The Awl

Joyce: "When I wrote them I was a strange lonely boy"

Regina Small — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:20:49 +0000

"I like to think of you reading my verses (though it took you five years to find them out). When I wrote them I was a strange lonely boy, walking about by myself at night and thinking that some day a girl would love me. But I never could speak to the girls I used to meet at houses. Their false manners checked me at once. Then you came to me. You were not in a sense the girl for whom I had dreamed and written the verses you find now so enchanting. She was perhaps (as I saw her in my imagination) a girl fashioned into a curious grave beauty by the culture of generations before her, the woman for whom I wrote poems like ‘Gentle lady’ or ‘Thou leanest to the shell of night.' But then I saw that the beauty of your soul outshone that of my verses. There was something in you higher than anything I had put into them. And for this reason the book of verses is for you. It holds the desire of my youth and you, darling, were the fulfilment of that desire."
—James Joyce's Chamber Music is now available online. [via]

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127 Reasons Why We're Fascinated By Lists

Jillian Steinhauer — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:40:27 +0000

We are a society of listers. Grocery lists, to-do lists, bestsellers lists, the “25 Random Things About Me” meme on Facebook that generated almost 5 million notes in one week. Mainstream magazines feature them, entire websites are devoted to them. Even museums have begun celebrating them: the Smithsonian organized an exhibition two years ago titled, simply, “Lists,” which featured examples of the form by the likes of H.L. Mencken and Picasso. (The latter’s handwritten 1912 list recommended artists for inclusion in the first-ever Armory Show.) The year before that, the Louvre invited Italian writer Umberto Eco to curate an exhibition and event series based on a theme of his choosing. His idea? “The Infinity of Lists.”

Eco also published a lavish and philosophical coffee-table book under the same title. In doing so, he added to the growing field of list literature. This genre boasts in its ranks everything from academic studies to journals that invite the reader to list her way to self-discovery, to 100 Facts about Pandas.

In the U.S., we often laud things by naming months after them. December might then be proclaimed “Lists Month.” At that cold, reflective time, year-end best-of’s inundate us like blizzarding clumps of snow. How do we navigate our way through them? Why do we love them so much?

Dictionary.com includes one “glazomania: a passion for listmaking.” Merriam-Webster doesn’t have a similar entry… yet.

What, exactly, is the list doing to—or for—us?

***

8 Tricks for Putting Off a Haircut. 12 Globe-Shaped Foods. Top 10 Famous Buses. 40 Culturally Relevant Birds. 13 High-Tech Steampunk USB Flash Drives. The 10 Most Phallic Cars. Top 10 Evil Sports. 5 Insane Celebrity Conspiracy Theories (That Make Sense). Top 10 Weirdest Twin-Crime Stories. Top 10 Strange and Bizarre Dead Bodies. The 10 Hottest Women on the Texas Sex Offenders List. 25 Sexy Chests to Be Thankful For. 9 Surprising Things Men Look for in a Wife. Top 10 Ways to Piss Off Your Wedding Planner. The 4 Worst Times to Be on the Internet. Ways I Am Prematurely Mature. Inconsistencies Between Original Star Wars Trilogy and Prequels. Things I Would Do to Fix the Mets. Indian Film Songs in Kharahara Priya Ragam. Top Excuses Women Give Not to Have Sex. Random Things I’m into Lately. Expensive Things I Need to Buy Someday. Cool Hoodies for Hackers. 100 Things in the World I Love. Lists to Make. Indicators that You Might Need to Focus More…

***

1. “The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order—not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.”
—Umberto Eco, interview with Der Spiegel

2. “Lists help us manage the chaos of our lives—to impose order, if only for a moment. Writing a list clears the mind. … Once everything is written down, it’s easier to see which tasks are important and in what order to tackle them. Tasks that seem overwhelming look easier when reduced to mere lines on paper.”
—Sasha Cagen, To-Do List: From Buying Milk to Finding a Soul Mate, What Our Lists Reveal About Us)

3. “To my mind, the difference would be where lists support your quality of life or where they begin to impede your quality of life—where having your list perfected gets in the way of your functioning, or having too many lists. It’s a matter of how you use them. They can give you control in a certain way, but you don’t want them to be the only thing you do to gain control.”
—Dr. Cynthia Green, clinical psychologist and brain health/memory specialist, interview with the author

***

According to Robert Belknap in his book The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing—a study of literary lists, particularly in the work of four American Renaissance authors—lists of sequential signs appeared as early as 3,200 B.C.E. Used as a means of accounting and record keeping, they signified an early form of communication that would evolve into written language. If this is true, then Eco is right: the list is the origin of culture.

In his own book, Eco goes back to ancient history to find examples of literary lists. Homer, in The Iliad, spends 350 verses naming generals and ships in the Greek army. Eco gives us lists contained in the works of Virgil and Dante, the Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and on through the centuries.

***

The bestseller list, though not quite so old, has deeper roots than we might expect. Harry Thurston Peck compiled and published the first one in February 1895, in The Bookman magazine. Publishers Weekly caught on and inaugurated its own bestseller list in 1912. The ranking-by-sales trend spread to other industries. Billboard began releasing music charts in the 1930s and inaugurated the Hot 100 in 1958.

It’s easy to see how critics might regard these types of lists with indifference bordering on disdain. They’re a useful tool for publishers, distributors, and everyone on that side of an industry, but they’re a real downer for critical authority. Who cares what people are actually reading—we want to tell you what you should be reading! We’ll keep it simple, though; we’ll give you lists, too.

One wonders which critic penned the first top 10, and when. What magazine or newspaper was it for?

“Pauline once called me a ‘list queen’ to my face,” wrote film critic Andrew Sarris in 2001, after the death of his critical rival, Pauline Kael. “…[I]t started me thinking. To my knowledge, Pauline was the only critic never to compile a 10-best list. Her admirers might say that Pauline was above such trivial journalistic diversions. But with a 10-best list, a critic puts his or her tastes on the line, and makes an easier target than one would get, for example, by plowing through Pauline’s stream-of-consciousness prose.”

***

If the list is the origin of culture, then all culture springs from the compulsion to order. In other words, the to-do list I make as a private individual is an unlikely sibling of the “Top 10 Exhibitions of This Year” list I write as a critic: both reflect me trying to manage the chaos of the world. The grocery list I jot down when I decide to bake brownies is, I would venture, a cousin. (Trying to manage the chaos of the supermarket.) What do we make of this?

Another question: What happens when so many lists vie for supremacy? The Publishers Weekly bestseller list dukes it out with the New York Times bestseller list; the New York Times bestseller list takes on the Time critic’s top picks list; the Time critic’s list faces off against the Entertainment Weekly critic’s list; the Entertainment Weekly critic’s list goes blow-for-blow with an Amazon user’s Listmania list. And then there’s your friend with the blog you like—you know, that one. He’s got his own lists of books you should read, too.

***

To mark the tenth anniversary of September 11, New York magazine created an encyclopedia of 9/11, an alphabetical ordering of phrases and symbols: “Irony, The End of” preceded “Islam,” which led to “Jumpers.” It was, the editors wrote, a reaction to the overwhelmingness of the event, an attempt “not to shrink from its scale but to embrace it.”

The encyclopedia builds on our usual method of collective remembrance for tragedy: listing the names of people who died. The etched walls of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the reading of the names on Holocaust Remembrance Day—these are attempts at comprehension in lieu of comprehensiveness. Listing as an imposition of form on a mess of history and memories.

***

The list is omnipresent, and in that sense, it’s a bit like God: existing all around us, capable of assuming many different forms, a way to structure our lives. “Thirteen are the ways that God is good,” goes the song that Jews sing on Passover. The whole song is, in fact, a list—from one through thirteen, each number represents a different tenet of Judaism. “Eight are the days before a bris,” and so on. As a kid, I bellowed those words in a gymnasium filled with hundreds of other Jewish kids dressed awkwardly in their holiday best. We would stand on the laminated benches of the cafeteria folding tables and yell-sing the number corresponding to our grade—“FOUR ARE THE MOTHERS!!” We did that for eight years (we didn’t have a high school; I don’t remember who filled in numbers nine through thirteen in the song), always trying to be louder than the other grades.

***

Let’s talk about the Internet.

The Internet has been to lists what it was to home videos and amateur porn: the great enabler. In his book Belknap calls it “the apotheosis of the list.” There are simply more lists on the Web than could ever possibly be useful, or enjoyable. Wading through it all—publications that offer them both earnestly and ironically, user-based sites that let you generate and vote on them, various tools and apps for making and managing them—it’s hard not to feel the water rising around your waist.

Even the way we navigate the Internet and get information—by typing a query into a search engine—results in a stack of links. If you use Google, you’ll get anywhere from one to three more lists on the left side of the page, representing ways to edit and refine your search. At the bottom, a two-column list of related searches will appear, and below that a horizontal list of more pages. You are boxed in. The list is inescapable. It is helpful, but it is also confining, organized yet overwhelming. On the Internet, the consummate mechanism for controlling chaos struggles not to become a form of chaos itself.

***

Contrary to popular belief and much critical ire, the Internet did not beget the listicle (a portmanteau of “list” and “article”). Magazines did. But the Internet offered a garden in which this hybrid journalistic form could grow and spread its seed. Not only that, but because the listicle and its fellow species, the slide show, could be broken up into multiple pages and thus induce people to click through, slide by slide, some people believe this genus provides part of the answer to the nagging question, how can websites make money?

Though I can’t do the precise math, the model looks something like this:
More slides=more pages=more page views=more ads=more money.

Among other places, listicles and slide shows have found a home at the cultural commentary website Flavorwire. Its editors have perfected the art of turning any given topic into a list or slide show. Speaking with me about a recent post that could have run as an essay but was instead broken into a top-10 slide show, managing editor Caroline Stanley said: “I think couching it like that makes it more accessible. Slide shows are obviously generating page views, but I always try to think of myself as the reader first. Breaking 3,000 words into something that’s less intimidating to look at is important; it helps people move through something. … I think there’s nothing, for the Web, worse than looking at this page where it’s a few thousand words to get through.”

Maybe Nicholas Carr is right—maybe we are deep in The Shallows, and the Internet has changed the way we read and think. Shorter attention spans. More pages. Less writing per page. Pictures! LISTS!

***

I recently met the culture editor at an esteemed magazine that produces a lot of lists. When asked about them, she replied that she finds something incredibly satisfying about the process of clicking through a slide show.

This comment bounced off my brain like a rubber ball. I despise clicking through slide shows. I’m not sure what this says about me. Either I represent the past, when we used to read articles all on one page, or maybe two or three pages, but certainly not ten (unless it was in The New Yorker); or I represent the future, a world in which our attention spans are too short even for slide shows and all we want are clean, simple lists.

***

I write a lot of lists. These days I probably make a to-do list a day, in addition to the others I keep floating around: story ideas, exhibitions I want to see, people I’ve slept with. But I don’t want to share them with you. Do you want to read them? I doubt it. And I’m not sure I want to see yours.

The Internet has this funny tendency, though: it turns us inside out and makes us into narcissists. On the Internet, we suddenly think most of what we have to say is interesting and worth sharing with the world. Enter listography.com.

The website was founded by Lisa Nola and her partner, Adam Marks, in 2006 (they’ve also published an accompanying series of fill-in-the-blank, diary-like journals). It provides a platform for users to create lists of any kind; people use it for everything from daily to-dos to television episodes (yes, episodes, not shows) watched in a given year, to places they want to travel. Each listographer gets a page, for which he or she chooses a background theme. The lists are laid out on top of it, like pieces of paper arranged neatly on a desktop.

On the site, Nola and Marks bill the project as autobiography through list making: “A listography is a perpetual work in progress, a time capsule, and a map of your life for friends and family.” Fair enough—except that traditionally, personal lists are more like diaries than autobiographies. In fact, they often go in diaries. Do we really want to read the private musings of strangers? I had thought that kind of interest extended only to people we love or dead celebrities.

But I was wrong! Not since the coming of Live Journal and Blogger and MySpace and Facebook do we only care about the quotidian existences of those we know (or think we know). We are equal-opportunity snoopers now.

“When we were building the site, it was a time when social networking was really popular,” Nola told me. “A lot of this became a question of, would people want to share their lists publicly, and would that be the majority? We had to figure out what the overall picture would be.” In the end, as with so much of the Internet, the overall picture was public sharing.

***

Possible reasons we make and share lists:

1. Maybe it’s about helping ourselves.
Psychologist Dr. Green: “The bulk of information we come across that really matters to our functioning is information that we need to remember for a short time but that we don’t, over the long run, need to commit to memory. Those are the things we keep in a calendar or on a list. Lists and other organizational techniques play a very important role in keeping track of that information and helping us function well. I think we feel better when we’re organized. It feels good to get things done.”

2. Maybe it’s about having an “expert” help us.
Author Sasha Cagen, on her website: “As the world's leading todolistologist, I'm all about breaking down your big dreams into manageable steps and fully celebrating every crossed-off item along the way so you ENJOY the process of doing.”

3. Maybe it’s about helping each other.
Listography's Lisa Nola: “A lot of people enjoy sharing and commenting and being inspired by other people. I made some lists about her [Nola’s mother, who died of cancer last year] that were really private, but I made them public at the time. It was the same way people use any social media website—it was sort of reaching out for comfort. A lot of people reached out, and I was surprised at how comforted I was.”

***

When you think about it, list making has a kind of creative limit: it’s mostly aggregation, filling empty spots with preexisting items. But choosing those items is often an assertion of power, an act of curation: what doesn’t make the cut is as important as what does.

Today, though, as we increasingly rely on obscure knowledge for novelty, what kind of power does list making give us: the supremacy with which to name globe-shaped foods? A fine eye for spotting the 10 hottest women on the Texas sex offenders list? I worry that we find ourselves knowing a lot, so little of it worth knowing. We risk becoming masters of our own triviality.

Eco, in his interview with Der Spiegel, said, “The list doesn’t destroy culture; it creates it.” This may once have been the case, but it isn’t anymore. For better or for worse, the list now recycles culture. Where once it bred, today it borrows.

Related: 100 Great (Not Best) Songs of 2011 and How Much More Do Books Cost Today?

Jillian Steinhauer writes about art, comics, and other things that strike her fancy for places like the New York Observer, Guernica Daily, Hyperallergic, and The Jewish Daily Forward. Like you and all your friends, she's on Twitter. Image: A page from Madonna's to-do list in 1990, courtesy of Gotta Have It, via Lists of Note.

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252 Things Our Readers Bought on Amazon This Year

Choire Sicha — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 13:00:05 +0000

As an Amazon affiliate, we get a wee percentage of sales from people who click through from our site to Amazon. But better than that, we get a report from Amazon about what people have purchased! (Don't worry, it's all anonymous: there's no information at all passed on about the purchaser's identity.) One thing we can guarantee: you people buy things online. Here are just a few excerpts from the year 2011, here with quantity, title, media and cost.

1 Chupacabra (HD), Amazon Instant Video, $2.84

2 "Top Chef: Don't Be Tardy for the Dinner Party," Instant Video, $1.89

1 Buffalo by David Bitton Men's Bridle Strap Belt With Leather Plaque, in brown, size 38, $29.99

2 Joe's Jeans Men's Malcolm Rebel Relaxed Fit Jean, Malcolm, 38, $158.00/each

1 Honda CRV Heavy Vinyl Spare Tire Cover w/ Honda CR-V Logo, $19.95

1 Got2b Rockin' It Dry Shampoo, 4.3-Ounce, $5.61

3 1Q84, Haruki Murakami, $16.04

1 At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, Danielle L. McGuire, $17.30

6 Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future, Tom Scocca, $15.66

1 Furniture with Soul: Master Woodworkers and Their Craft, David Savage, $29.70

1 Geek Girls Unite: How Fangirls, Bookworms, Indie Chicks, and Other Misfits Are Taking Over the World, Leslie Simon, $11.24

13 Habibi, Craig Thompson, $20.58

1 Handbook of Otolaryngology: Head and Neck Surgery, $70.35

1 Iron Man: My Journey through Heaven and Hell with Black Sabbath, Tony Iommi, $16.46

1 Myth of Black Capitalism, Earl Ofari, $9.99

1 Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, Maria Mies, $4.78

1 Valences of the Dialectic, Fredric Jameson, $15.00

1 X-Men: The Ultimate Guide, $16.49

1 Microsoft LifeCam Studio 1080p HD Webcam, $57.69

1 "Community: The Complete Second Season," DVD, $19.99

1 "Eleanor and Franklin Double Feature (The Early Years / The White House Years)," DVD, $8.99

1 Wicker Park, DVD, $2.99

1 Readynas Pro 6 Unified Nas, $1033.14

1 Fun Size Halloween Mix Variety Pack, 157-Piece, 74.87-Ounce, $19.62

25 Miracle Frooties 600mg Miracle Fruit Berry Tablets Designer Box, $15.95

1 Traditional Medicinals Organic Pregnancy Herbal Tea, 16-Count Wrapped Tea Bags (Pack of 6), $ 21.90

1 Clearblue Easy Fertility Monitor Test Sticks, 30 Count, $28.99

1 FertilAid for Men: Male Fertility Supplement, $28.95

1 NOW Foods Horny Goat Weed Extract 750mg, 90 Tablets, $12.24

1 Sunshine Chees-It Cheese Crackers Thirty Six 1.5 Ounce Snack Pack Bags, $18.99

1 FertileCM: for Fertile Cervical Mucus, $19.95

1 SpermCheck Fertility, $34.95

1 Waterpik Ultra Water Flosser, $46.97

41 A Tea People's History, Alex Pareene, $2.99

1 Bringing Nothing To The Party: True Confessions Of A New Media Whore, Paul Carr, $8.42

1 Bubbly on Your Budget: Live Luxuriously with What You Have, $8.79

1 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition, Jared Diamond, $9.99

1 Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, Tom Mueller, $10.39

1 The Book of Repulsive Women (Illustrated), Djuna Barnes, $0.99

1 The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934: Vol. 1 (1931-1934), $9.99

83 The Junket (Kindle Single), Mike Albo, $1.99

1 The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course: Online Marketing, $9.99

1 Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, Barry Estabrook, $7.69

35, Up the Down Volcano, Sloane Crosley $1.99

1 Cuisinart 77-10 Chef's Classic Stainless-Steel 10-Piece Cookware Set, $122

1 "NOW That's What I Call Music Vol. 39," $5

1 "The Complete John Peel Sessions," $9.49

1 Entertainment Weekly (1-year auto-renewal), $15

1 DC Men's Villain Vulc Skate Shoe, Armor, 11 M, $37.75

1 DiaGel Diarrhea Control Gel for Cats Over 6 lbs, 1.0cc Syringe, $13

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Korea's Narc Economy is Perfect for See-Something, Say-Something USA

Choire Sicha — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 15:20:27 +0000

"Snitching for pay has become especially popular since the world’s economic troubles slowed South Korea’s powerful economy. Paparazzi say most of their ranks are people who have lost their jobs in the downturn and are drawn by media reports of fellow Koreans making tens of thousands of dollars a year reporting crimes."
—I would be so into this catching on in America. If you see something, narc someone out and get paid for it! It'll end terribly of course but think of the stories! Think of the reality TV! Let's just go for it and wallow around in it.

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Local Gay Upset About Near-Death of Camp

Choire Sicha — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 15:40:12 +0000

"A couple of Sundays ago I had a gnarly mood swing in front of the telly. It happened while Kate Winslet was frowning and mumbling her way through the third episode of Mildred Pierce, the HBO miniseries directed by Todd Haynes.... Clearly there is a conspiracy afoot to deprive us all of the one thing that can make life bearable. Something must be done to protect and promote the endangered majesty of camp."
—Homosexual Puts Foot Down, Cries Enough!

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Boob and Penis Drawings, Doll Houses, Bright Fire and the "Unspeakable Home"

Seth Colter Walls — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 15:30:42 +0000

Mary HK Choi: Hi Seth! How are you feeling today?

Seth Colter Walls: both within and without the state of being connected / the Internet makes me feel online

Mary: Of course this is where you begin. I'd have started with the Saint Joseph Domaine Laurent Betton with the peppery finish that we murdered last night at Bar Boulud.

Seth: Oh sorry, HK, my mind is still a touch scrambled from the last of the three short "operas" we saw last night. As you know, the libretto for the last one was written by Samuel Beckett. The rhythms are still a bit in my head. But let's start at the beginning.

Seth: As everyone has been properly notified, City Opera is currently presenting a night of three short, modern one-act operas, which are being rubric'ed under the heading of "Monodramas"–on account of how there is only one singer per piece. (All sopranos, as it happens.) You can read several quite favorable standard-issue operatic reviews in the Times and in the Post (and in another town's Post) if you'd like–though what follows will be more of a user-experience conversation for the non-specialist.

Mary: And I went in totally cold. I do not have the recordings, LIKE YOU DO.

Seth: Truth–or at least for the two that HAVE been been recorded. And so here is the point where we say the titles and composers. First off was John Zorn's "La Machine de l'etre" (The Machine of Being), written in 2000, and which was 10 minutes long, only. Plotless. Also: wordless. Just emotive sounds from the soprano over a gnarly orchestra. And it's meant to be based, somehow, on the late drawings of Antonin Artaud.

Mary: Very KTHXBAI. And it was just a GANG of burqua'd ladies.

Seth: Right. At beginning of this piece, dozens upon dozens of people on stage were in burquas. And the two kind of mannequin-ish actors, dressed up in tuxy-duds, who served as our "guides" to all three works and who stood out in front of the curtain before the lights went down...

Mary: They looked like they were in some sort of synth band!

Seth: Yes, they were very Crystal Sleigh Pink Nothings...

Mary: Yeah, the super hot lady one with bangs and 5" patent leather heels. And the dude.

Seth: Right. He's always going to be called "the dude," when standing next to her.

Mary: And they went around undressing everyone: the soprano, a man in a scarlet suit... before the music even started.

Seth: The whole thing played very much like performance art? But they also gave some odd "structure" to the the night's disparate pieces.

Mary: The thing about the whole performance art bit was that at times it was almost like a comedy skit–poking fun of EXACTLY something like that. BUT it was all too well done and strangely pleasing in other respects.

Seth: Yes, the audience was supposed to laugh a bit, at the beginning and in-between the pieces. Some slight comic relief amid all the keening, angsty abstraction of the modernist musics.

Mary: The audience laughed because they played so much with the planes of interest. Like the focal points altering jarringly from the projected artwork to the background to the sherpas who move around on the foreground. You laughed because moments were absurd.

Seth: TONS of data to process. Here's also where we describe more concretely to people that one of the burqa'd ladies in the Zorn piece had a huge thought-bubble screen above her head, onto which animations based on Artaud's work were projected.

Mary: Some of the women in burquas looked like nuns, though, when they were skittering about. And the drawings looked like aboriginal boobies.

Seth: And penises... which is why I thought the burqua/nun thing was interesting. And also why the whole conceit of "dressing/undressing" the participants before the first two operas was key. Just the notion of the sheathed self versus the revealed/vulnerable self being the emotional nexus between these works that are otherwise quite dissimilar. And and the reason that we don't get any dressing/undressing in the third act is because the MIND/PERSONA IS UNKNOWABLE TO ITSELF, hullo Beckett!

Mary: Hmm... the thing is some of the burqua'dnuns had mad personality while totally covered. BUT you know that's funny you say that, about vulnerability, it's like all the nuns were space aliens, right? And the audience is an invading space ship, and we're way more powerful than them.

Seth: Uh...?

Mary: And the undressed singing lady head nun or den mother or whatever looked panicked! Like she was making up excuses to us, to protect all the other nuns who were helpless

Seth: Yes, she was gesturing to the animations, to the crazy penises and boobs projected into their speech bubbles, as if to explain their essential legitimacy to us as thoughts.

Mary: But she was also the only one really looking at us. There was something very beseeching about it. Like she was asking us to spare them

Seth: And explain their brains to us.

Mary: It was a weird feeling, and none of us were getting it.

Seth: Which, obviously, was why it was wordless

Mary: RIGHT.

Seth: How cool was the fire at the end?

Mary: It was gonzo. Right so there was a huge speech bubble that they showed the animation on, and then they set it on fire. OR rather, it went up in flames. And it was SO FUCKING BRIGHT.

Seth: How do they make fire so bright that you have to close your eyes, even from that distance? And don't forget the other dude in the red suit also had a competing thought bubble, but his went away and then he was vacummed up into the ceiling. AS ONE DOES in this show. So much flying.

Mary: I was worried for their lumbar support. But I also loved it. Also we forgot the lingerie lady with the t-straps.

Seth: She had a super-kinetic and disjointed dance.

Mary: YES, broken doll club dance w/splayed hands and good hair movement.

Seth: This all happened in 10 minutes!

Mary: It was crazed.

Seth: Correct. And then there was a brief multimedia interlude that came before Arnold Schoenberg's "Erwartung" (Expectation, or Anticipation, or Waiting — people do fight over this), from 1909–which in some ways was the most straightforward, most "plotted" thing of the night. In brief: a woman in the woods is looking for her lover, who is late to meet her.

Mary: A total wackjob woman, btw. I mean she is basically straight up making out with a dead man.

Seth: She comes across a dead body (it's him!) and mistakes it for a tree trunk at first. Later she realizes he's dead, but then keeps wondering about the "other woman" homeboy had been seeing of late.

Mary: That's what made her totally nuts! Well, you know I felt deeply for the animated interstitials, because they felt good on my brain and as though I was DUMB high on very good marijuana. AND reminded me of the BEST kenzo floral prints from the 70s.

Seth: That was video art of the seasons changing in the woods, courtesy of Jennifer Steinkamp. Thought it was a bit long. But it was a nice way to disguise the need to have a 5-minute set change after the Zorn piece.

Mary: What did YOU think of the second one?

Seth: I thought it was the least successful staging of the night. Like all the stage business revealed the director's lack of trust regarding what actually happens in the piece.

Mary: So she sees her dead lover, is maaaaaybe making out with him the whole time, and talking to him about how sad she is, and how desperately she loved him.

Seth: After killing him and forgetting it.

Mary: And THEN she gets PISSED! Because she DECIDES he was having an affair with some chick with "white arms." I also noticed this was the production with an Asian lady in it.

Seth: Meantime: so many rose petals falling onto the stage from above.

Mary: Gorgeous rose petals.

Seth: Too many?

Mary: Yes. And then we think maybe she killed him. BUT also I really like their little empire waist dresses, with the pretty little balloon cap sleeves, AND there was a super pretty doll house in that one too. OK so let's get to your favorite, the LAST ONE.

Seth: Morton Feldman's NEITHER!

Mary: The #disco one.

Seth: Describe the set?

Mary: It looked like the walls were covered in fish scales

Seth: I feel like this was opera as it would be staged at Club Silencio from Mullholland Drive?

Mary: Without a doubt. I LOVED the disco balls that were just spinning mirrored boxes.

Seth: Very General Zod. And also they reflected this refracted pinwheel morph-zone of intense colordrom, right?

Mary: YES. The reflections off them shits were really uncomfortable in a way I liked.

Seth: But viz a viz the sheathing and unsheathing of the women in the first two, there was no getting INSIDE the woman in the final piece.

Mary: Oh none. We were in it, but there was no inside to be had.

Seth: The boxes spinning all around her were the antithesis of the doll house (look inside), and the animations (look inside my head).

Mary: YES. I mean, it starts off elegant and beautiful ... and then...

Seth: A bit disturbed and keening and repetitive, but rhythmically varied. And sometimes very softly played. To the point where when a new phrase or momentum was created out of the pointalistically realized orchestration... your hair was just blown back.

Mary: And the words!

Seth: "to and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow / from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither"

Mary: Bro: "UNSPEAKABLE HOME"!

Seth: The final words!

Mary: By then, you're like, WERD. CHURCH.

Seth: One other moment? When once of the dancer woman is trying to hold onto the man who is flying away, and she's holding onto his shoes?

Mary: Very no strings attached/*NSYNC (not Portman-Kutcher).

Seth: LOLLL ... anyway, it reminded me of the protagonist in opera number 2 holding onto the dead body that had weirdly risen, undead-like, at the end.

Mary: YES.

Seth: I thought it was a nice callback, just as the boxes that were animated in the first piece were the disco boxes in the last piece. I think the director, Michael Counts, did a great job "tying" together these pieces thematically without putting too much of a BUTTON on the whole deal.

Mary: Agreed. Man those disco boxes were crazy feeling on the brain. But that's the thing. That piece JUST ENDED. It was like being sprung form a sensory deprivation tank into times square. What did we call it?

Seth: That you are refreshed, but also kind of dazed that you elected to sleep with all the lights on and windows open.

Mary: And slightly headachey.

Seth: And still in your SKINNY JEANS.

Mary: And needing to pee. BUT, in a good way that you should pay money to go do.

Seth: $12 tickets and $25 tickets remain for all the remaining presentations of "Monodramas" — which is cheaper than all the things we ate and drank afterward. Otherwise: did the music ever become beautiful to you? Or did it stay space alien-y the whole time?

Mary: It was beautiful the whole time, and space alieny the whole time

Seth: DUALITY, BITCHES. Also, parts of this night contained some of the most exciting opera-making I have seen on any NYC stage this season.

Mary: It was uncomfortably beautiful–and draws you into its crazy immediately. It's like a really hot crying chick.

Seth: Again: LYNCH.

Mary: VERY VERY LYNCH. Importantly so.

Seth: I wonder what we'll see next?

Mary: First we have to go to our jobs again, though.

[EXUENT ALL, TO MEETINGS]

Seth Colter Walls and Mary HK Choi are a mite sluggish today.

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The Mark Rappaport Film Fest This Week: Do Not Miss!

Seth Colter Walls — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 12:00:25 +0000

Whenever I belatedly discover an American master, I feel a pain inside. A guilty pain. A pain related to an understanding that the celebrity-media complex has indeed been "winning." And then I put on some sunglasses and remind myself: It's not personal, babe. It's just late capitalism doing what late capitalism does. (Then I flip myself off in the mirror.)

Mark Rappaport is the man behind Rock Hudson's Home Movies and From the Journals of Jean Seberg. Those two films, which were sold and distributed during the indy-doc craze of the 90s, weren't true documentaries, but found-footage essays of social-crit wrapped up in sheaths of savvy sound-and-image humor. They amounted to good crash courses in underground culture—or at least I thought so when I was still in middle school and still had yet to know that a word like "heteronormative" existed, or what a "Rock Hudson" even was. Today, those two quasi-docs are the only films of Rappaport's currently available on DVD. (Because they were actually, you know, distributed.) Rappaport's half-dozen underground feature films from the 70s and 80s—which were independent before "independent" was a marketing niche— are lost now, even in our long-tail world of putative uber-availability. (In what amounts to knock against the import of criticism, it seems not to matter these films were heralded, at the time, by critics as diverse Siskel, Hoberman, Ebert and Jonathan Rosenbaum.)

Which is the whole reason we should be glad to have Anthology Film Archives, here in New York. Only they can put on a show like this week's Mark Rappaport festival, which features new-ish prints of those early 16-millimeter pieces, courtesy of the George Eastman restoration house. If you have any affection for the American underground, this is the very definition of a "don't miss" engagement. Break your plans. You actually won't be able catch up on Netflix.

I caught 1977's Local Color on Friday night, and it was like discovering where the (allegedly retiring! Again!) Steven Soderbergh of Schizopolis was born. Right down to its humorously layered (and confusing) nest of characters—including a philandering dentist who liaises with his patients—it became plainly obvious that Hollywood's reigning experimentalist has long been aware of Rappaport's career. I won't ruin the dentist's best gag in the movie, but I will say I haven't heard a voice-over joke go over that well with an audience since I went back in time and saw Annie Hall in the theaters before I was born. How many movies from America's experimental-film undergound are this funny? (I don't mean "chuckle-in-your-oh-so-sophisticated-head" funny, but like legit LOL.) As a dedicated surveyor (and defender!) of the mullingly ponderous, I have to say I think their aggregate number is maybe single digit.

Rappaport described Local Color's emotional wheelhouse as a collision of "flamboyant melodrama in dreary, desperate lives—operatic passions ground underfoot by the crushing flatness of daily existence. It is melodrama stripped bare, drained of the heavy breathing we associate with soap opera…. In a sense, the movie is the plot and the plot is the movie. Except that the plot is irrelevant. Suffice it to say, there is enough of it to choke a horse.”

Says Ebert: "a strange and wonderful movie."

At any rate: sorry to do it like this, but Local Color—which Rosenbaum calls his favorite Rappaport movie in this fine essay—only screens once more during Anthology's one-week festival. That would be tonight at 7 p.m.. (Short notice, I know, but I had to see the first screening before I could tell you how unmissable tonight's final screening is!)

Later on this week, I'll mostly interested to catch The Scenic Route and Chain Letters. The second and final screening of Impostors, from 1979, is on Thursday. Here is Siskel's old summary of the film's plot—"Sinister, silly, and sometimes murderous twins named Chuckie and Mikey track down an Egyptian treasure while performing a magic act with their assistant, Tina." Right?

Seth Colter Walls is The Awl's chief correspondent for the difficult arts. He has a Tumblr and a dayjob both!

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Everything You Were Too Lazy to See in 2010

Choire Sicha — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 12:30:26 +0000

Holy moses, here is an amazingly comprehensive list of, pretty much, all the moving-image culture you missed in 2010 and shouldn't have, according to many people! Still, the one cultural event we can agree upon with Josh Siegel, associate film curator at MoMA? Sky Mall Kitties! Miss you, Sky Mall Kitties.

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Last Chance To See Bernstein's Messy-Great Opera: 'A Quiet Place' Closes Sunday

Seth Colter Walls — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 17:00:57 +0000

I would up being pretty busy at work this last month, or I would have written a full-length Difficult Listening Hour about the current production of Leonard Bernstein's opera A Quiet Place—a work that is at times brilliant, and is still sort of dizzyingly entrancing even when it is busy being uneven. The story might make you go "blah," as it's a jaundiced tale of suburbia's morally cramped way—a Revolutionary Road/"Mad Men" arc perceived through the late-alcoholic haze of some gnarly-proof, atonal music that's speckled with odd bitters of jazz. But do not let your standard-issue requirements for novelty turn you away, here. There is not a better way to spend $12 (standing room) or $25 (fourth ring) in NYC this Sunday at 1:30 pm.

The musical imagination at work in Bernstein's final stage score is undeniable. Occasionally, a pop-like tune by the Bernstein-you-know breaks out—though it's as likely to accompany a striptease performed by a young, schizophrenic gay man (and for the benefit of his father, while at the funeral of the mother/wife) as anything so neat and thematically tidy as Jets/Sharks. The politics of the piece are strained, to be sure; everyone's got an afternoon-talk show mania on their minds. But tired as any one strand of the plot may seem, the overall jumble carries a chaotic jolt of the distinct. And, after the burlesquery of the son's funereal striptease settles down into a haunting, Messiaen-like flicker of notes, you'll think: goodness, I'll never see anything like this again. And Sunday—quite honestly—is your last chance. This problematic piece has never been staged in Lenny-loving NYC before, and likely will not be staged again for some time. This production is also uniquely good, since the scrappy City Opera is again benefiting from Christopher Alden's morally engaged direction. (His narrative framing of the opera's song-for-winners, "There's A Law," conjures a Brecht-Weill style of humor that's laced with cunning cruelty.)

But so now here we are: Sunday's matinee performance at City Opera is the last one in this run, and I just couldn't let that pass without comment. Awl pal Zachary Woolfe called this production "one of those strange evenings that's disappointing but unmissable"—which I think is mostly right, except for the proviso that it's disappointing only if you go in expecting every work to box with the classics. An athletic failure can be a vitalizing thing. Awl pal Alex Ross, in this week's New Yorker, says "the production makes you squirm while you are in the house but lingers in the mind for days." Since Ross's review came out, the cheap $12 seats have sold out. But $25 tickets remain. And I'll be buying one, because I want to see this thing again before it's gone.

Seth Colter Walls really has been busy at work.

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You Get 56 Glossy Pages About a Museum in Boston!

Choire Sicha — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 11:35:04 +0000

"On Sunday, November 14, 2010, The Boston Globe will publish a special magazine devoted to the opening of the Museum of Fine Arts' major new expansion, the Art of the Americas Wing. Entitled, "The MFA takes wing," the 56-page full-color glossy magazine will appear in all editions of the Boston Sunday Globe as well as in The New York Times in greater Boston and Manhattan..... Other features include stories on how the museum beefed up its collections, the story of two rooms from a 19th century Dorchester house that were recreated for the museum, and what's served in the new café." Is it... soup? Do they serve soup?

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