Arf She Said

There's the stuff ("the same old fucking three songs" according to some) that I listen to constantly, and then there's the rest of it. The rest of it gets a look-in via the shuffle though, and with insistent regularity a song I haven't paid much attention to will sneak right up and brick me. The only thing to do then is to listen to it on repeat 1000x until it's out of my system and shift it through to regular rotation.

Currently: Sharon van Etten's Your Love is Killing Me (Are We There, 2014)



Lovelorn MELODRAMA. She goes for it full-throated, over a military beat. The middle eight provides classic middle-eight relief, and then it's back into the mountainous FEELING. Over the top, but without any sense of shame it just feels epic. Unfortunately, the music video is a lesson in how to kill a good song by truncating it, robbing the build of its power. And it's boring! The pity of it.

But the song, for real -- turn it UP.

Kurt Vile's ambivalence, his gently obsessive self-reflection is, perhaps, might be, the truest and loveliest thing about his repetitive, melancholy, soulfully amusing work.

The last track on 2015's b'lieve I'm goin down..., Wild Imagination, is a masterpiece of regressive doubt:

I’m looking at you
But it’s only a picture so I take that back
But it ain’t really a picture
It’s just an image on a screen
You can imagine if I was though, right?
Just like I can imagine you can imagine it, can’t you?


As easy, pretty, and chill as his finger-picking is, his lyrics are often a battle, searching for a firm conclusion while never quite believing in the existence of one.


I don’t know if it’s real but it’s how I feel / Don’t know if you really came but I feel dumb in asking
-Runner Ups

Wakin, the dawn of day / And I gotta think about what I wanna say
..
Wakin on a pretty day / Don't know why I ever go away
It's hard to explain
-Wakin On A Pretty Day

Sometimes I talk too much but I gotta get it out / But I don’t wanna talk, I only wanna listen
-Wheelhouse

I get sick of just about everyone / And I hide in my baby’s arms
My baby’s arms
Cuz except for her, you know, as I've implied
-Baby's Arms

I don't wanna work, but I don't wanna sit around
All day frownin
I don't wanna give up, but I kinda wanna lie down
But not sleep, just rest
...
I been searching, but I don't know what for
-Peeping Tomboy

What's the meaning of this song / And what's this piece of wood
I don't care it sounds so pretty / Its change is so sublime
What was the meaning of that last line
But I'm just kidding around over here
-Kidding Around

This, but that, and maybe so. Every song is suffused with words of mitigation, doubt, qualification. But hey, that's life!

I remember the record label played [That's Life tho (almost hate to say)] to [Matador label head] Chris Lombardi and he was like 'what does this record mean? What's the story?' I was like 'it's a life record, man!' He was like 'what the hell does that even mean?' and I said 'How can I explain it to you? It's just a life record!'

Hey, but that's neither here nor there
In a way how could one ever prove you're just putting them all on
That's life, tho
Almost hate to say
-That's Life, tho (almost hate to say)

Talking trash on nothing the human eye can see anyway
-Was all Talk

How can I even look myself in the mirror / Then again, why would I?
-Shame Chamber

You should sing just whatever
-Snowflakes are Dancing

Oh what a mess I guess I'm in
-Smoke Ring For My Halo

Sometimes I get stuck in a rut too / It's okay girlfriends
-Puppet to the Man

One day I won't even know what was better / Then again and now I want not much of nothing anyway
-In My Time

Maybe you don’t hear me talking strange / Well, hang on you better wait / Maybe you didn’t hear me right
-Life Like This

I'm just playin' / I got it made
Most of the time
-On Tour


March 2017, almost a year ago. Great solo gig at the Adelaide Festival.


Certainty, concreteness: are they not akin to death? To live is to muse, brood, to do and reflect, to start back, to turn around. Vile mines, in a sweet, sore way unique to him, ambivalence as a state of being, a source of pain, joy, and humour. He's gorgeous.


Strumming unsuccessfully but moreso just pressin' keys
...
Hey man I believe I'm floating and off course of course
Guess I got my mind well twisted didn’t I, well...
-All in a Daze Work

Lost my head there, whoops! / Lost my head there again
Didn’t wanna mess around, look around at all of it
But then I did though
-Lost My Head There

All right, what now? / That's fine, I think I'm ready
-KV Crimes

Well I want to be with you
(when can I?)
I don't know, well I'm workin
-Pure Pain

Take your time / So they say and that's probably the best way to be
...
I will promise to do my very best to do my duty / For God and my country
Hey but I'm just human after all
-Too Hard

Think I'll never leave my couch again / Cuz when I'm out, I'm on it in my mind
Then again, I guess it ain't always that way
In the morning I'm not done sleepin / In the evening I guess I'm alive
...
And when I'm drinking, I get to jokin / Then I'm laughin, fallin down
But that's just fine
And I just pick myself up and walk down / Ghost town
Raindrops might fall on my head sometimes / But I don't pay 'em any mind
Then again, I guess it ain't always that way
-Ghost Town

I’ve gotten a lot more paranoid in my older age. People ask me the album title, like, “What are you calling it?” I’m like, “It feels dumb to say it out loud, just wait until you read it.” It almost feels like you’re taking yourself too seriously, which I take myself seriously plenty, but if you just tell somebody your album title all loud and proud it’s almost like you fancy yourself a poet and then I feel like if you really were one you wouldn’t say it out loud. Once you hear the record it’ll make sense, but before then, what does it even mean?

Also, because there are a million albums, there’s always got to be a title or it’s untitled, so in a way it’s pretty bogus in general unless it can make sense with the record that you’re hearing. Everybody’s got to have a title so how many bogus titles are out there in the world every day? Probably a lot. Probably a lot of bullshitting, really. Just bullshitting. Self-importance.

I woke up this morning / Didn’t recognize the man in the mirror
Then I laughed and I said, “Oh silly me, that’s just me”
Then I proceeded to brush some stranger’s teeth
But they were my teeth, and I was weightless
Just quivering like some leaf come in the window of a restroom
I couldn’t tell you what the hell it was supposed to mean
But it was a Monday, no, a Tuesday
No, a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday
Then Saturday came around and I said
“Who’s this stupid clown blocking the bathroom sink?”
-Pretty Pimpin

When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature there was plenty of guff about challenging the distinction between high and low art, about whether his lyrics were "good enough" to be called poetry, about what it might mean to be "waiting for a voice" instead of a text. This comes down to a division between poetry (important art) and musical lyrics (unimportant art) that, despite lip service towards oral traditions of poetry, generally finds its end in the following convenient definition (here, courtesy Dylan himself): “Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can’t sing, I call a poem. Anything I can’t sing or anything that’s too long to be a poem, I call a novel."

I'd consider Joanna Newsom a poet just going by the most cursory read of her written lyrics, but here's the thing. The question is not "Can... the lyrics hold up without the music, just the words on a piece of paper?" (the form of acid test that, say, Leonard Cohen handily passes), but: is it desireable to separate them? How useful is it to exclude performance (because it is the fact of popular sound recordings being the dominant "art delivery vehicle" that is the contentious issue here) from a definition of poetry or literature?

Newsom writes allusive and complex lyrics dense with metaphor, pun and obscure references. The music that backs them is similarly complex, in time signature, melody and structure. The operation of lyric and music are, functionally, indivisible. I can't figure out how a Newsom song works until I figure out how to sing it, and this is often because of the density and surprises of her rhymes and how they dictate rhythmic structures.

Often too, meaning, metaphor, and connection are only fully awoken or active in the context of being sung, the performative twist, or the melodic or album structure. Her narratives and musical forms are circular, repetitious, and echoing (in Divers, for instance, the last song's final word is "transcend", cut off abruptly halfway into "tran"; and guess what, the first song's first word is "sending"). While an album can be likened to a poetry collection in the way its components speak to each other, an album is also a fixed performance, a statement of text's sound, and for Newsom, sound is a critical aspect of poetic language.

Taking this down to a very basic level, consider the rhymes of Goose Eggs, from Divers (2015). Newsom's sweet, mouthful vocal style may be an acquired taste (she is, of course, a weirdo, which is always to be encouraged) or initially seem like a cheap reliance on cutesiness. But once you've clicked in to her vibe, it's apparent that she puts immense effort and thought into both writing and performance. Goose Eggs demonstrates how deeply the stuff of words, of poetic meaning and correspondence, rely upon performance -- on the way she manipulates words and lines in her mouth -- instead of the written text.



Highlighted below are the two most important vowel sounds in the song, the "geese" sound (represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /i/) and the "goose" sound (/ʉ/ in the wild, rhyming with "moose", but the way she sings it here, it's /u/, further back in the mouth).



The most striking line, to me, is "A goose, alone, I suppose, can know the loneliness of geese" in which she bends every dominant vowel sound, the /ʉ/ of goose (and vamoose) and the /o/ of alone, suppose, know, loneliness, into a /u/, identical to the way she pronounces use, refuse and news, until we smash hard up against change, the /i/ of geese. Moreover, "suppose" is really "'spose", to preserve the scansion in which /u/ appears every other syllable.

This is a choice of performance and writing together and it has meaning. From the preceding verse /u/ has been the terminal rhyme, high and remote at the back of the mouth, associated with the past and failure, and the narrator (the singular goose) who is focussed on her work instead of relationships and the natural world. After this point the /i/ of the plural geese explodes into the song and becomes the dominant terminal and internal rhyme, as the narrator opens herself up to her and her friend's wider stories, and what they mean, and where that leaves them.

(I particularly love the choice of "Vs", the flight patterns of flocks of geese, as an /i/ rhyme).

Again, this is a choice. The sound often occurs with an unvoiced /s/ (as in "geese" and "recently") and she regularly ignores final consonants (there's no t in "east", apparently). Similarly, you /yʉ/ (which typically rhymes with goose, ie "you silly goose") is avoided, turned into ya /yä/ or y' /yə/ where necessary.

This attention to using words for the way they sound is everywhere. Newsom commonly inserts rapid internal rhymes in her lyrics: built/stilled, train/plain, learn/burn, and so on. The final stanza has a great example of this in her California vowel shift (/ɑ/ becomes /ɔ/) that turns talk, cause, and flock into rhymes. These rhymes also rely on the unreleased velar stop of /k/ that is also associated with /o/ in other verses (spoke, broken); an /o/ that also determinedly features in the manipulated lines "had to go/ and you caught that flight out of Covalo/ Now, overhead.."

The song (and her entire oeuvre) is filled with moments like this, that wouldn't "work" in the same way as plain words on plain paper would, read by anyone anywhere. Listen to the way she trebles the /ɛ/ sound in "at last (at least)": /ɛt lɛst ɛt list/. In my normal spoken accent, this doesn't occur, and the relationship between "last" and "least" is diminished, where the /a/ in last is a wide open sound that happens in the middle of the mouth, instead of the more frontal and constricted /ɛ/ and /i/.

The "written text" definition of poetry prioritises multiplicity over fixity, the privacy of language, the internal and reading process and the alchemy by which another's words become one's own. In this sense, it sets the reader above the author, that heralded New Criticism democratisation, and one of the great recuperating claims Literature makes for being not irrelevant -- it is high art because it is of the people, you see: the idea that Dylan is the voice of the commoner, the downtrodden, the people, is no small part of how he got away with the Nobel.

But there is also power in hearing the author, the poet herself. Goose Eggs contains an arrogant authorial request: listen to me, the way I want to say it. I picture Newsom singing as she writes, pen in hand, looping spirographic connections between words and stanzas and songs as she manipulates phonetic and morphemic correspondences, references, and doublings. While it's relatively common for celebrated lyricists to put out collections of their lyrics as little books of poetry, and I could not object to Newsom for doing so, it almost seems beside the point: this is a literature and an exploration of language that's meant to be heard, not read.

What you need is conviction.


Police Squad! s01e01 a substantial gift by djhollandsworth

There's the stuff ("the same old fucking three songs" according to some) that I listen to constantly, and then there's the rest of it. The rest of it gets a look-in via the shuffle though, and with insistent regularity a song I haven't paid much attention to will sneak right up and brick me. The only thing to do then is to listen to it on repeat 1000x until it's out of my system and shift it through to regular rotation.

Currently: Fugazi's Ex-Spectator (The Argument, 2002)



Tight and melodic. Two drum sets in unison. Smothering first verse, sneaky bass and guitar making promises. Bass and guitar running the same riff in the bridge - a pause before the whole thing explodes into the chorus riff. That is a great fucking apocalyptic chorus riff. Turn up this live version, which builds in intensity at the end until the whole edifice almost collapses.

goddamn this is the best version for the way it sticks Coleman Hawkins in your left ear and Monk in your right and just makes that happen to you. Smooth and soft and cool as hell.

A very strong memory.

My first year of undergrad. Dog-sitting for my aunt at her new place, on the other side of town from where I had lived my whole life. Far away from everyone, in a rougher area. '30s-style bungalow, thick brick walls and a deep porch. Trucks on the road outside.

Second night, Saturday night. Doing the readings for a lecture on the harm argument against pornography. A lot of material from the eighties. A lot of Dworkin and McKinnon. A lot of statistics. A lot of descriptions of violent and illegal pornography. Putting my jacket on. Turning the light on. Calling the dogs inside, feeding them. Locking the windows. Checking the doors. Descriptions of abuse and assault. Women getting beaten, penetrated with knives. Girls being assaulted. Girls being kidnapped. Women turned into objects. Helplessness.

Late in the evening. Surfacing and eating something, an ice cream? Checking the doors. Putting a kitchen knife on the bedside table. Turning off all the lights. Checking the windows. Calling the dogs into the bedroom. Turning the TV on to Rage, just starting. Smoking a cone. Coiling down into the quilt. Cross Bones Style comes on, hypnotic and understanding and comforting. I wished it could have gone on forever.

Don't think I can create any kind of thesis on this one and tbh it's fading kinda fast so some brief thoughts:

- Commits the unforgivable sin of being unable to photograph the gorgeous and talented Sterling K Brown with enough light and clarity to allow us to see the bottom half of his face. If The Wire can photograph dark-skinned, bearded men in that ugly-as-hell institutional lighting so can you. This was something I just cannot get past. I love this actor and wanted to see him ACT.

- Wonderful performances across the board but I particularly enjoyed watching John Travolta and David Schwimmer. Travolta's physicality is delightful and funny and pathetic and Schwimmer's arc held the true heart of the story for me, because I think it fumbled its other raison d'etres. Schwimmer's doleful eyes and gradually dawning horror were my favourite things to see on screen. Cuba was also stunningly pathetic and hateful and his vocal work was superb.

- I found the photographs of Simpson and Goldman that appeared at the end of the final episode in bad taste. These are the dead bodies that the this sensationalistic multi-million-dollar earner for FX is built on, so in that sense it is appropriate, but I don't think the series really cared too much about them.

- In fact I think this show was very confused about what it wanted to be. Realism, melodrama, naturalism, romance, thriller. The one thing it wasn't was nerdy or procedural, which might have saved it and pulled it away from sensationalism. It's not illuminating any fundamental truths about the OJ case, the justice system, or the media. I really, really wanted to feel Clarke and Darden's relationship in my soul but it developed so herky-jerky I didn't know where they were with each other from scene to scene. I don't feel like it carried Cochrane's story strongly enough to have his great moral victory -- an indictment of the racist LA Police -- counterpoint his simultaneous great moral loss -- the travesty of OJ's acquittal.

- Somehow, because she is an amazing actress, Paulson managed to find new ways to convey every time the trauma and surprise of the rug being pulled from under her. But still, the effort put into using dramatic irony to beat this woman back to the ground every time she staggered onto her feet felt sadistic and pointless.

- So of course these things happened, like her naked photos being published. But if part of the story is about the evil media and all the suckers watching -- if I were one of those thousands of viewers glued to the screen for months on end, speculating endlessly about her hair, and her mistakes, and the prosecution's mistakes -- if part of it is about problematising watching and what that does to the watchers, what does it mean then to watch this show? If I get to empathise with Clarke and her sob story and difficulties -- doesn't that let me off the hook? Aren't I now just the enlightened viewer of Quality Television? Great. So what's on next?

ILSA:
Strange. I know so very little about you.

RICK (chuckles):
I know very little about you. Just the fact you had your teeth straightened.

ILSA:
But be serious, darling, you are in danger. You must leave Paris.

RICK:
No no no, we must leave.

ILSA:
Yes, of course, we.

RICK:
Now the train for Marseilles leaves at five o'clock. I'll pick you up at your hotel at four-thirty.

ILSA:
No, no, not at my hotel, I -- I have things to do in the city before I leave. I'll meet you at the station.

RICK:
All right, at a quarter to five. Say, why don't we get married at Marseilles?

ILSA:
Oh...no, that--that's too far ahead to plan.

RICK:
Yes, I guess it is a little too far ahead. Let's see, what about the engineer? Why can't he marry us on the train?

ILSA (voice shaking):
Oh, darling.

RICK (laughs):
Why not?




Bergman's hand gesture here slays me. I suspect she might actually be corpsing, but anyway, to hide her face from the camera is a genius move, along with that stunning voicework -- Ilsa is too overwhelmed by heartbreak to exist even for us.

Another thing: people didn't think Bogart had the chops to be a romantic lead before this. But he sets Rick up for a fall so perfectly -- you can tell it's love that keeps him buoyant in Paris (laughs), and you can believe he'd do anything as the embittered Rick of Casablanca.

Captive Prince V3 came out last month -- long-awaited and very enjoyable and satisfying. Satisfying, however, in a significantly different manner to the first two books, and in a manner that pushes my buttons a little less. What I miss in it most is the sense, pervasive in the first two books, of an organising mind -- Laurent's mind, and the author's. Pacat was tremendously skillful in developing a narrator that is not so much unreliable as unknowledgeable. That would be the point of view character, Damen, who is plunged deep into the deadly political intrigue of a rival foreign country, and spends the first two books in desperate catch-up mode.

During those books it becomes apparent that initial antagonist Laurent's story is buried inside the tight perspective Damon's own story. It exists in observations that Damen or can't fully understand, or wilfully misunderstands; in events that colour past words or actions retrospectively; in surprises and slow puzzlings out of character deed and motivation. Every time Damen turns a corner on his understanding of Laurent and his environment, the foundations of our assumptions and prejudices crumble a little more, and we get a marginally clearer glimpse of the long game that Laurent is, and has always been, playing.

One of the cleverest things Pacat manages to do -- genius-level stuff -- is to run Damen's and the reader's levels of knowledge at different speeds. The reader -- cued by genre clues, mostly -- is running a few steps ahead of Damen at most points. And yet we still can only know what Damen knows, and seemingly inconsequential moments like the reveal of an earring as a disguise come as momentous, emotional, characterful shocks. Pacat manages that trickiest of things -- to have a Laurent's tremendous intelligence and competence actually feel like a living, realistic intelligence, organising the narrative behind the scenes without trickery or crutch, and she keeps it so, even on reread. This was, honestly, a revelatory pleasure for me.

By V3 most of the tension created by an unknowledgeable narrator has been settled: reader and Damen has much better handle on Laurent and the true antagonists. The reveals of V3 are correspondingly smaller and less undermining; it contains a narrative "cheat" POV switch; Laurent's interim plans reach fruition; romantic desire has been satisfied, although there is still a good level of tension; and, perhaps most crucially, the two major secrets that continue to underpin the emotional stakes are essentially resolved in the reader's mind, and are unavailable for the same kind of destabilising shock.

Laurent is still, of course, a genius, and legitimately reads so, but the third novel is organised around Damen's ascendency and power, and his is a much more straightforward, A-to-B, enduring kind of power, and the texture of the narrative follows accordingly. The plot(s) and characters remain twisty and complicated, but Damen is the one in the know now, and while it is immensely satisfying to see him and Laurent renegotiate their relationship and kick ass, that "uncharted territory" pleasure is missing, that feeling of you and Damen matching your wits against Pacat and Laurent both.

All three books are an incredible achievement, and Pacat is very generous about passing on some of the lessons she's learned. I've reread the first two several times and look forward to going over the third again to marvel at just how she does what she does. I've been thinking a lot about unreliable narrators lately, and the way she manipulates information, context and assumption just blows me away. Do check her out.