miss Dior,” and no-one really carries “Miss Dior Classic” any more, though you can still dig it up online.) But they do exist; Shalimar used to be what sex smelled like when your gramma was a spry young thing, and now, it just smells like your gramma.

The rule, it seems to me, is that you can wear an old-fashioned scent, if you didn’t live through its time as new fashion. Anyone can wear Mitsouko; it’s been around since women could vote. Lots of the critical-consensus masterpieces are from the early-to-mid-20th century, a time when tastes were weirder and much less sweet; you can still wear lots of them. (Though they do, as previously mentioned, get changed and toned down a lot for the sake of sales, production cost, or cutting out potential allergens; if you’re a purist, you go to the online black market to buy vintage.) But if you wear Poison or CK One, you’re either very brave, very misguided, or a time-traveler. Similarly, people who lived through the ’60s (or who went to a very progressive liberal arts school) can have a deep aversion to patchouli, associating it with hippie stink. And most people think they hate patchouli, because of hippie-stink connotations. But most of those candied, lightweight beginners’ scents for girls? When they want to be sexy (Coco Mademoiselle, Lolita Lempicka, Flowerbomb, even Miss Dior Cherie) they’re more often than not built on strong, chocolatey patchouli. Things change.

This happens on a smaller, quicker time-scale, too, and it happens in terms of both popular and critical taste. In the mid-2000s, when I went through my first stage of scent obsession, roses and powder were considered dowdy, unsexy things that young women would never wear (because they’re both in Paris; THANKS, PARIS) and I felt extremely self-conscious about liking them both. Now, due in part to the recent success of the Chloe line, this spring’s market for young women is by all accounts swamped in powdery roses. Similarly, when I first started reading perfume criticism, oud — or agarwood, a fragrant resin that’s big in Middle Eastern perfumery — was considered the ultimate connoisseur’s scent, something rich and complicated and weird and only available in bottles from Montale that you had to donate a kidney to own. This taste trickled down to the mass market, cheaper synthetic equivalents were made and popularized, and people started putting agarwood in just about everything, resulting in the fact that perfume critics now roll their eyes at the event of yet one more goddamned oud.

And yet, I still love roses and violets. (I can even tell you what “type” I like: The rose has to be dark and wine-like, not too fluffy or powdery — I like roses and powder, but not at the same time — and the violets should be moderately sweet, not green.) I love a lot of other things, too — incense, and a certain kind of leather, and dry chypres, and and and — but the fact is, I just do like the way those two flowers smell, and I always have. “Taste” is varied, and ideally, you’re looking to find yours. For those still feeling self-conscious, however, there are three ways to simulate good taste. I will outline them now for you.

FAKE PERFUME TASTE: An Incredibly Useful Primer

Approach #1: The Crowd-Pleaser. Find a list of current best-sellers and buy the top 10 fragrances on it. You know that lots of people like them, so you won’t offend anybody, and since newer fragrances tend to sell better than old ones (unless they’re classics, like Chanel No. 5, which never stops selling) there’s very little chance that you will ever be off-trend. According to Sephora, you will be wearing Flowerbomb, See by Chloe, Light Blue, Poppy, Amazing Grace, Stella, Viva la Juicy, Florabotanica, Angel and Daisy.

Downsides:Lots of your fragrances smell pretty much the same. You now own a bunch of light, somewhat fruity florals, and few patchouli-sugar bombs. And although I can pick out some winners here — Stella is represented, and Angel is in fact widely regarded as a masterpiece (although most critics tend to praise it precisely because it’s impossibly loud and hard to wear; Flowerbomb is basically an update that’s cut with flowers and turned down about 8 volume notches, which is why it’s so tremendously popular) — most of the perfumes you own aren’t very interesting. These things sell well because everybody likes them, which means that very few of them are so distinctive that you could love them.

Approach #2: The Siskel and Ebert.Buy a copy of Perfumes: The Guide, by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. I’ve already mentioned it, several times, but that’s because this is the reference for fragrance criticism; not only are the reviews themselves wonderfully written, lots of people tend to believe that Turin and Sanchez possess nigh-infallible discrimination and taste when it comes to the scents themselves. If you want to know if something is “good,” or at least worth exploring, you first check to see if Turin and Sanchez liked it. Luca Turin’s official top 10, from a few years ago: Angel, Beyond Paradise, Bulgari Black, Bois de Violette, Chanel’s Cuir de Russie, Habit Rouge, Joy, Mitsouko, Shalimar, and Farnesiana. He hates Farnesiana now that it’s been re-formulated, so take your pick of two newer rave reviews: Secretions Magnifiques or Missoni by Missoni.

Downsides:Your collection is a disjointed mess. Also, you now own Beyond Paradise. These perfumes are all very different in terms of their personality and style. You’ll love some. But you will probably hate at least one or two others — Secretions Magnifiques, based on blood, milk, and cum, is widely regarded as one of the worst smells in the world; “let’s watch someone try to smell SM without literally vomiting” is a surprisingly well-represented genre within the perfume-video-blog world — and admire still others without ever wanting to wear them.

Although Turin and Sanchez have the best “good” taste out there, it’s still a very specific kind of taste. They like “perfumey,” complicated scents. They like vintage. They like weirdness, but only if it’s wearable (with SM being a notable exception). Turin is a scientist — and a very good one, by all accounts — and so he tends to praise scientific innovation in scent, even if the result isn’t viscerally appealing. It’s true that Beyond Paradise manages to create a seamless and unique imaginary flower out of disparate chemical ingredients, and that Missoni manages to smell like eight different perfumes over the course of one spray, but lots of people think that imaginary flower smells a lot like air freshener, and that Missoni is too sweet in every incarnation.

It’s eminently reasonable to lean on critics when you’re forming your tastes. But you are forming your taste, not theirs. And even the best critics have blind spots. For example, Turin and Sanchez are routinely dismissive of the minimalist designs of Jean-Claude Ellena, who happens to have a huge cult following elsewhere. They also dislike many realistic single-flower scents: Not imaginative enough. (Try to imagine a guy who smells like a Lars von Trier genital mutilation getting viscerally offended by the scent of jasmine. This is what it’s apparently like to be Luca Turin.) Meanwhile, you might be an Ellena fan, and you might get an instant mood lift from smelling lilies of the valley. If you always defer to the critics, you’ll end up with a lot of stuff that’s “good,” but that you don’t enjoy. Which is to say: You will have missed the entire point.

Approach #3: The Single White Female.Find a critically adored line, and buy everything they make. When you’re trying to predict a scent’s aesthetic, two things tend to be important: The brand (houses often have a similar tone to everything they do) and the “nose” (the person responsible for designing the perfume itself; lots of noses have particular tastes that they carry with them from brand to brand). For this project, you could go with an acclaimed niche brand, like Serge Lutens (thick, syrupy, complex orientals and lush florals) or a beloved nose, like Jean-Claude Ellena (dry, transparent, understated vegetal smells). This unites your collection under a single sensibility, and ensures that everything you own gets at least some respect.

Downsides:Your collection is “good,” by anyone’s standards. Better yet, it has a distinctive personality. The only problem, of course, is that the personality isn’t yours. And — sad to say — just like the Crowd-Pleaser, you will get bored of always smelling more or less the same. Monogamy, in perfume, just doesn’t work. You may love Jean-Claude very much, and you’ll know in your heart that he’s irreplaceable and that your life is better now that you’ve found him, but sooner or later, you’ll find yourself sneaking out to the drugstore at 2 AM to pick up a mini of Viva la Juicy, just to break the monotony. Oh, your shame!

The point is: Smell a lot of things. Smell a lot of things without buying them. You can and should get samples, from most department stores and from Sephora and even from Aedes; if someone gives you the cold sales associate fish-eye, well, that sucks, but they don’t know a lot about how this works. Everybody who’s really into this game has a lot of samples, because that’s how you manage to wear something often enough to figure out if you want to wear it for the next year. (Which is how long a bottle will last you, minimum.) If you do find yourself wanting to smell one thing over and over, buy it. Then, learn as much as you can about it – who designed it, who put it out, what’s supposedly in there – and start to look for things that have elements in common. Over time – voila! – you’ve got yourself some taste.

As your nose develops, you will find that there are some things you just enjoy. You’ll also discover that what you enjoy is highly personal, and has much less to do with branding or price point than you might have imagined. You can find something you love for $200 at Aedes de Venustas, or for $20 at an online discount shop, and some of the $20 fragrances objectively outperform the $200 ones.

And I’m not just saying this because I love a bargain. Some “niche” fragrances are just objectively over-packaged and over-priced to give the impression of exclusivity; Etat Libre D’Orange, which made Secretions Magnifiques and puts “edgy” pictures of dicks on its bottles, is one well-cited example. Their Rossy de Palma is now the cool-girl woody dark rose, praised everywhere, worn by people like novelist Emma Forrest. I’ve smelled Rossy de Palma, and it really is an amazing woody, dark rose. The only problem with the amazing woody, dark rose of Rossy de Palma, in fact, is that it costs $93 dollars an ounce for the brand and the mention of an Almodovar actress on the label, and it happens to smell exactly fucking like Gres Cabaret, which was released five years earlier and which you can easily find a massive four-ounce bottle of for $25.

So some of the fashionable scents aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. And some unfashionable, cheap things you can get at Duane Reade are critically acclaimed masterpieces; unfashionable scents aren’t re-designed or killed as often as well-known ones, because there’s less pressure on them to sell. So, some of the things you find at the drugstore or at online discounters for under $40 are actually better examples of a vintage aesthetic than their counterparts from high-end brands.

And that’s it. Labels mean nothing; price point means nothing. Even aesthetic isn’t all that important; if you’ve smelled everything out there, you can tell cedarwood from sandalwood at 50 paces, and you just happen to really fucking like things that smell like fruit and dessert, my God: Do it. You will never run out of things to like. How great is that?

As a side note, when I started re-buying my collection? Got myself a rollerball of Juicy Couture. It’s a tuberose that you can wear without alarming people, it has four stars in P:TG, and the top smells like watermelon. Leave me alone, Aedes Counter Dudes. Leave me alone.

Lil B Panel Discussion at 285 Kent Street Presented By The Silent Drape Runners and Participated In IRL By People Of The Internet

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 12:35:00 -0500

After a DJ set that saw Chief Keef mix with Moby, and a live re-soundtracking of a popular internet video, Sophie Weiner kicked off phase three of last Thursday night’s “I’m Lil B” event by saying, “I think this may be the first panel discussion ever held at 285 Kent.”

That’s not exactly surprising, considering the punky, DIY space is typically host to zeitgeist-grabbing bands and DJs - not symposia. But it is in keeping with the venue’s spiritThe 285 Kent St. panel discussion started with an unceremonious text over last Thanksgiving. In an email, Marhsalek said, “I randomly texted Sophie on Thanksgiving saying, ‘We need to d a Lil B party.’ The rest sort of came from there.”

In a follow-up email, Weiner said, “ in general as a band we are really interested in the way that the internet intersects real life, and this party is a good embodiment of that. The people we have on the panel are all somewhat or very connected to ‘internet culture.’”

She added, “We’re basically trying to bring together all these like-minded people and try to figure out what exactly it is about Lil B that makes what he does so interesting/appealing.”

It’s also congruent with the ethos of the event’s host, The Silent Drape Runners, a Brooklyn duo, comprised of Weiner and Russ Marhsalek. The two met while working together at Flavorpill, an event notification and curation website. At first, they re-soundtracked live showings of Twin Peaks episodes (hence the name), but quickly moved onto DJing, hosting parties and events in the city, and touring the country performing internet-inflected electronic music.

It’s a close obsession with emerging online trends — witch house a few years ago, seapunk more recently — that links The Silent Drape Runners with Lil B, one of the most captivating figures to rise to Internet prominence.

Lil B embodies all the possibilities and contradictions of the rap Internet. Aside from a minor hit with The Pack in 2006, Lil B’s labored apart from the mainstream. By virtue of a huge output of songs (more than 1,200 over the last few years), he’s constructed a fractured but larger-than-life persona. There is a trap rap Lil B, a sopophoric cloud rap Lil B, a chipmunk soul Lil B.

The sonic-schizo tendency of Lil B is ideal for the deficient attention of the Internet generation; even more appealing is his political stance. Or, rather, the variety of his political stances. His music frequently denounces homophobia, he has a song called “I’m a Fag, I’m a Lesbian”, and he released an album entitled I’m Gay. But Lil B is not gay, and he never shies away from calling someone a “faggot”. He champions a hyper-naïve brand of positivity that he’s dubbed “based”. He also frequently slips into rap misogyny. These would be damning contradictions in a politician, but it’s ideal for an internet rapper whose fanbase is thrilled by audacity and irony. The dramedy of Lil B plays out every day, 24/7 via the Internet.

Last April, Lil B darted under the proscenium. He gave a lecture at NYU’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. For over an hour, the Oakland rapper battled a raucous crowd to set down a rough curriculum of his “based” philosophy. The spontaneity of his thinking, along with the constant interplay with the crowd, made the lecture resemble something of an IRL Twitter timeline.

Lil B displayed a guileless handle on the crowd and his subject matter. When people heckled him, he incorporated it into his thoughts. He said naively philosophic things like, “Appreciate every single person. Look at them like a golden, million dollar baby.” He marveled at the building he was in, at his well-off audience, at life itself. It could have seemed like a shtick, it may have sounded ridiculous, but it resonated with people.

One part in particular, when Lil B said, “I’m the first rapper to adopt a tabby cat,” resonated with Marshalek. And somehow, watching clips of the NYU lecture, smiling to the tabby cat line.

The panelists, to be sure, were all connected to Internet culture. It included Matt Sullivan, creator of a zine called Ad Hoc; Travis Egedy (better known as Pictureplane, an electronic musician); Ray Smiling, a Mishka blogger who goes by BeholdTheDestroyer!; Alex Gamlin, of Afro-Punk; and Marshalek. The general theme of the discussion was structured around open-ended questions about Lil B’s appeal, his philosophy, and his importance.

The discussion was freewheeling. Panelists disagreed about some very fundamental things about Lil B, like whether he was actually good at rapping. Some panelists, especially Gamlin, were sure of Lil B’s technical skills as a rapper and seriousness as an artist. “Rap’s always been about skill,” Gamlin said, and she described Lil B’s appeal in terms of his skill as a rapper and his social importance to the rap community.

Others placed the source of Lil B’s appeal more on his outsized personality and the way he can transition seamlessly from seriousness to humor. Lil B’s mercurial nature is essential to the relative broadness of his appeal. Egedy took things further, saying, “Lil B is essentially the internet in rap form.” His work contains thoughts and about everything from new age mysticism to explicit sexual fantasies - just like the Internet.

Marshalek took this thread and went even further, saying, “if he wanted to quit rap entirely, Lil B could get a very high paying job at a social media marketing firm.” At this point, it was difficult to tell if the panel was about Lil B or Gary Vuynerchuk.

The unfocused discussion, though, was entirely due to Lil B’s multi-faceted nature and the multivalent way we consume culture. You can enjoy him as a Real Rap Fan, who applauds his refusal to sell out. You can see Lil B as a Henry Darger figure, straddling the border of sense and nonsense. You can see him as a social media guru.

The main thread of the conversation, though, was that Lil B was Lil B – an individual – and that was a good legacy to have, worthy of praise. And so, whether as a live meme or real affirmation, the panelists concluded with a hearty “Thank you, BasedGod.”

Arbitrary Pairings: Kendrick Lamar and Taylor Swift

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 11:08:00 -0400

I woke up this morning and saw that in the last twenty-four hours both Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid M.A.A.D City and Taylor Swift’s Red were available for download, and I listened to them this morning. It is an entirely arbitrary pairing, but the mind can draw connections between just about any damn thing. How wonderful.

What I’m about to say is almost boring in its across-expectation slap, but I sort of like the Taylor Swift album more than Kendrick’s. Now, K-dot released my second-favorite song of 2011, and his 2011 mixtape (which really had the polish and poise of a ‘real’ album) was one of my favorite things to listen to in a very long time. Add to that that “Swimming Pools (Drank)” is a breathtakingly weird and great song, and it’s certainly, like, some of the more out-there major label stuff I can recall seeing since Eminem’s “My Name Is”. (The Dr Dre stamp certainly goes a long way toward explaining, then… or is it just correlation without causation?)

I mean, fuck a dog, I really love Kendrick Lamar, but on first listen Good Kid M.A.A.D City is just not, er, great. Except for “Swimming Pools”, it’s probably not even really a step forward from Section.80. I mean, where the hell is “Cartoon & Cereal”? It seems like you should probably use the song that was so good it made Gunplay into a marketable commodity on your major label debut. It needs more weird. Kendrick’s weird, and that’s basically his main strength in my eyes. His Unique Selling Point in the parlance of advertising. Being weird, not in Donald Glover’s just like head-slappingly annoying way of “Oh look at me I wear skinny jeans and watch Star-Trek - I’m so weird”. Kendrick is like the kid who had a bad home life so he dove into some out-there esoterica and inhabited it like he was after squatter’s rights.

Plus to that, Kendrick’s got a great musical mind, and he’s a great self-mythologizer. Thus, “Cartoon and Cereal”, right? The rest of his storytelling chops are underdone, though. You get a nasty case of trichinosis from that. (Sorry.) A lot of the “I want to fuck that bitch” songs are pretty flat. Most of the “We do or don’t do drugs” ones are, too. The stories about how fucked up his childhood are, though, like — sorry to keep returning to it, but it’s probably the best song of the year — “Swimming Pools” are amazing. There just aren’t enough ‘banger’-type songs. The production is typical and slightly interesting, but not great. I’d rather listen to Schoolboy Q’s Habits and Contradictions on repeat just for the beats. (Hats off to whoever decided Portishead samples are now de rigueur!) There’s not enough TDE-style mythology (I guess Ab-Soul mined all that for Control System?). And what is the deal with playing some tape hiss cassette insertion sound at the beginning and end of an album? Just bookending your album with an audio-analog conceit doesn’t make it a self-contained unit of work. It being uniformly great makes it a self-contained unit of work. You’re confusing why Channel Orange is an instant classic - it’s not the bookending sound effects thing.

I mean, I guess now that I really think about it, Good Kid M.A.A.D City is not bad - not at all. It stands above most of the 7 gigs or so of my “2012 rap” playlist, but it’s just not quite thematically-uniform, sonically innovative, or, you know, just tight like R.A.P. Music or, well, that’s the only rap album from this year that I think is truly great. The other thing is, it doesn’t have super high peaks like Nicki Minaj’s Roman Reloaded, Future’s Pluto, or Waka’s Triple F (underrated at this point, BTW).

Ferchris’ssakes, I may not even like it more than the other TDE albums, Habits and Contradictions and Control System. Sorry, Kendrick, but you’re better than both of those guys so you’re getting graded on a curve.

Maybe the reason why Taylor Swift’s Red sort of seems better to listen to, then, is that I really give no shits about her at all. I actually (“actually”, as if that’s a controversial stance) dislike her. I think, maybe, some of the 30-something guys that poptimistically defend her may just be lecherous and bad at heart. Because, come on, great is the pulchritude and purity of Tay Tay. She’s like a living, breathing J. Crew catalog that sings you lil songs about how much she loves you. Add to that the “hipster”-bashing single “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” (which is really just an adult re-write of “You Belong With Me” (which, hey, not a bad idea since that’s a great/catchy song)) and its super-super-super-super-super-super-super-super-super-super-super-twee video, and it seems a sure thing that I’d sort of hate it. Seeing as how it’s actually good, though - well, that makes it seem like a sequel to sliced bread or whatever. What I’m trying to say, then, is:

Iactuallythinkit’sprettygoodnoactuallygreatsosorryleavemealongletmeexplain.

We sometimes make the mistake of confusing a ‘bad’ life with a more ‘interesting’ one or a more ‘artistically valid’ one. And conversely. So Kendrick’s album has a lot of stuff about conducting a B&E, dudes dying, getting addicted to drugs, and a mom-vocal-skit thing that really made me think of this incredibly sad Robert Frost poem. Taylor Swift mostly sings about being from middle America and falling in and out of love with guys. But the big fat but of it all is that most stories — in general, overall, spanning time — are not really that captivating. Really outrageously plotted stories are usually called out by the more literary-minded for being so. Stories are good because they’re told well, and Taylor Swift really does tell a story well.

I mean, the whole “Taylor Swift” writes her own songs thing sounds really stupid, but she’s good at writing songs (now?).

“All Too Well”, the longest song on Red at 5:29, should be boring - or at least uninteresting. It’s not. Despite its lack of ukelele, EDM breakdown, or Snow Patrol cameo, it’s one of the strongest songs on the album. And, it’s actually one of my favorite songs I’ve come across this year. It starts out,

I walked through the door with you
It was cold, but something ‘bout it felt like home somehow and I
Left my scarf there at your sister’s house
And you still got it in your drawer even now

It basically ends by saying,

But your keep my old scarf from that very first week
Cause it reminds you of innocence and it smells like me

That seems like the sort of cheap bookend technique I criticized Kendrick for (on an album-level), but it works here. The whole song is just an astutely-observed study of being in and out of love. I mean, sorry but it just mirrors my own life experiences. “Cause here we are again on that little town street / You almost ran the red cause you were looking over me.” That’s a thing that happens! “You used to be a little kid with glasses in a twin size bed” - hey, I still have glasses, but I remember that twin size bed. The other thing is, Swift uses extended metaphors like an expert. There’s this middle verse about a masterpiece being lost in translation and then she’s a crumpled up piece of paper on the floor, and it’s just wonderful.

Now, what I’m not saying is that I think the white middle class American life is better (or worse - whatever) than the black lower class American life. I mean, that’s really just a stupid thing to even think about. There’s enough music in the world for some of it to be about one thing and other of it to be about another thing, and I’m certainly not going to be the ‘thing police’ and tell people to make things about other things than the things they want to make them about. Why would you want to be the ‘thing police’ when that sounds like the most dreadful job in the world?

Kendrick Lamar and Taylor Swift could both be characters on Friday Night Lights, and they would be the best ones. They would write all their own parts, and they’d both be tack sharp 3D renderings of real people - just how they come out in their own work. OK, gosh, it sounds like I’ve sort of talked myself back into Kendrick Lamar, now. I mean, he is a good storyteller, and rap is poorly (sort of) lacking in those. He just doesn’t have enough ‘bangers’ or ‘interesting ideas’ to make a 100% great album. (Yet?)

I guess the point of this whole essay is to say, if you are Kendrick Lamar fan but not a Taylor Swift fan, or vice versa, that you should check the other one out. Good Kid M.A.A.D City and Red are both really good, and they both really do the same thing. Either one would be the perfect gift for that person in your life who “likes everything except for country/rap”.

Horror Is Other People: Shirley Jackson and Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining"

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 16:12:00 -0400

The first and most important thing to know about Shirley Jackson is that, at a certain point in her life, she became too afraid of people to leave her own house. She had reasons; she was married to the only Jewish guy in Bennington, Vermont, and the townsfolk plagued them. She didn’t fit in; she was odd in and of herself. (Her sense of humor was so morbid that, when she died in her sleep at age forty-eight, her family assumed for quite some time that she was playing a prank.) She was intensely self-conscious about her appearance, something that she’d learned from her very unsatisfactory mother. But this is what you need to know: Shirley Jackson was afraid to leave her house, afraid of being part of the world, and she spent much of her time as a writer explaining exactly why.

You’ve read “The Lottery,” most likely; it’s one of those short stories that’s often inflicted on high school students. Which makes sense. Its basic premise – a happy town of good old-fashioned values, amongst which some values include picking out a townsperson once per year to merrily beat to death with rocks – should feel familiar to anyone who’s been a teenager. As should the fact that good Tessie Hutchinson is one of the Lottery’s biggest supporters, until

The children had stones already, and someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.

Old Man Warner was saying, “Come on, come on, everyone.” Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

That was the story’s nastiest take-away, the buried contempt in Jackson’s refusal to make Tessie in any way admirable or special. There’s no-one that we’re allowed to identify with in order to reassure ourselves that we’re good people: No idealistic young townsperson pointing out that, gosh golly gee, these Lotteries are killing people, no Katniss, no virtuous Christ getting nailed to the cross. These Lotteries are our values, they’re what we do. Participating in the Lottery is being a good person, isn’t it? Anyway, the only person who ever objects is the one who’s getting their skull crushed at the moment, and we don’t listen to them; it’s just a bunch of screaming. It’s always fair and right, until it’s you, is the intensely obvious message here, and it’s harsher for the fact that we know Tessie’s killed plenty of people, and never saw a problem with it until the first rock hit her.

In late-1940s, post-WWII America, that message was particularly primed to hit a nerve; the magazine got scads of angrily canceled subscriptions, and more letters in response to “The Lottery” than it did in response to any other story in its history. Of these letters, Jackson later said that, if she thought they represented the reading public at large, she would stop writing.

Judging from these letters, people who read stories are gullible, rude, frequently illiterate, and horribly afraid of being laughed at… People at first were not so much concerned with what the story meant; what they wanted to know was where these lotteries were held, and whether they could go there and watch.

But Jackson is being disingenuous here. In her view, people were gullible, rude, illiterate, horrible, and willing to do anything to fit in. That statement alone summarizes the basic thesis of half her work.

Consider: In “The Summer People,” a pair of self-satisfied city people decide to stay a few extra days at their lake house, oblivious to the townspeople’s hints that they normally leave on Labor Day, don’t they really want to leave on Labor Day? They really ought to consider leaving on Labor Day, until suddenly nobody in town has the gas to fuel their car and the letters coming from their families start to sound strange and the phone wires are cut and finally “the radio faded and sputtered, [and] the two old people huddled together in their summer cottage and waited.” In “Elizabeth,” a would-be literary agent who’s reduced to ghostwriting scams finds out her crappy boyfriend is cheating on her, spends a few pages feeling bad about it, and then, just when you’re about to sympathize with her, commits an act of pointless, life-wrecking cruelty with a smile on her face and no more guilt than you would have in swatting a mosquito. In “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” the plot is even simpler: A bright, poor kid is saving up to buy a rare book he’s wanted forever. The bookseller has promised to keep it on hold for him. A sub-literate but well-off couple comes into the store, looking for books they can buy to pad their shelves. What happens next is entirely predictable, but leaves you, the reader, feeling winded by the sheer pettiness and pointlessness of the betrayal.

Jackson initially considered herself a writer for social justice; early in her career, she wrote stories about real group-think cruelties, about racism. But that died out, as her severe agoraphobia closed in, and her marriage failed, until finally the only thing she wrote about was a world in which all people were terrible and dangerous, and complete isolation was the only safety, and even that didn’t always work. A belief in justice requires a belief in people, and this was something Jackson evidently lost as her life imploded and trapped her between her own four walls, under the weight of her fear, forever.

We Have Always Lived In The Castle is the end-point of this philosophy, her best work and her cruelest. Merricat is one of the Blackwoods, the town’s wealthiest and most privileged family. The townsfolk have always hated the Blackwoods, and vice versa. Coincidentally, the only Blackwoods left are Merricat, her agoraphobic, weak-willed sister Constance, and their senile Uncle Julian; “everyone else in my family is dead,” Merricat informs us. The novel opens with her walking to the grocery store, being harassed by townspeople, afraid to cross the street because she knows a car would willingly swerve or run a light to hit her. It also opens with Merricat visualizing the deaths of her tormentors in alarming detail:

I would have liked to come into the grocery store some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain and dying. I would then help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs. Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true.

It’s this, and the information that the “everyone else” in Merricat’s family was poisoned, and that no-one ever caught the killer, and we know the shape of things. Merricat’s a murderer. She’s entirely without conscience; her family’s fatal offense was trying to send her to bed without her supper. And she spends most of her time engaged in creepy little rituals like taking household objects her victims used to love and nailing them to trees. She’s a little baby Bundy, and the villagers hate and fear her for entirely good reasons.

All of this and yet, over the course of the novel, we come to see the villagers as Merricat does; not even equivalent to Merricat in their capacity for evil, but somehow worse. By the time they’re coming at her with fire like it’s the last act of Frankenstein, we fear them more than we ever did Merricat. The horror is in the villagers’ righteousness itself, their conviction that they’re cleansing their town of evil; Merricat kills out of personal spite, and because something in her can’t see it as wrong, but these people are implacable in their violence, because they do have consciences and they’re absolutely sure they’re doing the right thing. People are all horrible; the villagers are more horrible, because there are more of them. This, in the work of Shirley Jackson, is simply how all those things we like to think we believe – family, community, justice – will always work.

The best horror movie ever made is a drastic re-write of a Shirley Jackson rip-off. The Shining, as Stephen King wrote it, is essentially a bigger, ‘splodier, more dudely version of Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.

The basic plot of The Haunting of Hill House is this: There is a house, possessed somehow with a will and personality of its own, and that personality is purely malevolent. A group of people, two with psychic powers – Theo is telepathic, Eleanor is telekinetic – are invited to stay there. Other things to know about Eleanor: She is lonely, and sad, and strange, and spent her life taking care of her sick mother, and probably killed her. Her mother had an attack in the middle of the night, and knocked on the wall for Eleanor to save her, and Eleanor (she says) slept through it; she often wonders if she woke up, heard her mother knocking, and decided not to help. But if Eleanor didn’t wake up, how would she know about the knocking? As the group settles into the house, its evil – messages that read “HELP ELEANOR” scrawled in blood, disembodied pounding on the walls in the middle of the night – increasingly come to take the shape of Eleanor’s personal demons. Slowly, Eleanor is absorbed into Hill House; it is doing this to her, or she is doing it (remember, she may be able to move things with her mind; she is also clearly losing her mind, starting to hear things and lose time and develop paranoid ideations, as the plot progresses) and either way, it’s not going to stop until Eleanor is part of the House forever.

The basic plot of The Shining is this: There is a hotel, possessed somehow with a will and personality of its own, and that personality is purely malevolent. A group of people, one with psychic powers – wee Danny has the titular “Shining,” a weird precognitive/telepathic/I-see-dead-people melange – are invited to stay there. Other things to know about Danny: His father Jack is an alcoholic, and very definitely abused Danny. As the family settles into the hotel, its evil increasingly comes to take the shape of Jack’s personal demons. It is doing this to him, or… well, no, it’s definitely doing this to him. King doesn’t do ambiguity. And then there are explosions and people walking around with their faces caved in and walking topiary animals and all sorts of pyrotechnics, because King also does not do subtlety. But it’s not going to stop until Danny and/or Jack are part of the Hotel forever.

What Jackson accomplishes by tethering us to Eleanor’s point of view as it unravels – the most chilling part of the novel is not the ghostly manifestations, but the part where she asks how long they’ve been in the house and learns that it’s only been a few days; it feels to her like months, so it’s felt to us like months, and suddenly we realize that what we’ve been seeing is far more wrong than we ever suspected – is something King, a clumsier and more realistic writer, has to accomplish with explosions and cuss words and lots and lots of explanation of why ghosts are bad. King’s fans, and King himself, objected heavily to Kubrick’s adaptation; he gutted the story, starting with all the ploddingly literal explanations, and left only glacial, ominous silence and unanswered questions, punctuated by rivers of gore. Also: No killer bushes. Very sad.

But Kubrick’s Shining adaptation, while not a faithful rendering of King’s source material – which is the only reason we’re still watching it, honestly – is actually closer in spirit to Jackson’s book than even its excellent official adaptation, The Haunting. (The original, not the ’90s remake. We’re not going to discuss the ’90s remake. The only thing I remember from the ’90s remake is Owen Wilson saying he was scared of Teletubbies, and also I think somebody got killed by a harpsichord.) There are plenty of little touches that seem to pay homage to the source – Hill House disorients its inhabitants because it’s built with no right angles, so that everything is imperceptibly off or off-balance; the Overlook Hotel is built out of Escher-esque impossible spaces that don’t line up or connect – but, most importantly, in its coldness, its refusal to answer questions or provide context, its basic misanthropy, it speaks horror in Jackson’s voice.

I used to think that, of all the horror movies I watched, The Shining was the movie that men unilaterally reacted to more strongly than women. If you watched The Shining with a dude, he would lose his shit on you; teenage boys, obviously, got into jump-up-on-the-couch-screaming terror mode in the scene that transitions from “here is a naked lady with her naked vagina” to “here is a rotting corpse” territory, but I once had to go into the bedroom and keep my boyfriend company because reading about that movie made him unable to sleep.

Now, I think that it’s not a question of men reacting more to The Shining – not that any gender is going to like the same movies in the same ways – but of women reacting less, or less directly, possibly because no woman on Earth would reasonably wish to identify with Wendy Torrance as played by Shelley Duvall. She’s a wreck from the moment we meet her, all quavery voice and shaky drags on cigarettes and nervous smiles and excuses for her husband. Well before the killing starts, Wendy is a broken and terrified person.

And Kubrick got her there, forced her there; the making-of documentary details his bullying, isolating her (“don’t sympathize with Shelley!”) and making fun of her when she complains and ripping all of her choices to pieces and setting impossible standards for her to meet so that he can castigate her when she fails, setting up an obvious dynamic of favoritism with Nicholson (who has nothing but good memories of working with Kubrick) and arranging for Duvall to fuck up and then yelling at her for it, putting her through a seemingly infinite number of not-good-enough takes until she, as an actress, is actually losing her entire shit. Up the stairs crying again, now again, now again, now again, until in the finished scene she’s shaking and sobbing so hard you can’t understand what she’s saying, waving the bat so weakly that it looks like her arms are about to give out.

Kubrick did this to Scatman Crothers too, racking up a world record of 148 takes for him – it happened in the scene where Crothers explains the “shining” to Danny, in which he is meant to look terrified, and you believe that he is terrified, mostly of the fact that he might be saying these words until he literally dies right there at that fucking table; “what do you want, Mr Kubrick,” he broke down and cried at one point, “what do you want?!” – but Duvall gets the most on-screen hysteria. She cried so hard making this movie that she literally ran out of tears and had to start super-hydrating herself. It’s ugly to watch, and a lot of people fundamentally dislike Wendy, think of her as weak or whiny. It’s admittedly hard to see the Final Girl quality of a person who spends the most memorable part of the movie choking out her lines from between snotty, wheezing sobs. But it’s ugly in a way that’s real, and that anchors the movie. Nicholson is so manic, tap-dancing around and doing celebrity impressions, that if Wendy weren’t this fucked-up, this evidently destroyed, you’d start laughing. All that blood would start to look like corn syrup. But Wendy seems broken and frantic – in large part because Shelley Duvall was at the very, very frayed end of her own personal rope – and so you believe that people might die.

But Wendy’s broken well before she enters the Overlook. So is Danny: Removed, strange, already pulled out of school. This is the part of the movie that King objected to the most strongly; the casting of Nicholson as Jack Torrance, Wendy’s evident Stockholm Syndrome, Danny’s un-adorable trauma. And he did this for entirely personal, entirely understandable reasons. The Shining was his novel about being an alcoholic, about his own personal fears that he would destroy his family. And in his version, Wendy is essentially a happy wife, and Jack is essentially a good man, who just happens to get the Devil in him when he starts to drink. In King’s version, Jack saves everyone at the end, by resisting the hotel’s/his alcoholism’s will.

And Kubrick doesn’t buy it. Before the story begins, Jack’s already broken his son’s arm; he’s already crossed the line, with no ghosts to help him along. So, in Kubrick’s take, Jack is not a good man. Jack is a very bad man, and he hates his family from the beginning, and he is always already a danger to them. The scary thing about The Shining is not that the hotel convinces Jack to go after his wife and child with an axe, but that he might have done the same thing even if they’d all stayed home. And the only reason his family is willing to be alone with him, to trap themselves in the “Overlook” hotel (the grindingly obvious symbolism is King’s, the graceful use of it is Kubrick’s) is that they can’t quite make themselves believe it. They love him, and they want to believe they are loved by him, and that fact alone is why they place themselves in obvious, mortal danger.

Plenty of critics have outlined Kubrick’s Jacksonian use of the unreliable narrator in The Shining: In every scene where Jack sees a “ghost,” there is a mirror, except in a scene where he’s trapped in a food locker, and only hears the “ghost” speaking to him, as if it were his own voice. The ghosts definitely speak to Jack in the language of his own fears and beliefs; there is always a party going on, with an open bar, and his wife and kid won’t let him attend it, and as a man and a white man he has the perfect right to “correct” the women, children, and people of color who try to thwart his will.

And of course, the cottage industry of “Shining” interpretations is well-known enough to have its own documentary; the takes on what the movie is really, “secretly” about, ranging from believable (it’s about Manifest Destiny!) to pure wacky-town (Kubrick faked the moon landing! Illuminati!) proliferate all over the web. But it’s hard not to think that many of these interpreters are working overtime not to see the actual, and very obvious, message: “Abusive drunks don’t make very good fathers or husbands.” Despite all the creeping dread and ominous visual tricks, The Shining tells a very simple story: A bad man hurts his family. They forgive him. So he tries to hurt them worse, and again.

Ghosts, demons, witches, haunted houses, killer bushes: In Kubrick’s Shining, and the work of Shirley Jackson, these are all distractions. The real horror lies in being human, in the things we believe to keep ourselves going. We believe we can get a fresh start if we move. We believe Daddy really loves us, he just gets mad sometimes. We believe that she would have died anyway, that there was nothing we could have done. We believe that our community has strong values, that we’re doing this in the name of justice, that we’re expelling the monster, that there’s no need to listen to a few malcontents. We believe that it will all be different if we can just get him away from the booze for a while. We believe, and believe, and believe, and the river of blood keeps flowing. Horror isn’t something outside or supernatural or Other: It’s us. It’s all that believing, and the truths we use belief to run away from. At a certain point, Shirley Jackson became too scared of other people to leave her own house. And she spent her life outlining what the world looked like, to a woman with those fears; telling us that, if we really thought about it, we’d do the same thing.

Consider, for example, this final little story about Shirley Jackson’s fan mail: “One of the few positive letters Shirley received after the publication of The Lottery came from a man whose name Shirley was sure she had seen in print,” wrote critic Jack Sullivan. “Assuming he was a fellow writer, she wrote back, ‘Thank you very much for your kind letter about my story. I admire your work too.’”

“Later,” Sullivan said, “she found out he had been accused of murdering his wife with an axe.”

Pleasant dreams.

[SD]

Strip Clubs, "Bands a Make Her Dance", and Music That Just Sounds Good (Mike Will Made It)

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 11:30:00 -0400

There are a few things you should know about me, and then I’ll get to talking about the song “Bands a Make Her Dance” by Juicy J, featuring Lil Wayne and 2 Chainz, and produced by Mike Will Made It. I’ll try to get through that first part quickly because it’s decidedly the less interesting than talking about ratchets and strip clubs.

I’ve only been to three strip clubs. The first one was called Cheeks. It’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and my girlfriend-at-the-time brought me there on my twenty-second birthday. I don’t remember why. It was terrible. There was a small lake of vomit in front of the mens room door, and it didn’t seem like anybody’s job to clean it up. Drinks cost about $20. We saw someone get bounced for licking a dancer’s chest, almost motorboating her, really.

Cheeks is a seedy place. It’s the kind of place where you invite a whistleblower from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and beat the whistleblowing out of him right there in the parking lot.

The second strip club was called Peepers. It’s in Utica. When I was in high school, there was a coffee shop next door where we used to hang out. We’d sit out in front smoking cigarettes and hackle the guys going into Peepers by calling out, “Peeper!” It was clever. Little did I know that, like, ten years later I’d be one of those peepers.

Peepers was maybe even more depressing than Cheeks because it’s extremely low rent. I mean, Santa Fe is a state capital. Utica is something like the opposite of that. Everything in Peepers seems like it’s covered in dirty black, low-pile carpeting. Everything except for the stage, which was a shiny (intentional?) black color that caught murky reflections of the lighting rig and, if I recall, dollar store disco ball hanging above. They either didn’t sell alcohol or the dancers weren’t fully nude. One or the other — possible both. It was a depressing experience that wouldn’t have happened if, you know, me and my friends hadn’t been up for a day or two, you know, doing stuff and drinking. Literally the only positive part of the experience was they played Drake’s “Best I Ever Had”, which I’ve already jotted down a few thousand words on. (Forthcoming - threat/promise.)

The last strip club was some place in Syracuse, New York. I don’t remember what it was called. I got there with a bachelor party and promptly passed out in an armchair. I remember it was very bright, like every non-dance-able surface was covered with lightbulbs, which seems odd so maybe I dreamt that.

Another thing about me, quickly, is that I’m really into thinking about how cultural gestures can unfairly co-opt or otherwise appropriate other people’s thematic lives. And I’m especially wary of getting myself sucked into a large-scale culture-generating machine that does that. Like what happened to Seven Samurai and how Clint Eastwood just seems like a super-racist now and his whole career sort of makes symmetrical sense to me now. So the whole thing about me (a person who, If I were a D&D character, wouldn’t have rolled a 20 in ‘strip club culture’) loving this song about strip clubs seems, on the face of it, maybe sort of unseemly? Especially the part about how the “You say no to ratchet pussy / Juicy J can’t” line always feels like this profound life-affirming experience.¹

Jon Caramanica wrote a really great piece in a recent T Magazine. He says, “the way some cities are known for their restaurants or their museums or their turn-of-the-century architecture, Atlanta’s landmarks are strip clubs”, and then he goes on to talk about how strip clubs are an integral part of the promotional cycle of rap music in the south — especially Atlanta, which is really just an incredible cultural epicenter of interesting rap music (and black culture). It might seem sort of facile, but I don’t think it’s wrong to say that the southern, black view of strip clubs is just different than your (read: my) northern, not-black view of them.

Future, who’s had like the steepest personal appreciation delta of any artist I can remember, talked to Caramanica in that piece, and he was pretty blunt: “I just knew I had to start with [strip clubs]. You gotta go through the front door to get to the back of the house.”

Clearly, there are a lot of cultural and pragmatic reasons why strip clubs are popular in rap music. (Cf., Hannibal Buress’s white strip clubs/black strip clubs joke — pretty funny/true.) On the other hand, strip clubs are places where people go to spend money to watch women take of their clothes and/or get lap dances. So for all the high-minded culture/history/business talk, there’s like a whole roar of applause for the more pragmatic reason why strip clubs figure so prominently in rap. (Plus, it’s not like everyone’s favorite white indie rocker isn’t actually some sort of exploitative sexual predator-artist, amiright? (yes).)

I don’t know, honestly, I see why strip clubs are dirty/nasty, but I also sort of agree with this joke I heard by David Huntsberger last night about how people try to put a stink to strippers — “Oh, you take off your clothes for money” — when in fact, every job is for money, and taking off your clothes is one of the easier jobs in the world. I think the larger point is that strip clubs foster a potentially exploitative work environment, but just about every work environment is or can be exploitative. (Rise up proletariat! False consciousness! Alienation, etc.!)

From my personal experience, I’m not a strip clubs type of person. I know this. It’s not that I think they’re implicitly bad, or that I don’t think people should pay money for sexual gratification. It’s partially that I don’t like the sort of person who goes there, ie, the sort of person who’s totally fine with the idea that you can pay for sexual gratification. I guess I’m drawing a sort of fine distinction. It’s like, I’m totally fine with the idea of paying for sex, but I just don’t want to - just like I’m fine with people being Republicans even though I certainly am not. I think the world is a large and diverse place, and a lot of things don’t really hurt other people, but the idea of them maybe hurts our own ideas. I mean, that’s basically the underpinning of the modern vernacular of ideology.

You can treat anybody or anything as a means to your own gratification rather than something meaningful and important in itself. “Bands a Make Her Dance” is reasonably misogynistic in its non-strip club content. It’s mostly viewing women as objects, using them, literally controlling them, and maneuvering them around in a hyper-real carnival of sexual exertion. I don’t think there’s a lot of profit in ‘defending’ the song on any high-minded terms. You basically just have to say that the song just is about creating an atmosphere of hazy, remorseless sexual adventure and accept it at that. I will say that if you think about it, that really is the effect that a lot of great art strives for and generally falls short of achieving to the extent at which “Bands a Make Her Dance” reaches. That’s one of the main reasons, I guess, why I think it’s such an amazing song.

So me. I don’t like strip clubs. I don’t like misogyny. I love this song about strip clubs and misogyny. Hey! Whaa happened?!

The easiest answer is that I’m a dark person, a hypocrite, someone who in his heart simply accepts the patriarchal values that run through our culture. I think there is a part of that going on here. If I were a more high-minded, a better, person I probably wouldn’t give the time of day to a song like “Bands a Make Her Dance”. I’d hear it once, or half of once, and turn it off. But I can’t. You say no to Juicy J. B Michael can’t!

OK, let’s cut to the chase (a thousand words in…): “Bands a Make Her Dance” sounds amazing. Honestly, the words could be all gibberish (Flit it from the tide like a hubba hubba space nun) and the song would still be amazing. I could get over my admittedly juvenile humor fixation on the term “ratchet pussy”. I really could.

I don’t think it’s untoward for someone who really has no interest in strip club culture to be at the same time totally enamored with strip club music. It’s not a form of slumming it or appropriation. I sort of think that the converse is true: if you were to simply deny the validity of strip club music, that would be cultural misstep. There’s nothing wrong with loving the hell out of “Bands a Make Her Dance” because it’s a pointless exercise to imagine your not liking it would otherwise — what? — save a stripper? Who are you, Drake? There is responsible cultural consumption, and I think that’s basically the best you can do. You just have to weigh and measure, think. And I’ve thought about it.

Thing is, Mike Will is this year’s Clams Casino. His production has been everywhere good: Future, Kanye, Rick Ross, Jeremih, Schoolboy Q, 2 Chainz, Gucci Mane. Like, he single handedly made Future, a pretty underwhelming performer heretofore, into one of my favorite rappers of the year. Go ahead and download his latest compilation mixtape. I’ll wait. It’s worth it.

Lil Wayne sort of brings some heat, 2 Chainz does his thing, Juicy J does his thing. I mean, like I said, the whole song is like a wet dream inside a sex dream inside a porno movie. The upside, I guess, is that Juicy J shows up his scene-biting usurper Spaceghostpurrp’s sex-imagining skills. This song makes the latter’s phonk-szxxx jams sound like the aural equivalent of a lewd drawing on a bathroom wall. “Bands a Make Her Dance” is a fully realized, near-Lynchian sexual dystopia. I don’t think it’s deep because it’s not really a metaphor for anything. There’s no symbolism. But it is a quite vivid and focused evocation that stands out from the ironically flat “make it rain / make that ass clap” approach to strip club songs.

I don’t think, thematically, “Bands a Make Her Dance” is really any better or worse than any other song. Like, I don’t really care about the personal motivations of Panda Bear or Lil Wayne or anyone else who makes music. I care about how the music sounds, because duh it’s music. Honestly, I wouldn’t be shocked if every Grizzly Bear song were actually about dipping live puppies in concrete to make statues because I know literally none of the words to any of their songs, and I actually figure that’s part of their artistic goal. I do know their music sound damned amazing. And “Bands a Make Her Dance” sounds, dare I say, even damneder amazinger.

That sort of issue should probably get looked at a little later on. The other thing, obviously, is that “Bands a Maker Her Dance” seems sort of exploitative since it’s, well, it’s all in the name actually. Your money is making this woman dance for you. Seems pretty degrading. OK, so we’ll look at that, too. My thinking goes several different ways to start about all this, honestly. It seems like a pretty common way to censure rap music is to say that it’s almost implicitly misogynistic. I mean, I think rap is trenchantly minsogynst, which garners a de facto “implicitness”, but it doesn’t have to be. ↩

How Should A Person Be (Dressed)?

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 08:32:00 -0400

The whole #menswear phenomenon is sort of stupid. That’s never stopped me from reading the blogs, trying to snipe deals on Styleforum, or lusting after a camo-Canadian tuxedo. I’ve indulged, spent a few hundred dollars on pants made of something called Cone Mills selvedge denim. I know my way around a Ludlow and a Fitzgerald. After all, there is a truth-y seduction to #menswear because you do get what you pay for, to a certain extent. (That extent stops well before $295 dopp kits, though.) Like with audio equipment or prime cuts of meat.¹

No, I don’t really mind #menswear culture, and for the most part I think it’s pretty harmless. Dub monks never hurt anybody. I don’t have any problem with guys blowing half a paycheck on Chromexcel® Horween because have you seen how that shit ages? Butter.

The ugly side of the culture, to me, is typified by blogs like Fuck Yeah Menswear, which is a marriage of hip-hop culture and Sartorialist snaps. (Of course they got a book deal.) Take their last post. I actually remember seeing the original photo on the Sartorialist, and I thought it was cool. I lingered on it. That guy’s gym bag probably cost as much as a month’s rent for me - maybe more. Dude’s just walking around SoHo, in his gym clothes, nice coat, wireless noise-canceling headphones, matching New Balance sneaks. But’s an interesting outfit. Stylish, strangely compelling.

The off the cuff pseudo-rap lyrics FYM adds are detestable, I think, for a few reasons. They’re all, basically, swag swag swag, idiom, class signifiers, I’m a nice white guy, isn’t this funny, ha ha, ha ha, swag. Now, the triumphalism of rap is, to me at least, a clear facade through which the weakness of the rapper is usually pretty clear. Rap works through a carefully-balanced dramatic irony: blowing money fast gets you nowhere quick, basically. Everyone knows that. These guys with jesus pieces end up in pieces, or they end up poor, or both. Alternately, rap is a lot like ancient poetry, like prayer. Rappers, (and athletes, among others) basically sacrifice themselves on behalf of the culture, and these songs are their glory. There’s something there that’s beautiful and transcendent, even — especially — in a song like “Grindin’” or the sudden worn down destruction of a running back like a Shaun Alexander.

Fuck Yeah Menswear colonizes rap and removes all its poetry, all its irony. FYM sucks all the gravity out of the music and culture. Fuck Yeah Menswear takes the “black” out of “Black Republican”. It takes the “n//s” out of “N//s in Paris”. It is “R Money”. It’s sad and a little evil at the same time.

And that aspect of #menswear culture, with its constant SWAG and CRISPY and FUCKS WIT and etc. is pretty ugly to me. I mean, to put it clearly, why wouldn’t a bunch of rich white guys want to hear music almost exclusively about degrading women, iced out Audemars, and wearing Margiela in a Murciélago. It is irony free lifestyle music for the rich or rich-aspirant, which I sort of think makes up most ardent #menswear enthusiasts. Even my sort of personal hero, Kanye West, as Jordan Sargent pointed out last night on Twitter, pays explicit homage to American Psycho at the beginning of the “Love Lockdown” video.

The essentially post-Kanyeezian luxury rap trend has coincided in perfect felicity with the empty and acquisitive 1%er type of culture, a sad irony. It’s like skipping to the end of Huck Finn and walking away with the idea that it’s good to re-enslave your friends so you can go on a fun trip down a river. There’s a whole journey, a whole other side, to the Caligulan excess of rap that seems to be totally lost on a lot of people — critics and proponents, both. Either way, it’s all #SWAG #SWAG #SWAG.

I’m not saying all rap should be ‘conscious’ rap, or that trap rap is bad, or anything like that. Sort of like people who eat meat but only the ethically-sourced kind (or at least would, if they could afford it), I think the spirit in which you consume rap culture matters. I am a big fan of rap music. I’m not well to do. If my life were Kanye’s discography, I’m much closer to College Dropout than My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. All you can do is try to think hard about things and get on with your life, right? A lot of it is made up of tacit social agreements, or social exchanges whose characters remain obfuscated, simply because they’re either in our blind spot or we don’t really want to see them. See them.

My girlfriend thinks I’m “really into bro culture” because I watch the NFL, think Tom Haverford is the best character on Parks and Recreation, listen to Dave Matthews Band, and wish to own a cloth top Jeep. Is she right? Sort of. Again, as far as, I guess, superficial cultural signifiers go, she is. Or, more to the point, whether someone is or isn’t a part of any culture depends on the intimate relationship between their own self-conception and their notion of that culture. It’s easy to slip into caricature or offensiveness if one, the other, or both are too far off from would reasonably called ‘accurate’. It’s a difficult sort of equation to balance.

There’s a string ball knot of lines connecting the different states of relating to culture. You can be in it (even if you’re not an obvious candidate), try to be in that culture, knowingly or not make fun of the culture, or just making a hash of the whole thing. I don’t think, for instance, How To Dress Well (né Tom Krell) always does a great job of it.

Sometimes it seems like Krell could be doing something like whiteface minstrelsy thing. Covering “I Wish”, one of R. Kelly’s more poignant songs, which starts,

Rollin’ through the hood just stopped to say what’s up
And let you know your baby boy ain’t doing so tough

is a challenging move. Ending it by crooning, “Come on and braid my hair / Come on and braid my hair / Come ooooon and braid my hair / Come on and braid myyyyy hair / Myyyy hair.” Is even tougher. The fact that Krell ultimately concludes by saying, “That song’s too real, though.” makes the performance - what? An even more ambiguous act.

The whole act gives me pause because, even though I think R. Kelly is amazing and great at making music, I also think people (a lot of white people) tend to lionize him for being “crazy” and making “dirty fuck jams” and so on. You know, othering the hell out of him, basically.

It’s a fraught time for this stuff, honestly. What with Mitt Romney saying he feels like he’d be better off if he were born Mexican. And #menswear bloggers appropriating every bit of rap culture that’s not nailed down. How To Dress Well seems to fit quite snugly into the “PBRnB” moniker, popularized by Sean Fennessy: “this is rhythm and blues by or for hipsters”. And, I suppose the implication is that “hipsters” = “white hipsters” for the most part.

There just seems to be this dichotomy (definitely false) where “hipster” means “liberal white person” means “non-racist” and non-hipster means “everyone else” means “potentially racist”. I know that sounds wrong, but there’s a reason why things like historical guides to “hipster racism” or even a (potentially facetious) Vincent Gallo stud service. It’s why Stuff White People Like became the Cathy comic strip of institutionalized liberal racism. Clearly, I mean, clearly white people occupying other cultures are almost implicitly acting in a bad manner, so the whole white liberal hipster identity, the one that purifies radio R&B, is racist. Can you visit other cultures? Certainly. But you shouldn’t just take them over, throw out the stuff you don’t like, the stuff that’s too ‘ethnic’, and call it a day. PBRnB is sort of evil seeming to me.

These are all the different things I think about when I listen to How To Dress Well.

The thing is, while I feel comfortable saying Krell is a hipster, I don’t think he’s racist at all. He’s an artist, borrowing from a variety of traditions, the prevalent one being R&B and the less apparent ones being Grouper-like tape loop collage, noise, art rock, ambient electronic music, rap, pop, metal — everything and anything, like basically every good musician does.

The story of Krell’s artistic genesis feels true:

During the summer of 2009, Krell, then living in Brooklyn, began obsessively listening to “Right Side of My Brain,” The-Dream’s lush ode to romantic delirium from his Love vs. Money LP, and it spurred a shift in How to Dress Well. “I remember sitting in my living room, sweating and singing, and really feeling like I had made a new step,” he says of recording the buoyant, fuzzed-out pop track “Kidnap City” (which he’d later remake and include as a bonus track on the Love Remains vinyl). “I’m just a tall, skinny Jewish guy, but I’m singing R&B,” he says, reflecting on the epiphany. “And to do that and be, like, Yeah, that’s what feels right, took a long time.”

There’s a lot of “Right Side Of My Brain” in How To Dress Well — the distorted vocals, sad-but-ecstatic bounce, the overwhelming dolor.

In an interview with Pitchfork, Krell’s view of himself and how he fits into the culture is even more clear.

I encountered this with a lot of German journalists who say, “So you’re the only R&B singer who sings about anything other than sex and money”. Well that’s racist. That’s wrong, and just really close minded. I tend to be moved to write songs because I encounter an affect which is ambiguous or complicated or stresses me out, or perplexes me in some way. And sex and drugs, I just don’t have any problems with them. They’re both really great.*

Still, that’s not to say that Krell is somehow musically better than Terius Nash or Miguel or Chris Brown or Kandi or K Michelle. It’s not to assert that Krell’s music is better because it’s more ‘experimental’ or radio-antagonistic (despite his personal goals to the contrary). It’s just to say that Krell — unlike, seemingly, some fans and critics — tries to engage honestly with his influences and make the music he wants to make. He’s not just biting a style, riding a chill wave, exploiting a set of signifiers, or erasing an history. I think, but only Krell himself knows in his heart, that he’s acting in good faith, so it would be extremely cynical as a fan or critic to lionize him for making a ‘better’ version of R&B, which just equates to being more artful or less black.

I remember feeling quite upset the first time heard How To Dress Well. It was the beginning of 2011, and I was in the big Barnes & Noble in Herald Square (third floor, bathrooms and literature). I was listening to Love Remains and thinking, How could this be on all those year end lists? You know, it sounds terrible. All that clipping and distortion hurts your ears, especially if you’re listening some place like a Barnes & Noble with earbuds stuck inside your head, as I am wont to do. And they’re really good earbuds, so they were really good at reproducing the head-splitting dissonance Krell had made.

Even though more contained music — compressed, tight, bass-heavy rap or, alternately, rock music with some air in it — sounds best in my earbuds, I am used to listening to just about every genre with them. So it was basically a singular experience listening to Krell’s falsetto-driven songs with their trebly, bare instrumentation (mixed extremely poorly with a scuzzy, lo- fi presentation). I mean, it sounded worse than your average Blu mixtape does these days. I came to the conclusion that the album should be heard, if at all, from a set of speakers at quite a low volume. Hopefully, as you’re falling asleep. (Or, hopelessly, as you’re slitting your wrists.)

In this way, Love Remains is something of an aggressive, antagonist musical statement. Mark Richardson, writing the definitive, to me, take on Love Remains, says,

The distortion is at places so harsh, it’s hard not to wonder why Krell doesn’t do away with it. But with the sex and romantic yearning removed, the tension between the ethereal and prayerful mood comes from the quality of the recording, the way the music seems to be breaking apart as you are listening to it. How to Dress Well is to my mind the biggest breakthrough in home-recorded lo-fi in years.

“Biggest breakthrough”! This, from a certifiable home-recording lo-fi freak.

If you take as a premise that Love Remains gets a lot of its charge from its aggressively scuzzy sound doing war with Krell’s angelic vocals, then Total Loss is another antagonistic statement, but of an entirely different kind. Much of the sonic dissonance is gone. In fact, Krell’s production veers dangerously close to Clams Casino territory sometimes, which is a good look but not exactly a breakthrough at this point. Clams’s influence is especially strong on “Set It Right”, which will surely be touched on by many as the album’s stand-out track. But the song’s major impact doesn’t hit until the beat quells itself to soft piano chords and Krell lists those lost souls he misses.

So much of Total Loss is about just that, but it’s a loss that’s evoked as a searching. You can’t look for something that’s present, after all. Thus: loss. The thing is, philosophically and physically, just about nothing in life is truly present. We’re all missing each other, either through glancing proximity or just via garbled meaning. Cell phones, talking on them, that is, figure prominently in the lyrics of Total Loss - an antiquated notion, especially for someone, like Krell, who’s younger than thirty. But even though the album sounds gorgeous and expansive, it does have that receiver-to-the-ear intimacy that you get from late night talks.

I remember being laid up with pneumonia for a month when I was, I don’t even remember, maybe fifteen or sixteen. I re-read Lord of the Rings and talked to this a girl for hours, basically doing one by day and the other by night. I have no detailed recollection of either, really, but I remember the memory of it, the experience’s impression, and it was one of my life’s formative ones. Carving out the shape of my own psyche, night after night, in pitch black conversation with a voice whose body I’d only see a handful of times afterward. It was strange, but utterly essential.

Total Loss operates within a similar continuum of memory’s memory - the shape left on your soul by an experience you hardly remember. Musically, it’s touched all over by partial-recollection. The melody of “Say My Name”, along with its lyrical string of questions, sounds strikingly (improbably) similar to Vanessa William’s “Colors of the Wind”. “Running Back” lays out the picked-clean, perfectly preserved skeleton of a Michael Jackson song. “Struggle”, coming two-thirds of the way through Total Loss, cannibalizes the album’s very own first track.

Throughout, Total Loss remains utterly, almost transcendentally beautiful to listen to. Its instrumentation varies from piano to samples to guitar, but all stay within a crystalline structure that’s only occasionally — and quite consciously — abraded by background noise or sonic fuzz. It’s instantly recognizable as the continuation of Love Remains, yet also quite a departure from it.

Tom Krell is a fine name, but his musical moniker is just perfect. It’s not that How To Dress Well is particularly stylish music. It’s that, I think, one of the ideas behind it all is that music is just emotion wearing garments made of sound. How To Dress Well is less about fashion than it is about the ontological project of presentation, something in common with fashion, yet from an ends perspective, not a means one.

Sometimes writers or interviewers make a bit of a fuss about Krell’s philosophy background. Now, given that I studied philosophy and have a master’s, you’d think I’d be really into this, too. I mean, his DePaul student biography even says he’s into late Wittgenstein, which is basically my favorite thing in the world to read. But I don’t think that there’s a lot of philosophical import to, or at least overlap from Krell’s stated interests with, How To Dress Well. Krell’s music is thoughtful, but I personally find nothing from the tradition of German idealism from Kant to Schiller to Hegel in it. Rather, How To Dress Well is scrupulously ambiguous. It’s music whose hooks, influences, sounds, themes — everything — are almost immediately recognizable, yet they’re reconfigured in ways that mystify rather than clarify. They present without being present. It’s not exactly rigorous and systematic, like Kant, though I suppose listening to its dark search for transcendence is something like slogging through Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

Ultimately, How To Dress Well does everything right that a more vulgar #menswear culture does wrong. It’s just a happy accident that the two have similar names, but they hopefully they make for an illuminating contrast. How To Dress Well honors the tradition from which it comes while adding to it. It is searching, searing music. It’s serious without being at all ponderous. It makes you feel better about life, while constantly indicating that there’s little to feel good about. How To Dress Well offers nothing in the way of #menswear advice, and that’s also some of the highest praise I can give it.

What’s really unfortunate is not consumer culture, necessarily. It’s that basically every music album, regardless of quality, is ‘worth’ $9.99. Every book, $12.99. I’d rather pay $50 for a book by Heather Christle or a CD by Kanye West and then spend the dollar or so that that Malcolm Gladwell thing is worth to me. ↩

In honor of our Anais Nin essay getting the nod from Longreads...

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 16:49:00 -0400

In honor of our Anais Nin essay getting the nod from Longreads and The Atlantic (thanks!) here is Anais talking to Henry Miller.

This doesn’t really get fun — Henry Miller, SURPRISE, does not have anything very interesting to say, unless you find ancient dudes mumbling about Buddhist spaceships riveting — until you know the backstory. These two had broken up in the early 1940s, when he moved to California and just sort of assumed she’d follow him, which was the last straw for Anais in re: what she termed Henry’s “monstrous egotism.” She had sent him quite a few letters informing him of things along the lines of: “Your letters… are cold, egotistical, and concerned purely with your pleasure. All you can answer to my emotional attitude when I think I can leave and then cannot leave is thoroughly inhuman and mechanical… Do not misunderstand me. I am not asking you to return. It would be meaningless if you did.”

They were estranged for quite a while, until they managed to spark up a strained friendship through his wife, Eve. “Strained” because Henry didn’t see anything wrong with selling Anais’s personal sexy-times letters about their secret sexy-times relationship to libraries, thereby giving Anais massive panic attacks, to which Henry (always a sensitive guy) responded by telling her that everyone was going to find out they boned anyway, and if she wanted the letters back, she should go to the library and steal them.

And yet, suddenly, the man who’d sponged off of Anais, used her money to self-publish, and used her writing to pad his own books, was being hailed as a genius and a hero of literary modernism. And her only chance of getting recognition for her writing (which was going through a very long, very dry spell of being rejected by every single publisher and magazine to which she applied) was to capitalize on the newfound interest in their “friendship,” which meant she needed his co-operation. Which he made really fun, by writing her letters such as, “I probably never did a portrait of a woman artist because I never knew any intimately.” (They had been together for eleven years. He had proposed, on multiple occasions. One of the chief bones of contention in their relationship, as he well knew, had been that he wrote so much about his exes, and not about her.) “Is it necessary to do one just to prove one is not antifeminist?”

Well. You really have to search your heart for your personal that guy, and imagine your whole career depending on doing publicity appearances with him, to enjoy this clip. Because here are Anais Nin and Henry Miller! Who totally did not bone! At all! And are just such good pals! And all of this backstory comes out at around 1:02, when he’s cut her off for the second time in sixty seconds, and is now talking about how he is the world’s best person at having dreams, and she barely suppresses a glare at him, and then just turns her face to the camera with a look that seems, to me, to be the world’s best expression of “OH FOR THE DAY MY WITHERED OLD WINDBAG OF A MAN-CHILD EX-BOYFRIEND WILL SHUT HIS FLIPPING FACE.”

The Battle For The Soul of Kitty Pryde

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 13:55:00 -0400

“I’m Kitty Pryde, and I’m here to prove that I’m a real life bitch, and not just the Internet!”

And with that, I finally realized that I was no longer one of the Young People of Today. All of us have moments, I suppose, where we realize our age. Mine is thirty. And, since that age is not “seventy-two,” it is probably painfully Thought Catalog to even talk about it. But there is a moment, where you realize that you are not A Young Person any more. A Point of No Youngturn. A Youngterloo, if you will. “I’m a real life bitch, and not just the Internet” was mine.

Also notable: I learned that I could still attract the creepier variety of twenty-something dude, should I wear a shirt that exposed the vast majority of my bra. “I love the color of your pants,” one gentleman said, at the bar I stopped in prior to the show, while sliding his hand along the greater portion of my ass. (They were purple. It was not that great.) Another gentleman congratulated me on “really getting in there” during the mosh section of the show, although by that point, I had been irritated, and was mostly just punching the creepy dudes in the kidneys. And, most telling of all: A man, who was friends with “a producer,” had introduced himself to me at the bar.

“Are you really into the blog rap?” I had said.

“No,” he said, grinning. “I’m just into teenage girls.”

I’m trying to establish ambiance for you here. Specifically, the ambiance of Santos, the night Kitty Pryde — whose real age has been withheld from the public; she’s clarified that she is not, as she says in one of her songs, actually thirteen, but other than that, it’s anyone’s guess — played her second New York show. It was an uncomfortable atmosphere to be in, saturated as it was with both “Barely Legal” fetishes and nostalgia for an era I was actually old enough to have lived through the first time around.

Opening act Lakutis, for example, was the trend-leader in terms of rocking the hot look for dudes (seriously: at least three guys sported it, including Kitty Pryde’s brother) which was exactly the same as it had been when I was fourteen: Long skater hair, cargo shorts, and a sweatshirt that no man who was not already associated with Das Racist could wear with a reasonable expectation of getting laid. One song consisted entirely of the phrase “Dennis Quaid, bitch, Dennis, Dennis Quaid, bitch,” repeated until he got bored with it. His stage presence veered between a stoned, sarcastic smirk and a more earnest, but also more disturbing, serial-killer glare at the ceiling. “Too ill for the law,” the whitest-looking man you have ever seen chanted, occasionally sticking his tongue out at the audience.

“You spend your whole life in the thrall of cool teenagers, and right when you get it, you’re over it,” my notes read. Also in my notes: “Thank God the guy in the Transformers mask is actually performing.” He was Lakutis’s DJ, and had been a disconcertingly theatrical presence at the bar.

Actually, it helped that Lakutis looked and behaved so exactly like every guy that I had a crush on in middle school, because by the time Kitty Pryde came on stage, I had spent a substantial amount of time working out my animus in re: those dudes. (SARCASM STOPS BEING FUNNY WHEN YOU ARE EQUALLY SARCASTIC ABOUT EVERYFUCKINGTHING, WHAT DO YOU ACTUALLY FUCKING THINK, IF I DON’T HEAR IT IN FIVE SECONDS I AM CONCLUDING THAT IT’S NOTHING: Sorry, Lakutis, that was for Tyler [Redacted], not you. Yeah, you heard me, Tyler, you smug eighth-grade bastard.) And I was therefore prepared to know exactly what she was talking about.

◑

Here’s the thing about Kitty Pryde: When she wants to, she can be very good. She has a little, breathy voice, sort of like Kathleen Hanna, and, for quite a while, seemed as if she could not rap very fast at all; also sort of like Kathleen Hanna (and I promise to stop comparing the two, because aside from the timbre of their voices, they have nothing in common) she’s managed to turn her technical deficits into strengths. You know her when you hear her. Whether you like what you hear depends on a lot of things. The baby voice and self-conscious I’m-too-young-for-this-unwholesomeness schtick — “you apologize when I see you do a line, but like, it’s fine, I’m openminded,” in a song that also features Kitty coolly name-dropping her (eesh) Bud Light Lime — are immediately and intensely grating, for the first dozen listens. But you will still listen that first dozen times; the dreamy, pretty beats and the hypnotic detachment of her delivery pull you in. Until, at a certain point, it stops being irritating, and just gets great.

Pryde is capable, when she wants to, of writing songs that lay out the whole confusing territory of adolescent female desire with startling frankness: The above-quoted “Okay Cupid,” for example, which mixes drunk-dials and snorted lines with names drawn on binders and fantasy weddings, songs of innocence and experience delivered together, with no real consciousness (because real teenage girls have none) of any huge disconnect between the two. Or the whole hot-house atmosphere of “JUSTIN BIEBER!!!!!,” which has Kitty kissing posters, buying branded pens, and drawing the Biebs’ initials on her clothes, while also admitting the startling cruelty with which actual adolescent girls treat actual, non-celebrity adolescent boys: “Boys are like milk and they expire if you’re late on ‘em. It’s legal for me, man, I don’t even have to wait on ‘em,” says predatory Kitty, the moment she snaps out of her Bieber trance. “Drive ‘em to the show, and if I lose ‘em in the pit, then fuck it, let’s just go.”

The whole thing is like a blog-rap High Wind In Jamaica: It sounds authentically young, not least because it’s just as brutal, narcissistic, and awkward (Bud Light LIME!) as youth actually is in practice. Enough of this, and you begin to think that Kitty Pryde alone might be enough to deliver us from the long national nightmare of boy-centric, fake-teen-queen sweetness that is Taylor Swift. Even when Taylor wants to go for “mean,” she only ever manages to land at “petulant.” Kitty sounds like she could make your lunch period an actual living Hell. And the girl knows whereof she speaks; as far as I know, she’s still got a day job at Claire’s Accessories. For all the male creepitude on display, there were also plenty of girls at the show, who seemed convinced that Pryde was — albeit sarcastically and self-consciously — getting at something real.

And yet, for a long time, people — including Kitty herself — wondered if her audience was “in on the joke.” The “joke,” summed up by Kitty herself, goes like this: “My friends were all into real hip-hop culture, so they weren’t really taking it seriously and they’d be like, ‘Wow, you’re terrible at this, but it’s cute.’” It’s the kind of joke only a girl would play on herself — there’s no way I can really be as good or as smart as you, but aren’t I adorable for failing? — even as she makes overt jabs at the idea that, as a young female human, she can’t be expected to know anything about music. On “BIEBER,” for example: “I’m thirteen. What is lean? And what is dream-pop?” This is apparently the song that gave rise to the rumor that she was, in fact, thirteen years old. The fact that she spends the rest of it fucking and (more to the point) driving a car was dismissed; the joke went un-gotten. Her Facebook in-box filled up, she said, with unsolicited naked pictures and dirty-talk from pervs, seemingly eager to take the flipped gender-power dynamic of “BIEBER” and turn it right side up again.

I’m giving you all of this — the good, the bad, the whole landscape of female honesty and feminine self-deprecation, surrounded as it is by the glorious Sea of Pervs — because the thing is, I believe there’s a battle for the soul of Kitty Pryde going on, right now. And, based on her show, I’m afraid the pervs might be winning.

◐

It’s the giggle. It showed up less than three seconds into her show, in her first introduction — “what up dogs;” she couldn’t get through “dogs” — and reoccurred between almost every song. You’ve heard it on her songs, where it sounds self-conscious, performative, mocking. As well it should, because that giggle — the breathy, trilling little ascenscion up a delicate scale — is the one my friends and I practiced every day from the time we were fifteen until we were twenty. It was the “I want something” giggle, the “I’m so little” giggle, the “wow, play me another record and tell me all your opinions about it, you big, manly college sophomore, you” giggle, the giggle every girl knew how to pull out of her pocket when she needed it, and we needed it until the precise moment that we stopped getting attention for being teenagers and realized that guys our own age actually liked us better if we seemed like we did know how to give blow jobs. Kitty’s mastery of the giggle is one of the most charming things about her, in the context of a song, because she gives it the degree of sarcasm it deserves.

Live, she means it. Live, she commands her audience to “jump up and down, you know, bounce,” which last word she proceeds to adorably demonstrate, while doing the giggle, as if there is a single female member of her audience who has not for some reason found it necessary to physically demonstrate her understanding of the word “bounce” while attempting to get attention. (For me, it was when a guy called his beer “hoppy.” I’m not proud.) This isn’t a cranky, second-wave feminist point about Pryde objectifying herself; when a girl shows someone she knows what “bounce” means, she does it for damn good, highly selfish reasons, which I respect. It’s a bullshit-detector point. On record, and in interviews, Pryde has a finely honed bullshit detector. On record, that’s why she’s great, especially if you are or have been a teenage girl. She gets that the “adorable little girl” act is always just that: An act, a cover for messy, bloody, meaty adolescent desires and emotions that are just as rambunctious and anarchic as any boy’s.

Live, however, her bullshit detector falters. Live, she’ll pull out tricks so old that any woman in the audience can smell them for miles.

And this is especially disappointing because her songs are getting better and better. For one thing: She does, actually, know how to rap. Her flow is getting faster, more varied; she’s relying less on the dreamy ambience and jokes, and more on skill. The “it’s cute that I’m terrible” gag is apparently losing its charm for her; she’s actually working for it now. She covered songs by her idols, Danny Brown (the name on her binder in the “Okay Cupid” video; he was in the audience) and Tyler the Creator (“he won’t talk about me onliiiine”) and she did a good job of it. Even the little-girl voice can be discarded, apparently: During one song, she screamed “FUCK” on the regular, in full-on Cookie Monster bass.

And even in the midst of the giggling and bouncing, there were moments to remind you of why you like her: Her DJ played gunshot noises, incessantly enough to irritate (“Kitty Pryde has never heard a gunshot” — my notes, which are maybe presumptuous, but by the eighteenth gunshot noise in a row, I was willing to make a bet). But when she paused for a moment, between songs, to fulminate against a boy who “won’t return my Facebook friend requests,” and the DJ played a gunshot or two, just to underline the massive Facebook-related injustice Kitty had suffered, my notes read “for some reason the best thing I have ever seen on stage.” Which is an overstatement, sure, but it was a jolt of honest adolescent selfishness, immaturity, and cruelty, which for some reason is still thrilling coming from a girl, and which is why I listen to Kitty Pryde. And when she commanded that we bow our heads in a moment of prayer to BIEBER!!!!, I was reverent as all Hell.

And yet the “barely legal” thing is gaining steam, and in the context of her live show, it doesn’t always seem mocking. One new song’s hook goes “I’m just a little girl and you’re a grown-ups man,” the plural on “ups” alone being irritating enough to take it into “bwain huwty undewstandy Cwismas” territory. (Note, in that video, a demonstration of both The Giggle and The Bounce; these are old tricks, is what I’m saying.) She’s smarter than that, and she hopefully knows that she’s smarter than that, and it’s all the more frustrating for occurring in one of the songs where she’s demonstrating her steadily improving skills. Pryde is growing up; very soon, she’s not going to be a teenager any more (that is, assuming that she’s still a teenager now). And she’s going to have to reach for something besides the sexy-baby schtick, or else she’s going to hit a point of dimininuh bwuhwhuuhhh.

That is, if we even let her get that far.

“If you give her a few years, she’s going to be amazing,” I said to the guy who liked teenage girls — he was actually quite nice, it turned out — after the show.

“She won’t be around in a few years,” he said. “She’s a flash in the pan.”

Which is the real problem with liking teenage girls, it turns out. It may be true, as my partner pointed out, that “Internet rap has become like high school for about eight people.” But — and correct me if I’m wrong — I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone suggest that Kitty’s male compatriots won’t be allowed to grow up, and learn their craft. Tyler the Creator won’t always have to be an enfant terrible. Lakutis will be allowed to stick his tongue out at “the law” for as long as he’s interested. But at least some of the men who are buying tickets to Kitty Pryde shows have no interest in seeing what happens when she gets past the little-girl thing and becomes a woman. Those men can be young, and they can do what young men do: Struggle, grow up, develop, get better. But Kitty Pryde, and her youth, can only ever be a gag. A joke. She can’t grow up, or get better, because if and when she does, the joke won’t be funny any more. She’ll stop being a little girl who likes rapping — yet another girl displaying gifts that, as Samuel Johnson notoriously said, are “like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all” — and she’ll start being a woman trying to make her own music. And who cares about those, really?

Which is why I left the show let down, and irritated. And wondering what would happen if Kitty dropped the giggle from her live shows. My bet is, the people who want to see her keep making music would still be there.

[SD]

Don't Let Thoughts Into Your Head: On Podcasts

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 08:57:00 -0400

They list. And in the porches of their ears I pour.

—The soul has been before stricken mortally, a poison poured in the porch of a sleeping ear. But those who are done to death in sleep cannot know the manner of their quell unless their Creator endow their souls with that knowledge in the life to come. The poisoning and the beast with two backs that urged it king Hamlet’s ghost could not know of were he not endowed with knowledge by his creator. That is why the speech (his lean unlovely English) is always turned elsewhere, backward. Ravisher and ravished, what he would but would not, go with him from Lucrece’s bluecircled ivory globes to Imogen’s breast, bare, with its mole cinquespotted.

I wrote out this little epiphany as a warning to myself, though now that it’s somewhat too late.

It started on the north end of Astoria Park yesterday afternoon around 3pm. Well, it started toward the south-middle part of the park, right in the park’s sweet spot, where I was crossing a particularly green part of the field walking my dogs during which time I was listening to “Latest in Paleo” S02E02. The host, Angelo Coppola, made some claim I disagreed with, and he wasn’t there for me go over it with him. But I thought he was quite wrong.

To wit, his selectiveness (cherrypicking) in emphasizing certain idiosyncratic and heterogenous scientific findings form no better or logical system of nutrition than the state-mandated, corporate-funded one. Or the (entirely wrongheaded) homeopathic agenda. Or the entirely innocent, “noble savage” style of dining most Americans are accustomed to growing up on. The fact is, you are what you eat on a few literal levels, and the one I’m most interested in is how people make their decisions. As in, you’re basically free to eat whatever you want, so by thinking about what you do choose to eat, you can diagnose a lot of your life’s problems (economic, social, epistemological) and also discover many of its perhaps unnoticed benefits (economic, social, epistemological). That’s interesting to think about, I think. But, further, though, given that there literally one million contradictory studies on the health benefits (or deficiencies) of the great North American Granny Smith apple alone, I find it 100% preposterous that you could come up with a diet vetted and validated by science or medical professionals. A notion you, Angelo Coppola, bear out in episode after episode (well, for at least the two episodes I listened to) by running segments debunking studies and medical findings. So what is the point, at all, of citing any studies in your own favor, in support of your chosen lifestyle? Shouldn’t that practice make the truly learned and astute listener of your podcast suspect your own podcast? If not from an authoritative standpoint, which I should think you’d concede, then on the basis of common sense or logic? I mean, you end up sounded either quite stupid or as if you think your audience is quite stupid when you select this ground-less fact over another and assert its quality based on no quality other than your own discern.

I had all those thoughts, but not until well after I turned off the podcast, which occurred in between my having those thoughts and my having this little epiphany that lead me to turn off the podcast.

See, as I walked from the sweet spot of the south-middle field in Astoria Park to the bread heel end-like north end of Astoria Park, I grew more and more cross at Angelo Coppola until I decided to turn of his podcast. A few other factors contributed to my turning off his podcast.

It was really very nice outside. If you’ll follow me on Instagram, you could see photographic evidence of that.

I was entirely bummed out about not listening to music right then. I think I form really strong sense memories about places, but only in conjunction with smells, sounds, or like events. I’ll smell a smell and automatically recall some room or feeling I had in a room or something, and the same way it is with music. And since it was such a great day, weather-wise, and I was having such a nice time, feelings-wise what with walking my dogs and feeling physically much better compared to earlier, I was really unhappy about how I probably would instantly forget all about this feeling since I didn’t really have anything to anchor it on, except for maybe an increasing disinterest in the paleo diet. I mean, I was basically marrying this great moment in my life to listening to some (in my mind, at that point) utterly repugnant charlatan who probably smells like rotten cheese making dirty love to spoiled eggs inside a charnel house. So I decided to turn off the podcast, and within a few moments, maybe forty steps back round the end of the park following the southern, unpaved rise in the hill underneath Hellgate Bridge, I decided to stop listening to podcasts altogether for at least a while but hopefully ever.

Here’s an incomplete list of podcasts I’ve listened to lately.

Mike and Tom Eat Snacks (every single weekly episode, at least four times)
Pod F Tompkast (every single roughly monthly episode, at least five times)
ESPN Fantasy Focus Football (every single daily episode, for the last three years)
ESPN Football Today (every single roughly daily episode, for the last two years)
You Look Nice Today (every single roughly monthly episode, at least seven times)
Professor Blastoff (every single roughly monthly episode, at least twice)
The Talk Show With John Gruber (every single roughly weekly episode, for at least two years)
Back To Work (every single roughly weekly episode, for a year)
Jordan Jesse Go (every single weekly episode, many at least twice, for at least three years)
The B.S. Report (every single episode, for at least five years)
Stop Podcasting Yourself (every weekly episode, for at least three years)

Of course I’ve listened to podcasts here and there like Nerdist, Marc Maron, How Was Your Week, Joe Posnaski Poscast, Doug Loves Movies, Judge John Hodman, Superego, and so on, etc.

A poorly constructed mental model tells me I’ve listened to one one half year’s worth of podcast audio since I started listening to podcasts five years ago. That is ten percent of that time, and I suspect the figure may be accurate.

There are some strategies for listening to podcasts for a tenth of your living life.

Listen to podcasts in bed at night, and all day in bed on weekends that you spend in bed. Listen to podcasts while you’re reading, working, walking, running, sitting, shitting, and writing. Listen to podcasts while you’re playing video games for hundreds of hours. Listen to podcasts on the subway when you’re too drunk to read. Listen to podcasts in one ear while you’re doing everything in your life.

I admit that there’s nothing 100% wrong, pernicious, and evil about podcasts as such. I also concede that I take things “to the extreme” sometimes. That said, I think the logical form of my circumstances can retain its shape when applied to less severe cases. Let’s think about it for a second.

Binge podcast listening is a lot like binge Netflix viewing, for instance.

I think binge Netflix viewing is pretty bad, even though I do it. Why it’s bad is that it “turns your brain off”. It does that by showing you the same things you’ve already seen, thought about, and drawn conclusions about the first or second time you saw them. If you’re still thinking about them or drawing conclusions about them on the fifth or sixth viewing, then you’re not exactly binging on Netflix in my mind, you’re studying. (Why are you studying Coach?) By occupying your optical nerve and the parts of your brain that make sense of things (all of it?), you’re basically idling its engine so that it’s not entirely off (not that that’s possible unless = dead, but still) but it’s not achieving particularly high RPM either. I think we can all agree to that sketch of binging on Netflix, right?

But watching Netflix in moderation is fine, right? Yes. But watching Netflix is intrinsically different than listening to podcasts.

I find that I’m a fairly (or somewhat) depressive person. Sometimes I have a good idea, and even less frequently I engage it and achieve it in some sense. But for the most part, I think I have a sort of idle, Zen state of not thinking a lot about things. And I’m OK with that. I’m not very quick, but maybe some of that is self-induced by my constantly listening to podcasts. Because, see, listening to things like talk radio shows or podcasts is like plugging a mainline of someone else’s thoughts straight into your brain. So, then, your brain can shut off and let these other thoughts simply run across it like your broad, pimply back in the shower. And when the shower is over, your back is still broad and pimply, and it hasn’t really done anything and you barely even tried to wash at it because who even owns a scrub brush or has the flexibility to get a sponge or something to that part right below your shoulder blade. My back is smooth and rippled with muscle, but you get the idea right. Washing your brain with someone else’s thoughts in audio format doesn’t have a beneficial or even propaedeutic effect, I risk.

Simply letting someone else pipe thoughts into your head sounds like it would be OK for two reasons.

1) If you carefully choose which podcasts to listen to, and listen to quality ones like Mike and Tom Eat Snacks and You Look Nice Today, then it’s ok. It’s like reading a good book or having a conversation with a witty friend. Because, also,

2) You’re not just a passive receptacle for these thoughts. Your mind can turn them over and respond to them. You create a little inner dialogue, and you can even create an outer dialogue by emailing or tweeting at the host and then you get to have a real (but not IRL) friend to talk about to with those ideas.

In practice, I find 1 and 2 are very infrequently the case, and they’re the case to such a vanishingly small extent that it’s practically not worth it to let other people pipe thoughts into your head ever.

For one, look at the incomplete list above. I did find some very great podcasts: M.A.T.E.S., Pod F Tompkast, YLNT, etc. Even the B.S. Report. The problem is there are not really that many transcendentally great podcasts, and since I’ve been nursing a near-crippling addiction to podcasts (rhetorical overstatement), I had to settle for second- or third-tier podcasts like Pop My Culture, This Feels Terrible, The Vergecast, Hypercritical, and the catalyzing Latest In Paleo. I did listen to the truly great podcasts and great podcast episodes over and over, but at that point there are pretty significant diminishing returns. (I still find snack rating an uplifting pastime, though.) As for two, I have two objections. The first is that more often than not, when you make a tweet or email at someone for something they said in a podcast, it’s usually to disagree with them. And if they have a podcast of any amount of popularity, they get a lot of email about it, and they don’t want to hear anything negative about their podcast. This is especially true if, for instance, you try to point out to John Siracusa that there may, perhaps, gasp, exist sexism in the tech industry, and it’s actually not a legitimate strategy to label sexist the very people pointing this out. That that’s gaslighting or derailing or something similarly creepy and wrong. He will write you back just say you’re wrong because of robot logic. And secondly, unlike a normal conversation, you are listening to a monologue or performed dialogue, so you cannot actually pause the discourse to interject or question. You can form little mental rants, but then you’ve stopped paying attention and either continue to stop paying attention as you rant over the voice of someone else, or you rewind it and stop your mental rant.

I find the only way I can create and sustain a reasonable pace of idea formation and argumentation is by not listening to other people’s (face it, likely stupid) thoughts constantly. And my near-addiction to doing so represents some sort of bad tendency or aspect of character in myself, whereby I don’t really want to succeed or something in life. So that’s why yesterday somewhere in between the sweet spot of the middle of Astoria Park, between the swimming pool and Hellgate Bridge, I decided I’d have to just quit listening to podcasts altogether so that maybe some day I can come up with a good idea in my life and get to be, if I’m lucky, one of those people other people listen to in order to push the thoughts out of their heads. Or I’ll decline and write another blog post about an uncommonly specific occurrence in my life and how this, finally, will turn it all around.

Hah, so I realize going over this “epiphany” that it sounds sort of depressing or sad-making, but it’s really not. It’s great when you realize there’s something even a little pernicious or limiting in your life, especially a self-limitation, which you can easily abrogate. Epiphanies used to be the provenance of Irishmen watching girls bathing in seaweed, but now everyone can have them and it’s wonderful.

—BP

On Keeping A Liary: Anais Nin, Autobiography, and the Lady Narcissism Debate

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 11:01:00 -0400

I have only lately determined to remember some of my early adventures. Till now I have always avoided them, even with a certain uneasiness. Now, when I am not only recalling them, but have actually decided to write an account of them, I want to try the experiment whether one can, even with oneself, be perfectly open and not take fright at the whole truth. — Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

“I would not be concerned with the secrets, the lies, the mysteries, the facts. I would be concerned with what makes them necessary. What fear.” — Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin: Vol. I

At some point, toward the beginning of the summer, I became obsessed with the question of truth in personal writing. It wasn’t a question of craft — what to tell, how to tell it — so much as a moral crisis. If I have a value system, reckless honesty ranks high within it. But it’s easier to lie about oneself than about anything else, primarily because it’s easier to lie to oneself than to anyone else; we tend to be our own most gullible readers. And I got the sense that, more often than not, the story I remembered was only the story I most wanted to believe.

I raked through my pieces, looking for sins of which to accuse myself. I found distorted chronology, missing details, imprecisions, false precision, inadvertent cruelties, intentional cruelties, invasions of privacy, a frankly disgusting amount of self-justification, even in pieces that had seemed harmless, and even in pieces where all concerned agreed that I’d told the truth. I had never lied. But the whole truth — the full, real, photographic thing — always seemed to elude me. This process was more than slightly insane; the littlest thing could set me off. I remember those margaritas being $3. I remember that being their only real attraction. But what were the odds that I could remember the exact price of a drink I’d had, several years ago, without taking notes, and when I’d had enough of them to get an impulsive tattoo after the fact? Couldn’t the margaritas have been $5? Or $4, or $7? The spectre of involuntary margarita-related falsehood kept me up at night.

My existential crisis was well-timed. The subject of women’s autobiography — specifically, how much they could tell, and whether they should tell it — was being widely discussed, and fought over. Emily Books was promoting several great examples of it (some of which I reviewed). Marie Calloway and Cat Marnell were attracting a fervent cult fan base, and an equally fervent cult of detractors. Girls and Sheila Heti were so ubiquitous that people joked about having to include their names in a pitch in order to sell it. After a few months of relentlessly hating myself and/or my writing, I was able to produce quite a few pieces on that fight, more often than not arguing both sides.

The terms of the debate — which you’ve likely heard already, but which it’s worth rehashing — are as follows. For the defense: Women have never been encouraged to be honest. Traditional femininity both requires a permanent emotional pseudo-virginity — an appealing blankness, a lack of “baggage,” upon which men can impress their own fantasies and needs — and encourages women to fear or pathologize their own feelings, which are always suspect, always potentially “sentimental” or “melodramatic” or “hysterical.” In the old sexist dichotomy, men were proudly impersonal, gifted with transcendence: They slipped the surly bonds of earth and touched the realms of pure, objective intellect. And if they happened to write about their bad relationships or their breakdowns or their various organ-meat-based masturbational tactics, as they traversed these lofty regions, well, that was Art, my good man. High culture, don’t you know. Brave and ground-breaking and explosive and rebellious and all those other nice, laudatory, masculine-sounding adjectives. Meanwhile, women covering the same ground were supposedly stuck in rehashing petty, pointless personal bullshit. Women didn’t write, or even self-express; they just “overshared.” Therefore, women who actually do share a risky or unflattering amount of personal information are pushing back against the system, breaking new ground, and presenting us with a full, complex portrait of female existence that isn’t filtered primarily through male fantasies or fears.

The prosecution’s case can be summed up in one word: “Narcissism.” Specifically, as John Cook at Gawker writes in regard to Girls, “the exhaustion of ceaselessly dramatizing your own life while posing as someone who understands the fundamental emptiness and narcissism of that very self-dramatization.” The act of writing about oneself is self-inflating, a way of recreating oneself as a fascinating character, even if that character is ugly. And it can also be a dodge which allows one to remain stuck in adolescent acts of self-definition without engaging with the larger social context in any meaningful way. There are wars, there is poverty, there is starvation, there are diseases and injustices and super-PACs; writing about your insensitive college boyfriend does very little to solve the problem. And it’s none too kind to the boyfriend, either.

Or, as Houghton Mifflin wrote to Anais Nin in 1942, rejecting her diaries:

There is no doubt it is a remarkable performance that should someday be published and may well achieve permanence as the ultimate in neurotic self-absorption, a kind of decadent St. Theresa. Certainly the writing is extraordinary, the cadences, the ability to communicate an intensity of emotion. But I don’t think this is the time to bring it out. Today such morbid preoccupation with one’s inner life will seem trivial.

“Today,” apparently, has lasted for seventy years. And it is frankly flabbergasting that any of these conversations — the one about women and autobiography; the one about autobiography and female narcissism; for that matter, the conversations about the act of documenting one’s daily life and creating a more or less truthful public persona, which, in the era of Tumblr and Facebook, are relevant to men and women alike — have gone on this long without a serious consideration of Anais Nin.

Let’s start with a few unpleasant facts. First: Anais Nin was a fraud. Fifteen volumes of her diary (which disillusioned fans have referred to as “the liary”) have been published, and all of them are untruthful. The first seven-volume edition cuts out her prodigious extramarital sex life and all mention of her two husbands, contains some invented characters, was written partly by someone else (her second husband, Rupert Pole, who took over the job when she became too ill to work) and contains too many falsified details to count. The next four volumes, published after her death by her second husband (possibly against her will) contain almost nothing but sex, and are still heavily distorted and re-written. Only the four “early diaries,” covering her childhood and early married life, come close to being accurate and full representations of what she wrote, but Nin’s own writing process makes their real truth impossible to ascertain.

Second, and not unrelated: Anais Nin was a very fucked-up lady. Her biographer of record, Deirdre Bair, writes that assembling a picture of the woman’s life required special research into “childhood abuse, child and adult incest, narcissism, borderline personalities, and various forms of sexual pathology,” just for starters. Bair assigns her an armchair diagnosis of “Narcissistic Borderline personality,” but with or without our posthumous categorizations, the fact is that Nin routinely made some flabbergastingly bad decisions, and required therapy for her entire adult life.

Given all this, and the disrepute into which her writing has fallen as a result — she’s known primarily, if at all, for the relationship with Henry Miller that she tried for most of her life to keep secret, the porn she cranked out for quick cash and found so deeply embarrassing that she only allowed it to be published after her own death, and the ultimate humiliation, a special mention in a Jewel song — one has to do a little special pleading in order to explain why she deserves a role in the discussion. Our contemporary understanding of Anais Nin is summed up by her book jackets, which tend to revolve around pretty ladies in various stages of old-timey lace-and-garters undress; she’s lady-porn for ladies too pretentious to cue up a James Deen video, a romance novelist for people who can’t admit they read romance novels, highly embarrassing and relevant only to die-hard fans. But her work is so closely related to the fights we’re having now that it’s worth looking past all the garters, if only for a moment.

It’s not as simple as saying that Nin wrote exhaustively about her own life, or that she did it (as bloggers do now) with an emphasis on an unfolding day-to-day narrative, or even that she received much the same criticism as contemporary women who write about their intimate lives. All of these things were true: By the time she was in her late twenties, at least, she considered her diary to be her major work, and she went at it with a professionalism that some people don’t apply to their paid work. She produced hundreds of pages per year, indexed, numbered, and regularly re-typed so as to prevent physical decay of the text. But by the time Anais Nin got through with writing about “her life,” it rarely bore any resemblance to her experience. Aside from the quirks of her particular, highly subjective sensibility — and the fact that she had a “vice for embellishment,” meaning that she frequently wrote down incidents or compliments that she made up — the diaries were not written in anything like a linear fashion. Those re-typing sessions served a double purpose: Along with preserving the work, they were a chance for Nin to make revisions. She expanded scenes, corrected them, wrote new ones from fragmentary notes or memories and inserted them into the places where she believed she should have or would have had those particular thoughts, and she did this at regular intervals, for decades, until their first publication in 1966. It’s not as simple as saying that Nin didn’t publish her “real” diaries. In a sense, there were no “real” diaries. Their ongoing falsification was key to their form.

So you can’t exactly make a case for her as an autobiographer. Nor is it as simple as saying that Nin was “sexually emancipated,” a forward-thinking proto-third-waver who wrote about sex without shame, and assumed sexual prerogatives reserved for men in her misogynist cultural context. That was, briefly, the fashionable take: It started with the publication of the porn, and was sustained through the publication of Henry and June, an “unexpurgated diary” (put together from heavily rewritten material and further edited by Nin’s second husband) which filled in the sex scenes missing from the first part of her published Diaries. Although that volume was about cheating on her husband, it was romantic, and frankly pretty tame; there was lots of vague bicuriosity and lyrical praise of Henry Miller’s sexual prowess. (The revelation that Henry Miller was into dirty talk and butt stuff will shock exactly no-one.) But the case for Nin as a sex-positive role model ends at the second volume of the “unexpurgated” diaries, very subtly entitled Incest, and containing the revelation that she had a “consensual” — and, by her account, very enjoyable — affair with her own father. There’s freedom, and then there’s fucking your parents. Feminist interest declined sharply at the point where the latter was introduced into the picture.

If you can’t make a case for her honesty, nor for her feminism, nor yet for her general character (Bair’s diagnosis aside, the “unexpurgated” diaries contain plenty of behavior that’s cruel to the point of being abusive) then what is there to work with? Quite a lot. In Anais Nin’s stunning ambivalence, her compulsion to record the facts of her life and her equal, opposing drive to rework and conceal them, we can get closer to the nature of personal writing — the basic urge behind it, and how that urge conflicts with traditional femininity — than we ever can with a more honorable or skilled writer.

The first obstacle, for a contemporary reader of Nin, is her style. Even if you accept her as a proto-blogger — someone whose daily craft of figuring out which pieces of her life she wanted to record, and how she wanted to record them, should be familiar to anyone with an Instagram account — her written work is never conversational or direct, in the way we’re used to. Instead, it’s lyrical, dreamy, imagistic, full of idiosyncratic word choices and grammatical oddities, more than a little purple. Some people love it. (I do, actually.) It drives the majority of us right straight up the wall.

But Nin’s lyricism was not unrelated to her subject matter. Nin’s language was her self, her world; it was where she lived. She compared losing a diary volume to “my own death,” worked to publish the diary because “it must not die.” Nin didn’t record her life in the diary. As she saw it, her diary was her life. In fact, it was her. And its deceptiveness was largely self-deception. She put herself through exceptionally sordid, banal, or painful experiences. But when she went home, she inevitably transformed them into poetic, lyrical effusions, starring herself as the poetic, lyrical creature who had whatever thoughts and feelings she thought best suited her character. The words had to be pretty because the experience had to be made less ugly. Her prose was her defense against her life.

“I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live,” she said, late in her life. “I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me… I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living.”

It sounds like an excuse. But when Nin said she “could not live” in the world offered to her, she wasn’t kidding. She loathed realism, in fact loathed reality, in a deep way; she honestly did see the world as ugly, threatening, and potentially annihilating, and she honestly did believe she had to create a personalized fantasy world in order to survive it.

She had reasons. When the Diaries were published, Nin frequently said that they’d begun as a letter to her father, whom she’d lost when her mother divorced him and moved the family from Europe to New York City. (Queens, actually, for the most part. You say irrelevant, I say Queens Pride demands we claim our literary history where we can find it.) By describing her life, and her sorrow at his absence, she hoped to entice her father to come back. Somewhat glossed over, in these stories, was the fact that Rosa Culmell-Nin divorced Joaquin Nin because he was sadistically violent, and was probably molesting Anais.

We know a few things to be true. We know that Joaquin Nin beat his wife. We know that, when this failed to break her spirit, he locked her up and beat her three children just outside the door, so that he could hear her scream. We know that he frequently insisted on taking pictures of the children in the nude, and that Anais Nin always remembered this as the only time her father ever praised her or paid her any positive attention; usually, he mocked her and called her “ugly,” giving her a belief in her physical unattractiveness that she spent most of her life trying to overcome. And we know that, as an adult, Nin had confused, blurry memories of her father fondling or fucking her, and that she felt she may have co-operated, “consented,” if only in order to stop or prevent the beatings.

All told, Anais Nin had quite a few reasons for believing the real world to be a scary place. But when she sat down to write her first diary entry, at the age of eleven, her history of abuse disappeared. Her father became her idol, her love, her paragon; losing him was her greatest sorrow, all she wanted from life was to make him proud. Etc. It’s a sad story. But it doesn’t become heartbreaking until you realize that this story — the good Daddy who went away, the perfect Daddy that she failed somehow, the Daddy who could come back and make everything better, if only he loved her enough — was actually what Anais Nin preferred to reality. Blaming herself, believing herself neglected or abandoned or unloved by the perfect man, was entirely acceptable, if it meant that she could avoid acknowledging who her father really was, and what he had really done. The second she started writing, she was already inside her more livable world.

And for the rest of her life, Joaquin Nin’s beautiful, gifted, charming daughter was fundamentally incapable of two things: Honesty, and a healthy sexual relationship with another human being. In the unexpurgated diaries, at least, it’s clear that she chose the cruel men, the unavailable ones, the drinkers, the users, the ones who blew up or let her down. The two men she was closest to, in this time period, were Miller (one of the more notoriously misogynist man-children of the twentieth century, who often plagiarized her writing for his own more celebrated work) and Gonzalo More, a drunk with a nasty temper, who claimed he would one day do great things for the Communist party, and in the meantime enjoyed screaming at Nin, setting her things on fire, or trashing her apartment to prove a point. She was responsible for paying both of their rents and living expenses, as neither one could hold down a job. But with men who genuinely tried to care for her, like her adoring first husband, Hugh, or her preternaturally understanding therapist/lover, Otto Rank, she often felt distant, turned-off, perversely revolted by their devotion. The published evidence we have suggests that Nin simply couldn’t find a man sexually attractive if he treated her too well. And she was certainly never brave enough, or vulnerable enough, to make one relationship bear the whole weight of her need for love. In the midst of fucking her way across Paris, Nin confessed, she was most often “hellishly lonely.” No-one could ever love her enough. And she could never let them try.

But of course Nin lied to and betrayed others. She’d spent her entire life lying to and betraying herself. Even that exuberant, graphic, stomach-turning description of “consensual” sex with her father is suspect — more suspect, I’d argue, than anything else in her work. Nin spent her life lying to herself. And her first lie, her most important lie, was always about her father, and what he did, and what she felt. After that “affair” ended, Nin’s descriptions of her father are purely disdainful. When he died, she was so indifferent to him, so estranged, that she refused to be involved with his funeral. Her brother never saw her shed a tear.

She wrote a sad bit about it for the Diaries, though:

The hurt was so deep, the shock so deep, the sense of loss so deep, it was as if I died with him. I wept not to have seen him since Paris, not to have forgiven him, not to be there when he died alone and poor in a hospital… I wept and felt the loss in my body, this terrible unfulfilled love. Never to have come close to him, never to have fused with him.

At a very young age, Nin entered her more livable world, the place where she could recreate herself when life destroyed her, where she could be whatever she thought she ought to have been. And she never, ever came back out.

But it’s too simplistic to claim that Anais Nin was a fantasist, the Girl in the Bubble, irrevocably trapped in her own airbrushed self-portrait — or even to say that she used her diary to evade the truth. She was, and she did. But she was also driven by a powerful desire for experience. Her diaries, whatever other purpose they may have served, are also a crash course in the avant-garde literary and cultural movements of the first half of the twentieth century; she insisted on being close to all of them, involved with them or in reaction against them, as they unfolded, and could often catch something interesting brewing (Miller himself, or the Beats, or LSD, or the mid-century shifting of the American attention from New York City to California) before it was widely adopted by other artists. She spent her early thirties writing about Miller, Artaud and psychoanalysis, but she also spent her late sixties writing about Timothy Leary, Judy Chicago and consciousness-raising groups. In a sense, Anais Nin’s old-timey lace-and-garters memorialization is the ultimate insult; she never paused to romanticize any time period, because she always needed to be where the action was. In all of this, and even in many of the sex scenes, you get the sense that the diary was her main instigator: She was egging herself on, doing more and more outrageous things for the sake of having more and more outrageous scenes to describe.

And describe them she did, even when doing so was unbelievably risky. She sat in her study, with her husband, writing careful descriptions of sex with Henry; she sat with Henry, writing about her affairs with her therapists, her father, with strangers or with Gonzalo. “I live in terror that my journal should be discovered,” Nin wrote. But when anyone suggested that she stop writing in it, she was mortally offended.

“This diary proves a tremendous, all-engulfing craving for truth,” Nin wrote, “since to write it I risk destroying all the edifices of my illusions, all the gifts I made, Hugo’s life, Henry’s life; everyone whom I saved from truth, I here destroy!”

Probably, none of these truths were intended for publication. She considered it, on several occasions, and decided each time that she couldn’t face the consequences; one early novel, “Djuna,” was completed, self-published, and then pulled from circulation and repressed for decades, simply because the characters were too obviously identifiable as Henry Miller and herself. Despite her reputation as a self-revelatory writer, the real Anais Nin was so intensely private that, after she’d published seven volumes of memoir writing, some friends and colleagues audibly gasped when Hugh Guiler identified himself as her husband at her memorial service.

But as her lies and betrayals piled up, and the consequences of truth-telling grew steadily more terrifying, Nin turned to the journal, apparently simply to release the pressure, to have a place where she could actually discuss her life. Commentators have wondered how Nin managed to collect all these partners, and all of her many deeply devoted friends; the woman in the diaries is manipulative, selfish, cruel, a tantrum-thrower and a life-wrecker, somebody that no-one could even like, much less fall in love with. But no-one in her life ever really met that woman. In person she was delicate, shy, quiet, kind and generous past the point of reason, never remotely rude or tactless. An “angel,” whose “only fault was her incapacity for cruelty.” This is the woman she put into her first published diaries, as well: An ethereal, sensitive muse who selflessly and sexlessly provided for other artists, to her own detriment. And in the diaries she vented, gloated, and recorded each bit of trickery she’d deployed to give that impression.

“I need a place where I can shout and weep,” she wrote. And added: “Here I shout, I dance, I gnash my teeth, I go mad — all by myself, in bad English, in chaos. It will keep me sane for the world and for art.”

And she dissected herself, mercilessly, and thoroughly enough to know that even her “hellish loneliness” was self-inflicted:

When I talk, I feel that I lie imperceptibly in order to cover myself. I put on costumes. I hate to expose myself truly. Lies seem like a costume, small lies, deviations mostly, because I am afraid not to be understood, and I am afraid of the pain. And then what I do not tell, I pour into the journal. I chafe because people don’t understand, and it is my fault. The truth is I only face human beings in fragments… I always find the mensonge vital necessary — the one lie which separates me from each person.

Nin needed to be loved, needed to be accepted, by everyone she met — not only as a writer, but as a truly “feminine” woman. She often confessed her fear that her mind, her creativity, made her less than female, and worked constantly to find a “feminine” way of expressing herself, a way to do her work while still commanding admiration (particularly the admiration of men) in a sexist culture. Certainly, her huge sexual appetite and her capacity for cruelty didn’t fit into the mid-20th-century picture of what a “feminine” woman ought to be — which is probably exactly why she cut them out of her memoirs.

“I had locked up my demons in the diaries where they could do no harm,” she wrote. “And if the diaries burned, I would be left only with this persona, smiling, ever available, ever devoted. I associated honesty with the loss of love. The only women I had known who were honest, belligerent, assertive, undisguised had lost love. I was not going to risk that.”

But her very need to be loved, to be accepted as the perfect woman, meant that she could never actually be loved for herself. She kept careful lists of who knew whom, in her social circle — who she could talk to, what she could tell them, without being exposed. Toward the end of her life, she kept a “Lie Box,” a small box filled with cards on which she listed the lies she had told to each person in her life, so as to keep them straight. It is entirely possible that Nin would never have written at all if she’d had one friend or lover with whom she was capable of being entirely honest. But she was never that brave. And as her personas fragmented and proliferated, the Diary grew — not only as a means to recreate herself as she wanted to be, but as her only real way to pull all those fragmented, false selves together into a portrait that somewhat resembled her real face.

I discovered Anais Nin — many people do — as a teenager. I was working in my college’s library, in the basement, shelving books. This portion of the library — underground, windowless, lit only by a few ancient and unreliable ceiling lamps, so dark you could hardly see the shelves themselves — was notoriously haunted, on a list of the Most Haunted Places In Ohio, in fact. It also had a mattress in one corner, where people were said to sneak off for sex when they couldn’t get rid of their roommates. I would hear mysterious bangings on the sides of the metal shelves, when I got close to a dark portion of the library, and run up the stairs in terror; I was so innocent, at that point in my life, that I never connected the ghostly noises and the mattress. Now, I like to think that library — dark, underground, full of frightening mysteries, shadow-drenched pathways and secret sex — would have pleased Anais Nin, as a setting in which to discover her work.

I had never heard of Anais Nin, when I found her books. I didn’t know about the sex, or the lies, or the scandals. I picked up one of her edited diary volumes, while shelving, because I kept a diary, and the thought that such a thing could be published was amazing to me. I picked a good one: Volume One, which distills the chaos of her 1930s life into a novel that is ultimately a well-orchestrated, highly conventional feminist kunstlerroman. The narrator, a delicate, ethereal child-woman named Anais, lives with her mother and her brother in a mysterious old house just outside of Paris. She is haunted by memories of her sophisticated, yet treacherous father, who abandoned their family many years ago. And she wants to be a writer. But how? The narrator encounters several symbolic male figures, who initiate her into different realms of male-dominated knowledge: Modernism (Henry), Freudian psychoanalysis (her first analyst, Rene Allendy), surrealism (Antonin Artaud), and aristocratic high culture (her father, a composer). She is drawn to each of these, but must ultimately reject them, as they have no place for a woman’s unique vision. Alongside these symbolic men, we encounter several frightening female doubles, who represent sides of Anais that (we are led to believe) she cannot live out: June, the pathologically lying, chronically unfaithful seductress; Jeanne, the mad aristocrat in an incestuous relationship; Countess Lucie, the wealthy dilettante who amuses herself by writing bad novels. (This last was an accusation frequently thrown at Anais Nin, when she self-published her own fiction.) The whole thing could have been plotted by Gilbert & Gubar. (They quote Nin, and praise her highly, in The Madwoman in the Attic: Their whole thesis, that female artists experience a particularly female guilt for creating, was a topic Nin lectured on frequently in the ‘70s, and it was taken in turn from Rank’s thesis of “creative guilt.”) Ultimately, the narrator’s chains are broken by the rogue psychoanalyst Otto Rank, who insists that the artist’s first obligation is to his or her own self-created individuality, and she sails away with him to New York and a rich life as a writer. The End.

I stayed close to Anais Nin over the years. And I unraveled the secrets as I went, feeling personally betrayed each time, but always wanting to know more. And I continually re-read her work — still do, in fact — at points of personal crisis, during break-ups and professional frustrations and moves and breakdowns. The women who wrote to Nin in the ‘60s and ‘70s claimed that she’d given them “courage,” and that is, strangely, what comes through most in her writing. No matter how much ugliness life dealt out or how many complications she created, Nin took it all in stride, wrote it down, and went out looking for more.

Now, however, I read Nin mostly as a writer; to figure out the technique of creating a persona or a voice, the craft of telling a story from life, the difference between privacy (no memoirist would be expected to give us the precise details of all her one-night stands, as the “unexpurgated” diaries do) and dishonesty (no good memoirist would allow us to believe she was a completely celibate, angelic presence when she had so many one-night stands to detail). Anais Nin encountered all of these problems. And she screwed up, massively, with each and every solution she concocted. But it’s her failures that interest me now, that seem to make clear the mechanics of how and why we create characters and narratives from something as slippery and subjective as memory.

Biographers, scholars, and fans have been working for over forty years to establish, definitively, who the “real” Anais Nin was. And the fact is that no-one will ever know. She didn’t know herself. It was why she wrote. Not to glorify herself (although she self-glorified), not to expose herself (although she self-exposed), but simply in the hope that, by describing this complicated woman, over and over, and every day, she might finally write a description that she herself could understand.