The Awl

100 Great (Not Best!) Songs of 2011

Seth Colter Walls — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 17:00:27 +0000

This is not a “best of 2011” music list. I didn’t hear or read or see all the music this year. Did you? Perhaps after consulting with a suitably large staff, a publication could reasonably claim to draw a box around, say, the best music of the year. I tend to count myself rarely satisfied with these attempts, though, even if I'm consulted. How about you?

No, don’t even start, as I’ve seen every single one of you beefing on Twitter about a subjective list. You weren’t wrong to do so! Lists are always wrong. It’s a part of their power, this axiomatic guarantee of failure. A list might “start a discussion” or draw clicks (not the same thing), but it’s always gonna anger. Even should it focus narrowly on a single genre, the better to claim total knowledge, it’ll fail, because yup: a judicious myopia rankles, too.

Now: at this point, if you like, you could just jump straight to go listen to this promised music.

But it's interesting how frequently we continue to make and read lists. I’ve set all mine, for music at least, already. The aggregate sorting and assessing included decisions about classical albums I was asked to nominate for one publication, choices for a nationwide jazz-critics’ poll that’s due in the morning, some hip-hop entries for another spot. I couldn’t really make the list for one genre without figuring out how I felt about everything. Excuse me: “everything I heard this year.” See what I did there? So what follows is not a rebuke of everything you heard and/or liked that I didn’t in 2011. It’s a list of my favorites. Hey, look: we got rid of the word “best.”

Though maybe we didn’t, quite; perhaps we never do. It’s a difficult word to escape. Paste kicked off the silly season in music criticism the other week by being more or less first out of the gate to publish a “50 Best Albums” list— before The Roots’ "undun" came out (or was even furnished to press via protected streams). That list (and a few others) also came out before Anthony Hamilton’s "Back to Love" hit NPR’s First Listen the other day. (I’ve already listened a first time, and a second, third, ~~et al~~ etc.)

The Paste list, to the extent that it claims to represent “the best” of music’s overall pile, expresses some eyebrow-raising inferences about aesthetics in 2011. Hip-hop doesn’t have many ambassadors to the summit as defined here; apparently Paste would have us believe that the best rap record of the year came from that one guy who acts in “Community,” followed by that other guy whose sweaters are undeniably meme-worthy and used to be on another show. R&B’s influence is similarly limited to global sensation Adele and cause mîcroblog-célèbres Frank Ocean. Modern jazz and contemporary classical: they can go get their respective shineboxes. This list took a lot of flack along “LOL, white ppl” lines, despite the problematizing reality that it didn’t much reflect the diversity of music made by caucasian folk, either.

Not that these blinders aren’t also fronted in the opposite direction. The perspicacious critic Ted Gioia has, of late, gamely worked up a Top 100 albums list, across “all genres" … that has no hip-hop in it. Called out by Times jazz critic Nate Chinen on Twitter, Gioia doubled down:

@natechinen C'mon Nate, you know that – with a few exceptions – level of musicianship on hiphop records falls short of jazz, classical, etc.Tue Dec 06 00:09:55 via webTed Gioia
tedgioia

Now, to Gioia’s credit, he backed off a bit after Chinen (and others) raised the perfectly reasonable point that instrumental prowess is not the same thing as musicianship. (Which isn’t to suggest that instrumental prowess can’t be observed in hip-hop, either.) He solicited requests for rap that he might listen to, and expressed a willingness to give those recommendations a whirl. As Twitter debates between music critics go, this was a pretty civil, value-adding enterprise.

The “Difficult Listening Hour” column that has run, with varying frequency, here on The Awl since Summer ’09 has traditionally focused on what Sun Ra called “other planes of there.” But it can mean something else, too, aside from a devotion to experimental flights; “difficult listening” might also connote doing the work of a Fitzgerald-ian musical mind, one that absorbs a number of opposed genres and still manages to function.

One time when I was talking to Questlove, I mentioned how something on "How I Got Over" reminded me of a moment on an early Sun Ra side, and he geeked out with me for approximately five minutes. On another occasion, PJ Harvey talked my ear off about the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. (Harvey’s "Let England Shake" places high on my favorite albums list, by the way—as does the Oregon Symphony’s new account of Williams’ Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, on their all-around brilliant disc "Music for a Time of War.")

Comprehensive knowledge remains a chimera, though even if it weren’t, I know I wouldn’t be able to claim it for myself yet: there is only one “Latin”-tinged album on my “Favorite 50 Albums” list, which follows. This is an oversight I’d like to address in the future. (And I’d be happy to take some recommendations in the comments.)

While I’ve spent plenty of time with the classical and jazz over the years, I remain convinced that almost everything from those genres in the list to come is capable of speaking to listeners who may be less versed. The buzzsaw-noise keyboard samples that kick off Annie Gosfield’s recent piece “Lightning Slingers and Dead Ringers,” as performed on a new EP by pianist Lisa Moore, pack as thrilling a low-end grind as anything I heard in techno this year. (Though Lone’s “Explorers” is good on that score, also.) The one exception, so far as avant-newbies go, would be Anthony Braxton’s four-hour absurdist-modernist opera "Trillium E: Wallingford’s Polarity Gambit," which would be a terrible place to start listening to Anthony Braxton. However, if you cherish your 8-CD Complete Arista Recordings as much as I do, you have to check out this first full studio recording of a Braxton opera. (If you don’t have the Complete Arista, maybe ask for it as a gift this holiday season.)

Were we suffering from an era of musical scarcity, I might have to grapple more vigorously with the fact that I find Kanye West both very talented and very annoying to let into my life for more than five minutes at a time. But we don’t live in that era of scarcity; No I.D. and Flying Lotus contributed beats to Killer Mike’s "Pl3dge" that seem to me as good or better than any on "Watch the Throne." I might also have rated Beyoncé's "4" twenty or so positions higher, if not for the witless and class-deaf nonce word “swagoo.”

I liked Annie Clark’s piece for the yMusic chamber ensemble better than anything on her latest recording as St. Vincent. And my liberal philosophical cast takes comfort in seeing women gaining ground in the sphere of “classical” composition on the whole—as with Kaija Saariaho’s clarinet concerto “D’om le Vrai Sens”—even while Hilary Hahn continues to knock slept-on modern repertoire by the likes of Charles Ives out of the park. When speaking of art that challenges our stereotypical racial constructs, I also like to make note of Yelawolf’s rapping, George Lewis’s chamber music, and Matana Roberts’ visionary approach to the avant-jazz concept album.

There’s a loose genre key at the bottom of the albums list, in case you’d like to reverse-engineer the constituent genre-segregated lists. But really, so what? I’d say to the extent that lists from critics serve any useful purpose at all, this happens not by constricting and defining anything with too much certainty, but by promoting and celebrating perceived values as widely as possible.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to see a bunch of movies before turning in my film-critic ballot next week.

The “Difficult Listening Hour” 50 Favorite Albums of 2011

(Some of my very favorite jazz of the year isn’t so much on Spotify. YouTubes are embedded in this list for a couple of incredible albums that don’t show up on the playlist.

50. Dave Douglas / So Percussion – GreenLeaf Portable Series Volume 3: Bad Mango (!)
49. Tech N9ne – All 6s and 7s (@)
48. George Lewis – Les Exercices Spirituels (!)
47. Jean-Michel Pilc – Essential (!)
46. Beastie Boys – Hot Sauce Committee Part Two (@)
45. Tyshawn Sorey – Oblique I (!)
44. Eleanor Friedberger – Last Summer (#)
43. Action Bronson – Doctor Lecter (@)
42. Beyoncé – 4 (@)
41. Now Ensemble – Awake (!)
40. Rihanna – Talk That Talk (@)
39. The Men – Leave Home (#)
38. Matthew Shipp – Art of the Improviser (!)
37. Radiohead – The King of Limbs (#)
36. Yelawolf – Radioactive (@)
35. Wild Flag – Wild Flag (#)
34. Keiji Haino / Jim O'Rourke / Oren Ambarchi – in a flash everything comes together as one there is no need for a subject ($)
33. Kepler Quartet – Ben Johnston: String Quartets Nos. 1, 5 & 10 (!)

32. Wye Oak – Civilian (#)
31. Oregon Symphony / Carlos Kalmar – Music for a Time of War (!)
30. Red Fang – Murder the Mountains (#)
29. Nikkiya – Speakher [free mixtape] (@)

28. Tim Hagans – The Moon Is Waiting (!)
27. Fucked Up – David Comes to Life (#)
26. Anthony Braxton – Trillium E: Wallingford's Polarity Gambit (!)

25. The Roots – undun (@)
24. Nico Muhly – Seeing is Believing (!)
23. Anthony Hamilton – Back to Love (@)
22. Stephan Crump / Steve Lehman – Kaleidoscope and Collage (!)
21. Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra – Saariaho: D'om le Vrai Sens / Laterna Magica / Leino Songs (!)
20. Big K.R.I.T. – Return of 4eva [free mixtape] (@)
19. Meshell Ndegeocello – Weather (@)
18. John Luther Adams – Four Thousand Holes (!)
17. Death Grips – Exmilitary [free mixtape] (@)
16. Tom Waits – Bad As Me (%)
15. Miguel Zenón – Alma Adentro: The Puerto Rican Songbook (!)
14. E-40 – Revenue Retrievin': Overtime Shift / Graveyard Shift (@)
13. Nicholas Phan / Myra Huang – Britten: Winter Words / Seven Sonnets Of Michelangelo / Six Folk Song Arrangements (!)
12. Raphael Saadiq – Stone Rollin' (@)
11. Peter Evans Quintet – Ghosts (!)

10. Marsha Ambrosius – Late Nights & Early Mornings (@)
9. Percussion Group Cincinnati – John Cage: The Works for Percussion I (!)
8. Pistol Annies – Hell on Heels (^)
7. Killer Mike – Pl3dge (@)
6. Matthew Friedberger – Old Regimes (&)

5. Hilary Hahn / Valentina Lisitsa – Ives: Four Sonatas (!)
4. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake (#)
3. Matana Roberts – Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens de Couleur Libres (!)

2. Liturgy – Aesthethica (*)
1. Craig Taborn – Avenging Angel (!)

Loose genre key / statistical splits:

Jazz/Classical (!): 21
Hip-hop/R&B (@): 16
Punk/Hardcore/Alt-Rock/Traditional Indie (#): 8
Noise ($): 1
Tom Waits (%): 1
Country (^): 1
Autodidact-Harpist Singer-Songwriter (&): 1
Somewhat Contentiously Filed Under “Black Metal” (*): 1

And now!

THE AWL'S "DIFFICULT LISTENING HOUR" 100 SPOTIFY TRACKS FROM 2011

If you're on Spotify, you can just click right here to enjoy in that form. Or try this!

Below is a readout for non-Spotify users who may or may not want to look this stuff up elsewhere. No ranked order, though the sequence as presented is meant to work okay-ish, with appropriate spaces for pop in between the concerti/symphonies/multi-movement chamber works/jazz cuts. About ¾ of the artists from my favorite albums list are represented.

Killer Mike – That's Life II
John Cage – Credo in US
Pistol Annies – The Hunter's Wife
Fucked Up – Ship Of Fools
Goapele – Money
Miguel Zenon – Olas Y Arenas
PJ Harvey – The Last Living Rose
Death Grips – Lord of the Game (ft. Mexican Girl)
Rihanna – Watch n' Learn
Aurora Orchestra – Byrd: Miserere Mei
Liturgy – Returner
E-40 – 43 Feat. B-Legit
Jean-Michel Pilc – Mack the Knife
Marsha Ambrosius – Hope She Cheats On You (With A Basketball Player)
Annie Gosfield – Lightning Slingers and Dead Ringers: I. With enthusiasm and a little violence
Annie Gosfield – Lightning Slingers and Dead Ringers: II. Languid and layered
Annie Gosfield – Lightning Slingers and Dead Ringers: III. Machine-like, but with some groove
K'LA – All Your Love – Explicit Version
Lone – Explorers
Micachu & The Shapes and the London Sinfonietta – Low Dogg
Britney Spears – Gasoline
WILD FLAG – Boom
Red Fang – Wires
Statik Selektah – Cliff Notes
Meshell Ndegeocello – Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
Kari Kriikku – D'OM LE VRAI SENS: I. L'Ouie
Kari Kriikku – D'OM LE VRAI SENS: II. La Vue
Kari Kriikku – D'OM LE VRAI SENS: III. L'Odorat
Kari Kriikku – D'OM LE VRAI SENS: IV. Le Toucher
Kari Kriikku – D'OM LE VRAI SENS: V. Le Gout
Kari Kriikku – D'OM LE VRAI SENS: VI. A mon seul desir
Raphael Saadiq – Heart Attack
2562 – Winamp Melodrama
The Men – Bataille
The Roots – One Time
The Roots – Will To Power (3rd Movement)
Now Ensemble – Waiting in the Rain for Snow
Eleanor Friedberger – My Mistakes
Beyoncé – 1+1
PJ Harvey – The Words That Maketh Murder
Brad Paisley – A Man Don't Have To Die
Yelawolf – Slumerican Shitizen
Nicholas Phan – Winter Words Op. 52: Before Life and After
Liturgy – Generation
Lucinda Williams – Convince Me
Kitchener Waterloo Symphony – Popcorn Superhet Receiver / Part 1
Kitchener Waterloo Symphony – Popcorn Superhet Receiver / Part 2a
Kitchener Waterloo Symphony – Popcorn Superhet Receiver / Part 2b
Killer Mike – Ready Set Go
Tom Waits – Bad As Me
John Cage – Imaginary Landscape No. 5
Tune-Yards – Powa
Wye Oak – Dogs Eyes
Anthony Hamilton – Woo
Death Grips – Takyon (Death Yon)
Eric Church – Drink In My Hand
Beyoncé – Love On Top
Akira Sakata & Jim O'Rourke With Chikamorachi – Nagoya 1 [Part 2]
Meshell Ndegeocello – Rapid Fire
Pistol Annies – Takin' Pills
Yelawolf – Growin' Up In The Gutter
Jean-Michel Pilc – Caravan
Rihanna – We Found Love
Beastie Boys – Don't Play No Game That I Can't Win (featuring Santigold)
Marsha Ambrosius – Lose Myself
Miguel Zenon – Incomprendido
Ryan Adams – Invisible Riverside
Oregon Symphony – Symphony No. 4 in F minor: I. Allegro
Oregon Symphony – Symphony No. 4 in F minor: II. Andante moderato
Oregon Symphony – Symphony No. 4 in F minor: III. Scherzo: Allegro molto
Oregon Symphony – Symphony No. 4 in F minor: IV. Finale con epilogo fugato: Allegro molto
Big K.R.I.T. – Sookie Now – Explicit Version
Beastie Boys – Lee Majors Come Again
Raphael Saadiq – Good Man
Dave Douglas – One More News (feat. Dave Douglas & So Percussion)
Fucked Up – One More Night
yMusic – Proven Badlands
Goapele – Play
Pistol Annies – Beige
Aurora Orchestra – Byrd: Bow Thine Ear
Radiohead – Codex
Miguel – Sure Thing
Now Ensemble – Change
Red Fang – Hank is Dead
Matthew Shipp – Take the A Train
Roman Patkoló – Penderecki: Duo concertante
Wye Oak – Holy Holy
Big K.R.I.T. – Country Sh*t (Remix) – Explicit Version
International Contemporary Ensemble – Son of Chamber Symphony I
International Contemporary Ensemble – Son of Chamber Symphony II
International Contemporary Ensemble – Son of Chamber Symphony III
Paul Simon – Dazzling Blue
The Men – LADOCH
E-40 – Serious Feat. T-Pain
Nicholas Phan – Winter Words Op. 52: Midnight On The Great Western
Mary Halvorson – The Pseudocarp Walks Among Us
Killer Mike – Swimming
Valentina Lisitsa – Ives: Sonata for Violin and Piano No.4 "Children's Day At The Camp Meeting" – 1. Allegro
Valentina Lisitsa – Ives: Sonata for Violin and Piano No.4 "Children's Day At The Camp Meeting" – 2. Largo – Allegro (con slugarocko)
Valentina Lisitsa – Ives: Sonata for Violin and Piano No.4 "Children's Day At The Camp Meeting" – 3. Allegro

Seth Colter Walls is a culture critic and reporter for Slate, the Village Voice, the Washington Post, Capital New York, and also a contributing writer to XXL Magazine.

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'Satyagraha' and Occupy Lincoln Center, Last Night

Seth Colter Walls — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 11:35:38 +0000

The biggest opera house in the United States concluded its performance on time last night, at 11:15 p.m. Many of the nearly 4,000 people in attendance at the Met lingered in their seats for a bit, the better to praise the cast, orchestra and conductor—as well as to see if Philip Glass would take a curtain call. A number would have heard that the composer of Satyagraha, an opera about the life (sorta) and philosophical lineage (more consequentially) of Gandhi, was meant to have already spoken, at 10:30 p.m., to the Occupy Lincoln Center group just outside. When Glass did at last appear on stage, he was met with a rowdy harmony of cheers from what sounded like all levels of the opera house. Seeing a living composer take a bow in person after some masterful interpretation of his or her work can often carry a charge. But this time, the aggregate cheer's decibel-level felt augmented as well by the collision of the piece in question, first performed in 1980, and the specific time and place of its present revival. Police-evicted Occupy Wall Street protesters could be seen from the windows of the balcony-level's intermission space as patrons departed.

Satyagraha, or (loosely) "truth force" in Sanskrit, is all about a certain form of commitment not at all foreign to social justice movements in general, the Occupy project included. Its first act evokes the real-life exchange of letters and inspiration between Leo Tolstoy (around the period of his anarcho-mystically Christian late novel Resurrection, which is unjustly neglected) and the young lawyer Gandhi. Act Two posits the intellectual Tagore as precursor to Gandhi's journalistic work with Indian Opinion. Act Three passes the passive resistance torch on to Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the Met's production, by Phelim McDermott, the American Civil Rights movement plays out in chiaroscuro fashion, at the back of the stage for a long portion of the final act; King rises to a podium while Gandhi combats the "color bar" laws of the government in the foreground. At one juncture, the shadows of acrobats who are miming, in slow motion, the violence of police against Civil Rights protestors are visible through windows scrimmed with newspapers. Meantime, projections of documentary videos showing similar truth-forces play around the borders of those same windows. When the shock troops break the historical fourth wall, slicing the newspapers into ribbons as they move from the deep American south into the forward-stage world of Gandhi's compatriots, the viewer's response may be to object on the basis of some temporal-spacial order. Police can't just do that, can they? They can't magically cross continents and decades in order to tamp down any social movement they choose, right?

The constricts that power itself is obliged to observe are actually amorphous, at least from the outside; it's hard to know exactly where they really lie, or when, or to what degree, they may ever be changing. This accounts not just for what we may now commonly describe as Kafkaesque machinations of legal systems, but also citizens' wariness regarding nascent social movements. (Are they "really" doing something important? Are they "good" at whatever it is? Are they "likely" to succeed regarding issues "coherently" expressed?)

This is all part of power's language. So, on Thursday night, were phrases like: "Exit down the ramp to the right," which is what opera-goers heard from police trying to keep the Occupy movement cleanly separate from the people who had just watched Satyagraha. The blitheness with which these official police suggestions were ignored, or even taken as "suggestions," was striking. So too, given the very recent history in Zuccotti Park, was the total lack of consequence suffered by those disobeying these directions. Wearing a suit—even a cheap one—has its privileges.

A few opera-goers assisted the front line of Occupy protesters in opening up a split between two barricades. A cop, hearing the unclanking kiss of the metal hooks, looked on somewhat confusedly as protestors elected not to simply swarm into the plaza. "This is dumb," a young man told the cop. "We don't need these separating us." Then a couple reinforcements came to the solitary cop's aide; before long the integrity of the barricade was restored.

[Video of Glass taken by Alex Ross]

Philip Glass had already come and gone—having recited a brief excerpt from Act III of Satyagraha—before ticket-holders descending from balcony level at the Met could reach the Occupy group. If at first it seemed depressing to realize that one could not attend both "events" on the same evening, the crowd did its best to erase that inside/outside distinction by repeating Glass's excerpt several times, in the by-now well-storied "mic check" fashion, with waves of sound fanning out over the expanse of Lincoln Center Plaza. To occupy with a physical presence is only one method. Sound can occupy, too. "Thank you to the people on the other side of the fence for joining us," the crowd said, as the Occupation roughly doubled in size after a period of steady accretion on the other side of the police-patrolled fence.

Then many opera-goers simply jumped the barricade. Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, seen earlier at the orchestra-level of the Met, took the long way around and joined the right flank of the group. Quickly recognized, they then began a very cute, older-couple's conversation about whether to accept an invitation to be "wedged" toward the center and placed "on stack" to speak.

"I don't feel comfortable being 'the guy,' but I'll say something if it'll help things," Reed said.

"We could say we support the 99% one-hundred percent," Anderson suggested.

A tall man in a black hoodie helped lead Reed and Anderson deeper into the crowd. Give the celebrity couple points for patience; it took almost an hour for them to be heard, on one of the first for-real wintry nights in New York so far this season. Anderson spoke first, not long after a young man who said he'd been arrested at Zuccotti and thought cops generally "horrid." She took a different (if familiar) tack, saying that police were properly part of an ideal movement ("our colleagues and our friends"). She also asked the crowd to think of ways to talk to those "who are not necessarily your friends" about the Occupy movement.

When Reed spoke, he seemed both angrier about the barricades ("I've never been more ashamed," he said, to be a Brooklyn-born artist), as well as more conditional in his affection for the police. "The police are our army," he said, in a subtle rebuke to Mayor Bloomberg's claims of ownership, before saying "I want to be friends" with the cops—as though it were up to them to earn that friendship.

Several of the non-famous speakers were even better. One older man, who sported a thick, Eastern Europe-sounding accent, made a useful point about the act of imposition suggested by an occupation. Arguing that the truth-force of nonviolent protest "starts in the street and moves into the artistic and intellectual space," he suggested a common cause between the Occupy group and Satyagraha as an opera. In this account, it was the police who were occupying a space unjustly, by keeping the two apart. "So we demand that the police occupation of our artistic space be ended immediately," he concluded.

More than a few speakers seemed to want to claim the mantle of Satyagraha's generally agreed-to awesomeness for themselves while decrying a contemporary classical music establishment from positions of frankly obvious ignorance. "Opera is expensive.... Only wealthy people can experience this wonderful artform," one young woman sighed, as though crushed by her failed but honest attempts to do so.

It bears repeating: at the Met, the most expensive opera tickets are indeed expensive, but you can stand behind the orchestra section—or even sit at the upper reaches of the house—for less than the cost of an IMAX showing at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square 13 multiplex up the road. This persistent fiction of "elitism," and contemporary classical music's supposed inaccessibility, is one of the strongest propagandistic tools ever devised by the titans of corporate pop culture. They would prefer you not ever cost-compare a Family Circle seat to Satyagraha alongisde a 3D screening of Transformers 3.

Resentment directed toward a class of experience whose accessibility remains a matter of loose suppression is, in turn, the tool of social conservatives who hate public arts funding as much as they dig budget-busting tax cuts for the rich. Were we to realize a more progressive tax code, America might even be able to establish a public arts infrastructure that could more easily do without the ego-boosting contributions from the likes of the Koch family. In the meantime, we can take a page from Adbusters' "every dollar spent is a vote" ethos and decide what do with the $20 bills that we do control. Among the populist moves the Met has made in recent years is its "Live in HD" program, beamed to movie theaters in areas of the country that may not have so many top-flight opera houses currently operating. Though apt to pursue safe programming bets that sate the desire of traditional opera fans, the Met's administration places the occasional bet on a piece of radical culture like Satyagraha, which played in movie theaters on November 19th. That broadcast will have an encore next Wednesday, December 7th. It's a good time to be reminded that not all forms of cultural occupation necessitate standing out in the cold.

Seth Colter Walls is a culture critic and reporter for Slate, the Village Voice, the Washington Post, Capital New York, and also a contributing writer to XXL Magazine. Photos and video by Brian Perkins.

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Writing Good

Alex Balk — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 12:20:05 +0000

Here is a very large list of last year's notable music writing, some of which may seem familiar to those of you who have been with us for a while.

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Show Good

Alex Balk — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 12:50:49 +0000

Awl pal Seth Colter Walls REALLY LIKES Robert Wilson's new production of The Threepenny Opera over at BAM, calling it "at once the most satisfying and disturbing music drama I have ever seen presented on a New York stage."

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Laura Dern Is Our Only Hope For Bringing David Lynch Back

Seth Colter Walls — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 12:40:27 +0000

The first in a series on collaborations that we now take for granted but initially made little sense.

Fans of David Lynch are accustomed, by now, to the half-decade wait. It took five years after Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me unjustly bombed out of theaters in 1992 before we received Lost Highway. Later, once Mulholland Drive completed its strange, tortured path to realization—from stillborn network teevee pilot for ABC to a New York Film Festival premiere!—Lynch’s IMDB page indulged another similar gap when it came to feature-length projects. That streak of inactivity was only broken when INLAND EMPIRE smeared its digital abstractions and idiosyncratic willfulness (all-caps title included) across screens on the festival circuit.

Now we’re five years on since that work—and we haven’t heard a whisper of a rumor about a new film. During Lynch’s last five-year-itch interregnum, there was at least a sliver of web-based innovation to tide us over; if he couldn’t find funding for features, Lynch could be depended on to produce a goofy, Flash-animated series for his website. This time, the filmmaking lag has been filled up with campaigns on behalf of transcendental meditation, homespun coffee branding and, yes, that dance album slated for a Nov. 8 release.

Given this, it was far from weird for anyone to have wondered whether Lynch had unofficially quit the cinema. Then, earlier this month, Abel Ferrara went and made it ever so slightly more official, in an interview with IndieWire. “[David] Lynch doesn’t even want to make films anymore,” Ferrara said, while ranting about how his generation of directors had lost the plot. “I’ve talked to him about it, OK? I can tell when he talks about it. I’m a lunatic, and he’s pushing transcendental meditation.”

It’s easy to imagine a group of cineastes organizing in response to this news, with the hopes of dreaming up the contours of a lobbying campaign that might get Lynch thinking about movies again. Though, without Laura Dern on board, any such campaign would probably be pointless. The story of Lynch’s career can be told in large part through his various collaborations—think Kyle MacLachlan’s brilliant-naif detectives, Jack Nance’s furrowed-brow weirdos, or Angelo Badalamenti’s soundtracks, pitching back and forth between pop smooches and synths of doom—but Dern’s contribution to his career is as unequaled as it is unsung. She not only gets him, she’s helped him get why he cares about the non-painterly aspects of moviemaking, like story and character.

Though she appears in only three of his features, Dern has worked in every decade of Lynch’s activity but one (the '70s), and at every stage of his career (save film school). At the same time, Dern has offered Lynch a dramatic range that no other actor in his company can touch. For a writer so often resistant to traditional storytelling structures—as well as one who sometimes reveals, ahem, a limited approach to female characterization—Dern’s dramatic flexibility and radical alertness to shadings of performance have saved Lynch’s ass once or twice, and educated it in the process.

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Feminist critiques of Lynch’s work can point toward not just the ritual degradation and sexual violence visited upon the likes of Dorothy Vallens and Laura Palmer, but how unknowable these characters can remain, despite all the trials we see them endure. "Twin Peaks" was a drama about the few thousand different ways a raped and murdered high-school homecoming queen was perceived in a town of a few thousand residents. A fair enough lens on small-town life, taken by itself. (And again, Fire Walk With Me balances out the TV show’s approach and concerns—you should watch it, though only after you’ve taken in the whole series!) But if too many of these women turn out to be ciphers, we might eventually begin to identify a blind side in the filmmaker’s field of vision.

Who exactly is Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway, anyway? More to the point: does Lost Highway direct us to think that the answer to this question is at all important? It doesn’t matter whether she’s a mysterious and chilly brunette housewife or a blonde-bombshell porno actress: Arquette is so pulchritudinously Other she’ll make a man’s head go into meltdown mode, literally (what with Bill Pullman’s skull dissolving down to the brain cavity and building itself back up as Balthazar Getty). It’s as if the movie is telling us some women are too hot to ever be known. Better to become an entirely new man after messing with that kind of femininity-as-weapon.

Dern has never fallen into this trap in a Lynch movie, even when playing a sex kitten. Barry Gifford’s source novel, Wild at Heart, conceived of Lula Pace Fortune as a sexual being, but Laura Dern rendered that trait on-screen in such a way that her straightforward experience of ecstasy would not overwhelm the other aspects of being an adult in the world. Dern’s Lula doesn’t just get to enjoy the highest ratio of orgasms to assaults in the entire Lynch universe, she still possesses a working facility for empathy—be it when comforting a not-long-for-this world victim of highway carnage, or when she just wants Nicholas Cage’s Sailor Ripley to switch off the damned, death-obsessed news already.

Dern got the movie’s operatic, titular line: “This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.” That the line is delivered during one of the few mature adult conversations between lovers in a Lynch movie isn’t an accident, either. While it’s a big, over-the-top moment, emotive in a soap-opera fashion, Dern also makes it communicate dramatically, as her despair in this scene makes Sailor’s forthcoming attempts at problem-solving understandable, even if they aren’t particularly advisable.

In Blue Velvet, it’s also up to Dern to carry the film's riskiest emotional moment, when she delivers her “dream of the robins” speech to MacLachlan’s Jeffery Beaumont. In that scene, the snarky opportunity for audience laughter comes with MacLachlan’s cheese-faced reaction to Dern’s idealism. But her conception of a perfect world—a vision held out to counteract the film’s darkest, Dennis Hopper-on-nitrous depths —needs to seem something other than just risible. And selling that quality is all up to Dern; just as it’s up to her to nudge the audience to accept Jeffrey’s spy-boy antics, when she says she’s not sure if he’s a detective or a pervert (while subtly suggesting that it might be okay with her if it turns out that he’s got some pervert in him). Dern’s Sandy might seem virginal compared to Isabella Rosselini’s Dorothy, and she might even be shocked to learn that her college-boy crush put “his disease” in the lounge singer, but even that’s not so disappointing a revelation that Sandy won’t rush to aid the other woman when she’s naked and covered in bruises. In these movies, Laura Dern is always down for some real grown-up behavior, be it moral or erotic.

***

Aside from her bravery and flexibility in front of Lynch’s camera, it’s impossible not to acknowledge Dern’s similar steadfastness behind the scenes. The director gave her co-producer credit on INLAND EMPIRE for more than sentimental reasons; Dern’s forbearance over a multi-year period of staggered shooting was the only thing that made his three-hour fever dream possible in the first place. (It seems likely that Dern passed on at least some higher-paying work so she could remain on call for Lynch during this time.) "Every time he got an idea for a scene, we would shoot it, and he wrote the script through the course of this time," Dern told reporters upon the film’s release.

While it's difficult to speak super-definitively about what happens in INLAND EMPIRE, even after one has written out a lengthy, Wikipedia-style summary of its scenes, the film’s detractors ought to concede that, to whatever degree it all hangs together, it does so because of Dern. Does she read on the screen, during her early scenes, like an A-list movie star who is winning at the game of Hollywood, even if she’s being shot on consumer-grade digital video? Yup. Does she howl with the best of avant-cinema’s most tortured souls, whilst being chased down L.A.’s Skid Row streets at dawn by an angry passel of ladies of the night? Of course she does.

Dern seduces, and Dern repels; her character in INLAND EMPIRE frolics wildly under the covers while forgetting whether she’s playing a character in the movie-within-a-movie or if she’s just being herself. But through all this, Dern roots Lynch’s flights of abstraction in behaviors—most often derived out of fear—that feel recognizable to us. Only she can save Lynch’s three-hour abstraction from fully losing its own mind, its identity as a movie—and he knows, it, too. Even though there is no “dream of the robins” speech or “wild at heart and weird on top” movie-summing-up aria for Dern to sing, she’s still called upon to identify and resolve the movie’s central tension: It’s only when Dern walks into the strange room where a woman has been trapped, watching part of INLAND EMPIRE on a television, that the imprisoned viewer (and real-life audience) is granted an escape from whatever spectral demons have been haunting our viewing.

After working equally well with Lynch in his early, indie-style ascent, his mainstream pop period and now during his late-career explosion of his own practice, Dern’s qualifications for inspiring the director to try something new are beyond unique. Assuming Abel Ferrara’s perception of reality is correct (not always a given with self-described “lunatics”), and Lynch thinks he’s done with movies, here’s hoping Dern is already hard at work persuading Lynch that other creative possibilities still lie beyond the dance floor.

Seth Colter Walls writes for lots of places, including his Tumblr.

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The 6.4 California Earthquake of July 1, 1911 at 100

Seth Colter Walls — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 10:50:41 +0000

This morning, as I was walking down the street—on one of those uber-hyphenated strolls that freelance journalists colorfully like to describe as the "are-you-kidding-I-can't-afford-to-take-a-cab" variety—I momentarily tripped across a small fissure in the concrete. And then I got to thinking about the 6.4 magnitude earthquake that rocked the Calaveras fault in California, back on July 1, 1911. Today, were that earthquake still alive and happening, it would be 100 years old. What a grand old dame it would be! I decided to put on my imagining hat.

First of all, the breakout it would represent on the complexion of the earth's epidermis would, after 100 continuous years of rupture, likely appear quite large. By now, the chasm might have been steep or wide enough for us to have thrown all of our domestic and international problems into. Goodbye, the snakily complicated jurisprudence of military tribunals! We could have just thrown "enemy combatants" down the 6.4 California Earthquake of July 1, 1911, had it still been kicking during the Global War on Terror.

And I sure got the sense it would have known what to do about 9/11, too.

Mostly however, I like to think about how the 6.4 California Earthquake of July 1, 1911 would have probably had no thoughts at all about the British Royal Family. I like to imagine walking up to the precipice of a fault line that had continuously been terrorizing man-and woman-kind for a full-on century, and asking it about, say, the attractiveness of Pippa Middleton.

"Who?" the 6.4 California Earthquake of July 1, 1911 would say to me. (This, as hordes of concussed and bloodied locals who had still been raising families for generations near the fault-line—"It's where we make our stand," they would tell the occasionally visiting TV crews—stagger dizzily past me.)

"I'm a real game-changer," the 6.4 California Earthquake of July 1, 1911 would say, adding. "Fault lines, baby—we're the real movers and shakers on this planet. Oh hello, Gorby!"

What an intoxicating scamp! It's almost hard for me to go back to a world in which I can't imagine that the 6.4 California Earthquake of July 1, 1911 is still with us.

Seth Colter Walls really does enjoy imagining.

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Rap After Odd Future: Action Bronson is Magical

Cord Jefferson — Tue, 17 May 2011 12:00:54 +0000

Seth Colter Walls: Hi Cord Jefferson! Is there any new rap music that you have thoughts on or that you like especially? And if you say "Tyler" or "Odd Future," I will stab you in your esophagus!

Cord Jefferson: Ha! Yes, I feel like I've said all I need to say. Everybody's said all they need to about Tyler and Odd Future.

Seth: Oh, they will pull you back in before long, I'm sure. But yes, let's talk Rap A.T. (After Tyler.)

Cord: Within the past two weeks, I have developed a deep, deep obsession with a rapper out of Queens called Action Bronson. I'm more excited about him than I've been about any rapper since I was about 15 or 16.

Seth: Where did you learn of him? Message board? Record review?

Cord: A friend from Arizona texted me a couple weeks ago and told me to listen to him on YouTube. And since then I've done that thing where you watch literally every YouTube video about a person, whether it be a song or just some dinky, terribly produced interview.

Seth: Aha. Correct. And there are lots of videos of Action Bronson on the internet! He has a cooking show.

Cord: His cooking show! I've watched all of those twice even though they're all so meat heavy and I'm a vegetarian.

Seth: He has some weirdly charming freestyles where his throat dries up and he has to take a sip of water.

Cord: You've hit the nail on the head with the word "charming." Everyone I've introduced AB to has used that word.

Seth: Yeah—it's ... refreshing? He's not a softy by any means, but it's rather easy to root for him. (Slash, look past the obvious Ghostface influence.)

Cord: Very. Charm is a lost artform in rap.

Seth: When did it die, do you think?

Cord: Biggie had it, Ghostface has it, Tupac had it to an extent. I really don't know if you can pinpoint when it died. But there are very few rappers anymore who approach the music with a playfulness.

Seth: I think Yelawolf is actually pretty good at this, though!

Cord: I agree with that. I think the problem is everyone trying to "out-real" one another. Goofy and silly is no longer a virtue. There is a scene in the video for "Get Off My PP"—

Seth: (Also: that title! It's like a Funkadelic song.)

Cord: Totally! But in this scene, AB is standing on some overpass in loafers, basketball shorts, an old rugby shirt of some kind and what looks to be a fur fedora. And you can see in his eyes that he knows he looks ridiculous, but he just doesn't care.

Seth: Yes: it seems an actually pure form of not "giving a fuck"!

Cord: And I remember thinking to myself—as I do a lot when watching his videos—that there is maybe two or three rappers around right now with that sort of mentality. And what makes it even more amazing in AB's case is that he's not even that famous!

Seth: Lots of people profess to give very few fucks. But look quite studied while insisting on this.

Cord: It would be one thing if he were at the top of the rap game and giving a big middle finger to everyone else. But as of now he's a relative no-name, and he's still saying fuck convention.

Seth: Do you think he can blow up? The new album, "Dr. Lecter," is admirably focused (40-some minutes) and basically a party from start to finish.

Cord: Yeah, I think he's going to be huge. This is very adult rap! And adults are looking for some good rap!

Don't worry everyone that misses the boat now don't try to hop on when its a Yacht.less than a minute ago via ÜberSocial Favorite Retweet ReplyBamBam Bronson
ActionBronson

Seth: The line that really won me over came in "Ronnie Coleman" (which has lots of good lines, about Action's weight issues and food desires, etc.) ... but it was "I wanna wear Italian clothing / but it just don't cut it."

Cord: That song is brilliant.

Seth: Even when he is rhyming "me" with "me," his flow is really great? "Lock the refrigerator / there's no controlling me / Steak and chocolate got they mothafuckin hold on me"!

Cord: YES! Do you think he sounds like Ghostface?

Seth: Mostly in the nasal department I guess? Not in terms of flow. Or in terms of, like, patois. Action's not on any kind of abstruse Wu-style lexicon.

Cord: "Barbecues get thrown with EBT cards/ land, sea, and the air, three stars." I think you're exactly right about the Ghostface comparisons. He can't really help how his voice sounds or ditch his regional accent, and aside from those, there's really no similarity whatsoever.

Seth: Also, Ghostface hasn't been this hungry ... since Supreme Clientele! (Sorry, I do love that song from Fishscale, "The Champ"!)

Cord: (Me too.)

Seth: (Just Blaze!)

Cord: A funny story about that song is that I once played it for my then-girlfriend and at the part when he says, "Rip your guts out like a hysterectomy," she said, "That's not how a hysterectomy works." Not a big rap fan.

Seth: Ladies all literal all the time. So here is a question. Will it matter that Action is, or will be read as, The White? (I think he's Albanian. But, you know, he will be read as caucasian. The Times goes with "white.")

Cord: I don't know! I feel gross to admit that I've wondered about his race. Haven't you?

Seth: I've seen the question crop up in a lot of comment threads already. I came to Action through a YouTube rip of a song off of Dr. Lecter. One of those YouTube rips that's just an album cover. And the Dr. Lecter cover is a cartoonish thing! There's a hint of a Ginger-ish beard on it? But I really didn't realize (by googling in other tabs) until the end of the song that he might be white, etc. Which was interesting, because I was already quite sold!

Cord: Unlike Eminem's, his voice contains no traces of whiteness. Here's the thing about his whiteness. The only reason I feel it may be a hindrance is because of where he's from. If you look at all the most successful white rappers—Em, Atmosphere, Yela, etc.—you'll notice that they all come from very specific places with not necessarily the strongest rap scenes. So cutting it as a white rapper in the birthplace of hip-hop might be a challenge. That said, I think his flow is simply far too great to go unnoticed because of his race. I'd really like to think so, at least.

Seth: So I only have Dr. Lecter (I paid for it on Amazon! C'mon people, it's a self-released thing. Pay for it.) Have you heard the mixtapes and such?

Cord: I've heard Dr. Lecter. I've heard some singles he put out. Specifically the Statik Selektah produced "Cliff Notes," which is probably my favorite yet because it sounds like it was produced by DJ Premier.

Seth: And here is a freestyle over a Primo beat, from it looks like 2009?

Cord: Now, I think we'd be remiss if we didn't compare it to Odd Future, especially after last week.

Seth: GRRR.

Cord: Despite what I said earlier!

Seth: Ha.

Cord: OK, this may be long but here's the thing: I really, really tried to listen to "Goblin." I really did.

Seth: Uh huh.

Cord: But at a certain point, I honestly felt ridiculous. There I was, a guy pushing 30, and I'm listening to a 19-year-old kid scream "BITCH SUCK DICK!" over bad beats. And I thought, "Hmmmmmm. Why am I doing this to myself? What purpose does this serve?" I like Steely Dan and waking up early, man!

Seth: It's not a great record? (And I liked Bastard!) But it will win this year's award for Record That Will Receive The Largest Haul of Excuses From Critics. Which counts for something.

Cord: Oh, totally. The accolades it's getting already are astounding! Are people listening the same thing we did?

Seth: I'm not sure, in light of your earlier Root piece, that it's all about White Critics fetishizing either. (Though that's an element.) I think, to draw an analogy to the economy, that as an Internet Concern, Tyler has become too big to fail. If it's the case that his 73-minute record is just overbloated and doesn't have much new to offer, we can't SAY THAT—because it retroactively invalidates about 100,000 lines of journalistic credit that are tied to thinkpieces which would then be underwater.

Cord: That's an amazing description and I'm jealous I didn't write it.

Seth: I mean, like the economy, Tyler will fail EVENTUALLY if he doesn't restructure. But the critical culture will artificially extend that lifeline for a bit.

Cord: That is so right on. To me, how this relates to Action Bronson is that he's the first rapper in a long while—and I believe I said this earlier—who is for adults.

Seth: And not like, in a uber-serious way, either! It's like for adults who remember and still have emotional access to fun. Which is a tricky balance.

Cord: Not only does his flow harken back to a different time in hip hop, he also raps about eating capers and drinking good wine and getting stoned. Exactly, like, getting stoned and cooking elaborate meals? I KNOW THAT PERSON! I AM GOOD FRIENDS WITH THAT PERSON SEVERAL TIMES OVER!

Seth: Hurray for adulthood. It Gets Better, children.

Cord: Does it ever.

Cord Jefferson writes for The Root. Seth Colter Walls writes for his Tumblr.

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Steve Reich, "WTC 9/11"

Alex Balk — Mon, 02 May 2011 13:00:55 +0000

"Nearly 40 years after the hidebound boos that greeted Reich's Carnegie debut, in 1973, with "Four Organs," the critical consensus has long been settled. The composer–one of America's original sonic minimalists–is capital-I Important. That his music will survive him is beyond question. Also not up for debate is whether Reich stands as an indispensable part of New York's musical firmament, as he is a touchstone for post-rockers, avant-turntablists and myriad stylists currently plowing the hybrid, compound-noun genre fields still yet to be blog-hyped (or even named)."
—Awl pal Seth Colter Walls reviews Steve Reich's "WTC 9/11," a "15-minute piece for three string quartets and pre-recorded voices."
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Class Fictions, Reality Poetics And Zany Sex At Tribeca

Seth Colter Walls — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 14:40:14 +0000

When living as young and less than comfortable in New York, adoption of a willed ignorance regarding some class distinctions is in order. You naturally choose your own "can't-care" moments, but at some point, simply everyone breaks. Also: few can keep up with each and every conversation anyway; choices must be made regarding which ambient fashion truths to blow past and ignore.

That in mind, step this way with me. When I was a rice n' beans-subsisting college kid, it could have been a function of my fancy-meter's needle constantly skipping in the fritzed-out red zone of class detection—but I simply had no idea at all that the Tribeca Film Festival was ever considered anything but recherche. It seemed impossibly glam and refined, yet another Shangri-la for aspiring culture nerds to airily daydream about someday crashing. So leave it to the Times' Stephen Holden to show up my decade-long class ignorance with his curtain-raiser for this year's edition of the event, which apparently is no longer "considered a threat to the status quo" in the finer circles where there was once "grumbling."

Seriously, there was actually once tony grumbling about the establishment-threatening properties of something DeNiro birthed? At least we're all a decade hipper now.

Here is one of the other things cinephiles have learned, or at least come around to accepting, since the spring of 2002. Fred Wiseman can fall back; realism hasn't been about three Super-16mm lenses and the truth for a while. Post-Gummo, and post-Werner Herzog's exhaustive repping for Harmony Korine's conspicuously undercover humanity, we're primed to expect a contrived fictional heart beating in our documentaries. Especially those about marginal communities. It's just part of the fashion now—you can ask Agnes B. if you don't believe.

***

Bombay Beach, from first-time documentarian Alma Har'el is the latest entry in this tradition. "The desolate and surreal Salton Sea in California stands as a formidable metaphor for the broken American dream," its press kit says—and it ain't wrong. (Disclosure: a close friend of mine introduced Har'el to the area while she was location scouting for a Beirut video.) After rescuing a few flickering seconds of vintage, come-hither tourism adverts from the obscurity of mid-American Century optimism, Har'el smash-cuts us to the desperate, contemporary conditions of at-risk folks inhabiting a loosely knit shitcan archipelago chain of decaying towns dotting the titular beach. When reduced to stock types, it's easy to recognize some of the denizens: the high-school kid who wants out via the chimeral football scholarship, an ex-con dizzy from a lack of options (or else just congenital incoherence), and the well-meaning if grizzled old racist grasping onto withering decrepitude with every last flaking fingernail.

Whenever this hopelessness becomes too frowny-face familiar, an aestheticism posited as external projection of interior soulfulness takes over. Witness the (black) running back and his (white) girlfriend, who execute a fluidly conceived dance number near a gazebo after the latter narrowly avoids the fate of seeing compromising photos distributed about their school by her bitter ex. (Rightly, Har'el's choreographer gets a line in the credits roughly equivalent to that given to Zach Condon, who scored the movie.) This contrived movement is all beautiful stuff, as is the set-designed interlude wherein little kids fantasize about going on a grown-up date. When Benny, the real heart of Bombay Beach, mistakes one meaning of "class" (as a marker) for another (i.e., the place where he plays with markers), he's decidedly left on the outside by the other kids.

The outside is where you get the sense Benny ultimately, most happily belongs, what with his innocently donning a bright pink wig and indulging in "I'm a girl" ideation while walking down the street with his mother. "This ain't Halloween," a genuinely perplexed-seeming man observes while riding past in his junker.

Truly, this isn't a pretend tour through hell. Benny gets juiced with enough Ritalin to drop a small horse, and when that doesn't make him perform well in school, his doctors prescribe Lithium—enough perhaps to send Benny into a seizure. When his nobly struggling mother attempts to get an answer about potential causality from a neurologist, he (in full view of Har'el's camera) merely kicks the ball back over to the pediatrician who prescribed the meds. "He's cleared neurologically," is all the doctor has to say. Which is to say, not damaged in an irreversible sense.

The audience at Tribeca had presumably been cleared neurologically, as well—though that didn't guarantee we were operating at full moral capacity. Question and answer time at film festivals is often painful, but never more so than when consideration for fashion's presence overwhelms the substantive horror staring you in the face. Both Benny (snazzily dressed and charmingly effervescent) and his mother (elegantly but not overly well turned out) made the march up to the front of the theater, to be reintroduced by Har'el, and then were left absolutely hanging by the questioners. Nerd-craft questions such as "How long did you shoot?" and "How did Beirut go about scoring the movie?" dominated, until a European-seeming, potential doctor-type stood up and asked... how Benny was doing. He pronounced himself horrified by the Lithium dosage, and asked whether any alternatives, like regular old talking to a therapist, might have been attempted.

Oh yes, the people we asked art to make us care about: How are they doing now, tell us?

Har'el, who clearly carries around a truckload of affection for Benny in particular, proudly announced that he had learned to read in the past year (while the movie was in post production). And on the question of therapy, she noted that the local take among doctors was more or less like "huh?"—and that all she could do was privately "expose" Benny and his family to some other possibilities. For a film festival—where directorial distinction is often assumed to be next to godliness, in terms of power—Har'el's honest admission of a limited agency for herself and her work played like one of the strongest truths likely to be found on offer here over the coming days.

***

Movies about sex are usually forthcoming with some sweaty degree of honesty whether they're conscious of intending to or not. There's no tracks-covering in art when it comes to "doing it," which is why so many otherwise sound artists come up sucking the stylistic big one when trying to ride the subject. So what is Shinji Imaoka's Underwater Love, a fervently form-mashing "pink musical" from Japan, trying to tell us?

On one level, it's simply a whimsical fable about a woman named Asuka, her human fiancé (and boss at the fishery plant), and the amphibious, beaked creature, called a "kappa," who is the undead embodiment of the woman's deceased high-school pal. Amid softcore, from-the-waist-up-only sex scenes in which the human couple screw with nervous energy, we get outrageously lip-synced songs of innocence and longing from both Asuka and the creature to whom she's clearly drawn.

While we never see a for-real human penis in the course of the movie, we're led to believe it can't compare with the Kappa's vibrator-like schlong. (The kappa's prosthetics, like everything else in Underwater Love, are cheerfully amateur but curiously convincing within the scope of the movie.) There's something about ecology versus industry going on here—about the preferable quality of anything (especially mysterious) from the swamp versus a cut-and-dried company man, but it's all obscured under several layers of coy mysticism, as well as pivotal plot exchanges that go (approximately) like so:

"You want my anal pearl?"

"To fool the God of Death!"

"Don't. He'll curse you."

[Cue another dance number.]

Underwater Love probably wins this year's prize at Tribeca for oddest genre assembly (no, that's not a prize). During times when establishing "proof of standing audience" is a prerequisite for distribution, that means this one probably won't be making a multi-city tour anytime soon—unless the all-things-Japanese fetish subculture makes a suitably noisy case for it. Supply still tends to meet demand in the broader fashion economy, even outside New York.

Seth Colter Walls writes about the difficult arts here and elsewhere. He has a Tumblr!
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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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