Das Racist, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” (2009)

The person who put together this brilliant piece of dark aural comedy plus visual despair quotes from Herbert Marcuse’s “One-Dimensional Man” which I will buzzingly paraphrase: “Socially necessary waste…relentless utilization of advanced techniques of science…increasing surplus product…increased consumption…reduces the use of value of freedom.”

Marcuse is certainly apposite. But I prefer to see the nightmare cartoon through Nabokov’s description of Nikolai Gogol’s nightmare cartoon, “The Overcoat“:

“Russian progressive critics sensed in [it] the image of the underdog and the whole story impressed them as a social protest. But it is something much more than that. The gaps and black holes in the texture of Gogol’s style imply flaws in the texture of life itself. Something is very wrong and all men are mild lunatics engaged in pursuits that seem to them very important while an absurdly logical force keeps them at their futile jobs--this is the real “message” of the story. In this world of utter futility, of futile humility and futile domination, the highest degree that passion, desire, creative urge can attain is a new cloak which both tailors and customers adore on their knees. I am not speaking of the moral point or the moral lesson. There can be no moral lesson in such a world because there are no pupils and no teachers: the world is and it excludes everything that might destroy it, so that any improvement, any struggle, any moral purpose or endeavor, are as utterly impossible as changing the course of a star.”

And so goes the nightmare comedy funny despair cartoon…

“Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” remixed by Valerna, shot by WTFive

running around and around…

“Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” shot by TheresaPic

…and around

“Interview with Das Racist,” NylonMagazineTV (2009)

- Mary Gaitskill

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Roxy Music, “Ladytron” (1972)

Do you need to read any words about this? Just look. The singer’s face is exquisitely expressive, ridiculously expressive; whatever it expresses, your body knows it immediately. Try to grab that ephemeral “it” with the great pincers of your mind, cut it up to make defining words; it won’t be there any more.

I could talk talk talk myself to death. But I believe I would only waste my breath. On the page those words are nothing. But when he says them, they are a torrent of urgency, a comically defined voice riding a chaos of ephemera rolling in and out, the absurd voice that tries but cannot find a way, in a whirling world of masks and goof-ball fantasia.

Roxy Music, “Re-make/Re-model” (1972)

But sometimes it’s fun to read what people think about it, how they hear it. I used to write for a Zine (an actual pre-internet paper one) called Radio On. It was based on Top 40 lists; everyone who wrote, and they were very diverse, with only one or two critics, would say whatever they wanted about the songs, including random personal associations, what they were doing at work the first time they heard it, a conversation with their friend about it etc. In a way it had nothing to do with the music. But it had everything to do with music as a fluid phenomenon that becomes enmeshed in the DNA of people’s thoughts and feelings, and acts to express them.

In the first paragraph I said “the singer” instead of the singer’s name because Bryan Ferry, an embodiment of glam, and so an embodiment of the trendy, expresses with his face and voice something timeless. I don’t think I can say what it is. It might have something to do with longing and the ideal, and the absurdly shaped, unearthly quality of longing for the ideal. It might be the human way certain myriad effluvia came together in sound, sight and personality to express the experiential quality of a particular time before it passed into something else.

Fifty years from now Roxy Music may sound idiotic to all but the most arcane and culturally specialized ears. But anyone who sees the singer’s face, or the musician’s faces and bodies, will understand what they are saying, because people will still be saying it.

And it is very poignant, sometimes, for people to try to describe what their tiny piece of effluvia was at the moment it was all flying past: that day at work, their conversation with a friend.

Roxy Music, “Out of the Blue” (1974)

Five hundred years from now, Roxy Music might not sound like anything anyone would even call idiotic; it will be too far away to put a word on. The effluvia that helped form it, the thousands of bright tiny pieces that form social life, won’t mean anything anymore. The expression may still be identifiable, but vaguely, like a rubbed-away face on an ancient painting or a bodily gesture recognizable as, say, one of aggression towards or desire for something no longer visible. What was beautiful is now ugly, what seemed profound is trite. Do we know the difference?

Songs pass over our faces like gauze. Talk talk talk. Waste of breath. But sometimes, what pleasure.

Roxy Music, “For Your Pleasure” (2003)

- Mary Gaitskill

Music: The Killers, “Mr. Brightside” (2003)

I don’t have much to say about this, I mostly just want to share it. The only thing I feel compelled to comment on is the music which, compared to the beauty of the film and the elemental purity of Louise Brooks‘ face and body, is very common, I’d even say cheap. But that is almost why I love it with this hyped-up mash-up of moments from “Pandora’s Box.” I especially love its line “open up my eager eyes” sung in Brandon Flowers‘ petulant, puerile, insisting voice--the voice of a boy, the voice of bedazzlement and darkness, sweets and poison.

I don’t attribute these qualities to Flowers because of particular artistry or even personality; they are qualities he embodies in a charming and perfectly ordinary way, and there is nothing more ordinary than rushing eagerness for the ideal romance of a dancing girl, of lambent eyes, sweet looks and silly costumes, of tenderly cupped hands opening to release Pandora’s delicious vortex--betrayal, laughter, music, dancing, ecstasy, betrayal and back again over and over…until finally the movement goes too far out on the spectrum and tips into death. The shallow joy of the music holds in it a flashing glimpse of the ideal that is full-blown (briefly) in Lulu’s every move and in her various, feral eyes, as that ideal holds its opposite.

How ardently and uncomprehendingly shallow human feeling holds that inhuman ideal; the knife goes in, the gun goes off, the light goes out, and slowly, reluctantly, yet with relief--movement stops.

- Mary Gaitskill

Now that Sarah Palin has quit her post as Governor of Alaska, it is possible that she is from this point on completely irrelevant. Some less appreciative than I of the grotesque poetry inspired by Sarah Palin may say that she was irrelevant as soon as she and John McCain lost the election. But when you consider the riot of jokes, the outpouring of creativity, the enjoyment that only she could have made possible, I hope you will agree that she deserves her own granule of immortality or at least appreciation, in a tiny virtual niche in some tormented internet hall of mirrors like that provided here. Whether you agree or not, she has it--this granule, this niche, this torment--and I want to celebrate it with you.

Even if you don’t think its funny, or even if you do think its funny but don’t think she deserves any credit for it, consider her true accomplishment: She did as much as anyone, maybe even including Barack Obama, who did a lot, to single-handedly make sure that John McCain did not become president of the United States. She did as much as anyone, maybe more than anyone, to discredit the Republican party for a long, long time. I knew she could do it from the moment I set eyes on her. And for it, I will always love her.

From the Lisa Nova channel

And for these videos, I will always love this country.   Even if it looks like this next one was made in Japan. 

- Mary Gaitskill

This has nothing to do with Michael Jackson, but to me it does. Jackson was a superstar who, with mega-talent and mega-technology at his disposal, created swollen, ideal fantasies of beauty, artifice and innocence. This video features Liz Mitchell. Her face is not an ideal of beauty; it is beautiful, and it is sad and she is singing an old, old song about home and being lost, not just from a place, but from yourself, maybe even from your own body. The primitive quality of the video accidentally heightens this effect, makes it look like a broadcast from another dimension, where this soul has somehow, through some impossible cosmic mishap, incomprehensibly been imprisoned, or enslaved.

In Lynn Crosbie’s piercing eulogy for Michael Jackson on Ryeberg, she posts the video that went with his song “Childhood.” It is a haunting fantasy of dreamy, sleepy innocence, where children float above an enchanted forest, borne through a gentle night sky in simple, beautiful wooden sail boats, hanging languidly over the bows or playing slow-motion baseball. Michael sits alone on the forest floor looking up and singing in his purest, highest voice “Have you seen my childhood?”

It seems to have been written in response to the charges of child molestation leveled against him, and it pleads for the world to understand that he wanted to be with children because he wanted the illusion of being the child he was never allowed to be (I feel compelled to say that intuitively I do not think Jackson sexually molested the children sent to his house by their parents; however I think it must’ve been very strange for those children, at least one of whom was grievously ill, to feel such a complex and intense need coming towards them from a revered and powerful adult).

The video is sad and beautiful. It is also sad and horrible. Horrible partly because the song is low-grade Broadway, and mostly because its images of childhood are so ideal and sentimental that they are static; they don’t allow any real feeling of childhood in. This is true also of the singer’s face; it is eerily, bizarrely beautiful. But it is beautiful in a way that has nothing to do with the singer’s natural face. The essence of his voice and heart is being translated through flesh so manipulated it appears nearly tortured. In the Neverland of music videos, the face is exquisite. In real life, it was probably rather hideous.

I cannot blame Michael Jackson for not wanting to live in “real life;” his circumstances made that impossible. But I wonder, what would be the impact of this song if Michael Jackson sang it with an un-altered, middle-aged man’s face? In public, without the fairy land of a video behind him?

This is “Little” Jimmy Scott, a jazz singer who has nothing to do with Michael Jackson, but who seems to me a spiritual relative. Scott, who was born in 1925 and who still lives and performs today, was born with Kallman Syndrome, a genetic condition which stunted his growth, prevented him from reaching puberty and gave him a high, feminine voice. He was neglected by his father, then orphaned at 13 when his mother was hit by a car; his career was wildly uneven in part due to prejudice and misunderstanding regarding his feminine voice; at one point in middle age, he was reduced to working in a hospital, probably as an orderly.

His power as an artist is impossible to separate from his “abnormality,” which he had no choice about and which he used with an amazing plangency and yieldingness that, because it was fully expressed, became a rare kind of force—the force of private emotional touch, the touch of love and longing. Scott too made art about the ideal. Yet when I hear him, I hear the sadness, the impossibility of ideals such as love or beauty. He didn’t need technology, other than that provided by musicians; he communicated with his body, directly into the bodies of those lucky enough to be in his presence, the mystery and sadness of being human, ideally, hopelessly, brokenly.

Perhaps the comparison is unfair or just wrong. Scott was not a pop musician. He wasn’t seized at a tender age by the mechanical claws of the entertainment business, and the business is in any case less likely to destroy a person who patently has less broad appeal; also it did not at that time have at its disposal music videos, a 24-hour media and an entire culture which holds fame to be the highest possible human achievement, and/or which equates fame with love.

Cosmetic surgery existed, but it was nowhere near as sophisticated or as ubiquitous. In other words, while Scott had great hardship in life and struggled materially, he was far luckier than Michael Jackson because he was never tempted by Neverland—an enchanting place for inhuman creatures, but a terrible place for a person, especially if that person is there alone.

The Velvet Underground, “After Hours“

Edie Sedgwick has nothing to do with Michael Jackson either, but I consider her to be another spiritual relation, however distantly. People said that Michael Jackson was trying to make himself white, but it seemed more like he was trying to make himself inhuman. It seemed he wanted to do that partly in order to arrive at something beyond race or gender, in the pursuit of a pure ideal. But because he was a human not only living in a culture with a particularly twisted relationship to beautiful ideals, but living in it as a pop star, he was bound to somehow represent that relationship; his pursuit of the ideal was knotted together with his human pain plus the projected pain and madness of an entire world population.

There was something terrible to me about the nature of Jackson’s artifice, his baroque style, and I am not sure why as all performers make use of artifice, even if Jackson was far more extreme than most. Maybe it was because the disjunction between his presented ideal and the nature of his crippled reality was both more shocking and somehow more visible: One of Jackson’s most original and endearing creations, his moonwalk, was like the repeated, stylized flinching of someone with a strong bodily memory of being hit, fear made not only fearless but charming—yet still recognizable under the charm.

That poignant disjunction is perhaps the secret core of the mad love for him, at least in this country: a country of record obesity with a fanatically thin, adolescent ideal of beauty, which photoshops already stunning models to appear in magazines bought by plain, over-worked, over-weight girls, in which working class people believed that a patrician fake cowboy was one of them and so elected him president, in which children increasingly live through passive fantasy identification with computer screens more real to them than physical life, and the greatest dream is to be famous, to become an American Idol star because you are loveable, not talented, which believes that the two qualities are the same thing.

In other words a powerful, over-weening, often brutal culture with a strong idealization of childhood and childhood desires, including the desire to be loved by the whole world as a child ought to be loved by its parents, simply by being him or herself, with all hurts and inadequacies which are themselves as beautiful as the most beautiful art. This is the love of narcissism, and it eats its object. It is not love at all.

Andy Warhol recognized and celebrated this desire, expressed in the formula: “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” But Warhol was not under the illusion that his aesthetic of fakery was about love.

The Velvet Underground, “Venus in Furs“

This really doesn’t have anything to do with Michael Jackson. But it does have to do with the world into which he entered as a little boy; a world of glamourous artifice, egos and appetites (Warhol’s version of that world may’ve been very particular, but I think he understood its essence as well or better than anyone). It’s a terrible enchanted world, a synthetic Neverland—and yet, because Jackson entered it as a child with preternatural talent, he not only survived it for decades, but kept creating and giving within its confines—as Lynn Crosbie said in her essay, working “through the thunder” of his palpable suffering.

He was doing on an epic scale what all humans must do, keep going through the illusions, mistakes, hurts, conceits, self-hate and masks of human life, sometimes not having any idea if what is important to you actually has any value, or even knowing what is important to you. He reflected this struggle back to us and made it something other than stumbling through the neurotic mire, made it shiny, loud, dramatic and big.

This is nothing new; this is what stars do. It is why we sometimes value them more than artists whose work is actually better. It is an especially potent function when the star is a child; it is all the more so when the beautiful child star keeps working as an increasingly gifted, yet increasingly flawed, strange and ridiculous adult. It is potent to the point of superhuman when this child must negotiate the titantic forces of racism brought to bear on him from all directions before he is old enough to fully grasp who he is, yet who must not just negotiate these forces, but embody, channel, ameliorate and challenge them on a world stage, in out-sized Kabuki form. All this while, dear God, simply trying to preserve the divine spark that he came here with, the spark that we all have, but that Jackson had to the hundredth power.

The Jackson Five -- I Want You Back

“All I want! All I need!” I hope he found it. I hope he is finally home.

- Mary Gaitskill

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Anyone see the movie about mountain climbers called “Touching The Void“?  One of them falls down an abyss and the other, being pulled down by what he thinks is the dead man’s body, cuts him loose. The fallen climber though has survived with a broken leg. He must make his way out of the pit and across the frozen tundra with a broken leg.  While narrating the story of how he did this, he remarks that, as an atheist, he wondered if he would start believing in God.  He reports that he did not. He reports further that during his ordeal, he was pestered by a song by Boney M playing endlessly in his head. This confirmed what I’ve long believed, that the Divine has a great sense of humor. 

- Mary Gaitskill

This is from a story of love, abandonment and death.  The melodramatic aspect of the staging and costumes strangely add to the supernatural quality of the exquisite sound: the nearly still, yet emotionally empathic bodies of the male characters are amplified by their rough, cake-frosting costumes, the absurd pointy queen’s crown gives a piercing contrast to her soft-draped, soft-shaped body, the refined movement of her sometimes-wide mouth is devastating in her fleshy face, and then there is that one moment where her intensely in-folded lips release her voice in a pure glowing intersplice of fragility and power expressed as sound. 

The body language and the voice are in a constant dramatic flux of collapse, lift, falling, rising, contraction, expansion, hopeless weakness and spiritual power:  watch how she nearly falls against her beloved friend and then, in her defeat, with her face so knit and dark it’s nearly ugly, she spreads her arms and invokes the power of the earth, then contracts again as she holds her fists gently to her chest, then opens her arms in resignation without fear. In the one ungainly moment, she falls over like a tree.  The scene ends in mortal weakness and confusion as bobble-headed humans crown round.  

Dame Janet Baker was not a physically beautiful woman, but her grace and the tender movement of her hands, especially on her servant’s face, give her what the merely beautiful might envy in vain.  

- Mary Gaitskill

Round shapes, luscious curves and cylinders, bright wires, halos, rippling streams of light, dark churning liquid, white bubble-lace, rough, glowing stone in glowing darkness; refined faces, bulging eyes, limbs and bones emerge from this mass of textures to tell the story of the beast and the harlot so compellingly it doesn’t matter if you like such fundamental stories or not. 

I saw ”Metropolis” a long time ago, but my husband reminded me of it during last year’s election, when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were still fighting for the nomination.  In the movie, the real Maria is a working-class girl trying to help her fellows by pure-hearted means. The rulers then build a false Maria to sow division and hatred. It doesn’t quite work as a comparison; Palin is more a combination of what the real Maria claims to be (evangelical) and what the false one is, proud and violent. But the film’s logic is visual, and visually, it pictures America now as it once pictured Weimar Germany. The false Maria’s dance is one of gluttony and power, and it has a demonic force that awakens ancient archetypes of chaos and destruction. Of course, the election is over. McCain/Palin lost. But the false Maria is still there and always will be, waiting for someone else to embody her. Note: The damn thing even winks.

- Mary Gaitskill

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“…I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity…” - Proverbs of Hell, William Blake

Lady Gaga, “Poker Face” (2008)

This video is to me a picture of hell. It is so normal, yet so terrible. The girl looks like a dream vision of normal, a hologram of herself—and then she looks like a reanimated corpse.

She can’t move right, or doesn’t move right; in some clips, shots, whatever they are called now, half her body moves with wild energy and the other part just hangs there; she walks across the hellish pool patio in her leather suit, one arm swings freely, the other hangs there. It’s not that she can’t move that arm, she sometimes moves it vigorously and charmingly; at one point she sticks it out so some invisible thing can kiss her hand. But it does not usually move in tandem with the rest of her body, like whoever put the thing together forgot people’s bodies move in tandem.

When I remarked on this to an acquaintance, she said but that’s how the youth are walking now, that in particular neighborhoods, each youth has his or her own very elaborate way of walking which could involve half the body just hanging there.

Okay. But that still doesn’t explain how Lady Gaga looks while posing on the floor on one knee, her back arched intensely and her head thrown way back; this posture would normally be a supple stretching action, but she simultaneously has her shoulders hunched way up around her head in a stiff protecting gesture. She looks likes she’s in pain. She looks like she’s old. She does so many moves that are just back and forth, back and forth, her hands opening and closing around her face. For one moment her hips and that one often-slack arm, move in tandem with the hips, but not like a body, like a machine.

This affect works with the music:  It’s adorable when she punches at the air with her fist like a sexy child. But then her face is heavy as a meat puppet or a painted mask with a card stuck between its teeth, a thing made by crude animation to flick the card from its lips onto the table or raise its arm in a wide arc and bring the card down while other holograms dance around it in fevered jerking motions.

Between the puppets and masks, see a fresh 13-year-old girl bursting with energy, bluffin with her muffin; see a faded middle-aged woman numbed and thickened before her time. She yells like a carny, “I promise this, promise this.” The lights flash, the eyes are hidden by electronic words, steam rises from hell. You can’t see the look on anybody’s face. This is normal. This is fun. This is hell.

This on the other hand is life on earth. It’s also adorable, straight up:

Michelle, Lorena, Chris & Geraldo dancing to Lady Gaga’s “Love Games”

And this is a moment of heaven of earth, carrying the creative seed of hell—that is, ‘hell’ in the Blakeian sense.

PS22 Chorus singing Lady Gaga’s “Let’s Dance”

“Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that called Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.” - William Blake.

- Mary Gaitskill