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One Is Perfect Where The Other Falters
by Dick Cheney
Lost
executive producers Carlton Cuse & Damon Lindelof
Choosing between two women is what God put man on this earth for, and it is what Jacob put Sawyer LaFleur on this island for. And who can’t sympathize with the plight of our handsome, beneficent rehabbed con man leader?
how do I love thee until kate gets back to the island? let me count the ways
I mean, two women desire the ripeness of his savory island cock. That’s absolutely terrible. How long has it been since the hedges were trimmed on that bush? Nevermind.
jason and his true master: abc’s reality tv guru
Bachelor emeritus Jason Mesnick was presented with a similar dilemma this week. He proposed to Melissa, a super hot sales rep. Then they spent six atrocious weeks together where she acted like a possessive biatch and generally ruined his life. He retreated back to ABC’s clutches, where, like Gollum begging for the one ring, he asked for his preshush Molly back.
melissa: you were borderline down syndrome, but we still wanted jason to stay with you out of some silly obligation to the outdated concept of marriage
Molly was a little bug-eyed, and a lot retarded. She made a book about the story of her and Jason’s love, which straddled the insanity of The Shining and the affectionate nature of Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs. When he put her in her limo after dumping her, she told him, “You’re making a huge mistake.”
women give Jason strength
He then launched into what I refer to as the Jason Mesnick face, which is a little like the Peyton Manning face but with more crying and you jerk your head back suddenly as if you were epileptic, or just regretful. He thought he wanted no tan lines, but he learned that actually wasn’t as important as is commonly believed.
“this should end well”
Every man comes to a fork in the road sometime, unless he’s the fabulously lucky Bill Hendrickson. Don’t think my path to chening Lynne was such an easy decision. I had another limber hottie on retainer, but there was just something about the glow in Lynne’s eyes when I described my dream of making billions from mining the natural resources of invaded sovereignties. It was like a lightbulb was going on in Lynne’s vagina.
could it be any more obvious her IQ is in the 70-80 range?
Similar situation for Sawyer, and Jason Mesnick. No matter how much you try to quench your thirst with a conventionally hot-looking obstetrician who devotedly snuggles against the deepest fibres of your chest hair, you’re always wondering what kind of pussy might get time-transported thousands of miles to the deserted island you’re on.
“hey sawyer, your daughter is now the new bachelorette–that’s what you wanted me to do in the real world, right?”
In one of my favorite books, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, the main character — Shadow — is released from prison only to find out his wife is dead. He attends her funeral, and later in his hotel room, he finds her sitting on the edge of his bed. He has the briefest of hopes until he tastes her tongue. Smoky, salty, full of bile and vomit; still dead.
jack’s in a suit, she’s in a wife beater
When Sawyer sees Kate for the first time after three years, his heart leaps. He’s been funning the jungle scientists and jacking off while he watches young Charlotte frolic in the sunlight. But when he finally goes to her, and figures out that she gave up Aaron, and has been doing Jack (but just in the butt so she can remain what is referred to in canon as a Sawyervirgin). Her mouth will no doubt taste just as bad.
As creepy as it was seeing Elizabeth Mitchell be so hopelessly devoted to the master of the long con, you wish they hadn’t set it up and paid it off in the same hour. Why on earth did the blonde-blonde pairing have to wait until the very episode of Kate’s return?
internists were such morons in 1974
By the way, it’s not wholly true that when two blondes reproduce the child always looks like Ryan Seacrest. That’s a filthy old wives’ tale that was last invoked during the marriage of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid. (Though it did limit the output of their coupling to an only child, as one might have hoped.)
Lost has so far not let us enjoy the primary fun of time travel. We didn’t even get to hear Juliet speculate on all the tremendous things she could do if she took the submarine to Tahiti and went back into the real world.
To get a proper handle on how awesome and/or depressing it would be, I recommend my homeboy Ken Grimwood’s classic time travel novel, Replay, in which the same thing happens, but instead of getting married and setting up a cute house in a weird island cult, the protagonist decides to win gajillions betting on the Dodgers sweeping the World Series.
So far the show has avoided the number one cliché of time travel, what is referred to in the trade as ‘I am my own grandpa‘ syndrome. Still, Sawyer is Aaron and this predictable twist is on its way as surely as a Daniel Faraday-Sayid-Hurley facial hair love triangle will envelop the remaining castaways.
Finally, though, the castaways are going to need some mechanism to return to their own time. We know that Daniel Faraday never quite accomplishes the feat, since he’s planning on seducing a preteen Charlotte.
My remaining question is this: whatever happened to the rest of the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815? The show has always had a perilously hard time keeping track, and maybe Richard Alpert’s salvo on the beach killed Rose and Bernard? At this moment the only chance such a couple would have to retire would be washing up in an island paradise after a plane crash.
In fact, it really hasn’t hit anyone how good their fortune is just yet. Even if they are unable to alter the timeline except in ways they already have, the money they have in their pocket hasn’t been reduced in value by a certain Democratic president from the Midwest yet. And hell, Gennifer Flowers hasn’t even warranted an entry in wikipedia yet, and our new Keanu Reeves has yet to make the centerpiece of his presidency a balding, overweight conservative talk show host who is far richer than Obama will ever be. And you thought my administration was inept and unfocused!
Let’s face it: everything is better in 1974. No jackasses are talking on cell phones while they’re in public bathrooms and confusing the hell out of you, the name A-Rod is purely a part of plumbing terminology, and you really don’t have to choose between your hot but possibly anoxeric wife (Elizabeth Mitchell’s sternum appears to want to burst Alien-style out of her body) and your definitely anoxeric runaway. You can just let them work it out between themselves.
Hopefully the show’s writers will solve Sawyer’s tender conundrum several seasons from now by flashing several thousands years forward in the future to a massive stone statue of both women going down on the Long Con.
leave any woman who forces you to wear that shirt, LaFleur
Yes, the most important island secret ever, if you go by Entertainment Weekly‘s fanboy coverage of the show, is what the four-toed statue that Sayid and Sun glimpsed on their mini-island cruise so many seasons ago. It looks like it’s the foot of Anubis, the jackal god of the dead. In that case, can they see their way to bringing back Michelle Rodriguez? Her sex with Sawyer was the best sex with Sawyer.
Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He will never tell you where exactly he lives.
“Cover the Windows and All the Walls” – Grouper (mp3)
“Down to the Ocean” – Grouper (mp3)
“Follow In Our Dreams” – Grouper (mp3)
“Heart Current” – Grouper (mp3)
PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING
Cheney, week two.
Cheney, week four.
Cheney, week six.
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Democracy Super America
by Molly Lambert
Have a coke. Go fucking crazy!
What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
“As We May Think” is an essay by Vannevar Bush, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945. Bush argued that as humans turned from war, scientific efforts should shift from increasing physical abilities to making all previous collected human knowledge more accessible. He also helped invent the atomic bomb.
Selena was a spokesperson for Coca-Cola from 1989 till the time of her death. She filmed three commercials for the company. In 1994, to commemorate her five years with the company, Coca-Cola issued special Selena coke bottles.
Coca-Cola was the first-ever sponsor of the Olympic games, at the 1928 games in Amsterdam, and has been an Olympics sponsor ever since.
The Coca-Cola Company has been criticized for its business practices as well as the alleged adverse health effects of its flagship product. A common criticism of Coke based on its allegedly toxic acidity levels has been found to be baseless by researchers; lawsuits based on these criticisms have been dismissed by several American courts for this reason.
There are some consumer boycotts of Coca-Cola in Arab countries due to Coke’s early investment in Israel during the Arab League boycott of Israel. This contrasts sharply to Pepsi which stayed out of Israel. Mecca Cola and Pepsi have been successful in the Middle East as an alternative.
Fanta has its origins in Nazi Germany, when a trading ban was placed on Germany by the Allies during World War II. The Coca-Cola company therefore was not able to import the syrup needed to produce Coca-Cola in Germany.
As a result, their chief chemist, Dr. Schetelig, decided to create a new product for the Germany market created using only ingredients available in Germany. They called the new product Fanta.
Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording.
PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING
Tyler Coates Buys The World A Coke
Olympic Cermonies and Large Hadron Colliders
Guy Debord’s Society Of The Spectacle
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Dissociative Identity Disorder
by Eleanor Morrow
United States of Tara
creator Diablo Cody
Let’s face facts: the pro-life lobby had a bunch of stripper-era Diablo Cody photos and they forced her to write Juno lest Ramesh Ponnuru publish the illict photos in his secret Republican porn webblog.
diablo and steven…they have obviously at least eskimo-kissed
There was every reason to expect United States of Tara to exist along those same lines. Every character in the pilot was a whining composite of Ellen Page’s quirky yet optimistic preteen. They all talked in the same overwrought California lingo — at first, it’s annoying, but then you start to miss that level of sophistication in other shows. After the pilot, where Tara’s most irritating alter took the stage, it’s been all uphill from there.
tara and her sister charmaine
Without the fanfare accorded her earlier project, the Steven Spielberg produced Tara has quietly become one of the most entertaining shows on television, largely for the reason that it explores territory that serial television has never before touched.
marshmallow’s fellow cream puff
Ironically it now seems like Tara’s predicament has taken a crucial backseat to her brilliant surrounding cast. Start with Tara’s less well-liked sister, Charmaine. Rosemarie Dewitt deserves the Oscar that Kate Winslet stole through Nazi sex. Last episode she had her off-center boobs corrected surgically while Tara’s alter Buck ministered to her every need. He even conditioned her ends. It was the most brilliant, touching television since Tony Soprano’s first panic attack.
Tara’s children are equally gut-busting. Brie Larson is damn near perfect as Tara’s daughter, and while the show flirted with teenage rebellion storyline for her, it soon found more amusement in teaching her gay brother how to get guys and making out with her geeky boss from Barnaby’s (a transcendent Nate Corddry). This show is so well cast it doesn’t even have time for Patton Oswalt- Rosemarie DeWitt sex jokes.
Tara’s youngest is Marshall, an uptight high school feglia who’s more adorable than Ellen Page and her bare stomach combined. Marshall’s cannily seducing another youth by playing hard-to-get and damn if it isn’t working, Marshmallow. His participation in a Xtian Hellhouse performance was funnier than all seven seasons of Two and a Half Men.
You just don’t see this stuff on television, and yet the Kansas-set show isn’t looking to surprise all the time. Like Gus Van Zant and Harmony Kormine’s depictions of the lives of young America, Tara is at its most shocking when it bares the humanity and decency of people you wouldn’t expect it from. Like mothers, for example.
“you don’t think you did sarah jessica parker in a past life, do you?”
This is perhaps best done with Tara’s husband, Aidan on Sex in the City, the groom in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, John Corbett. It would be so easy to paint him as the saint or the pure straight men to all the crazy people his wife contains, but there’s something understandable about every moral conundrum he faces. We can barely live even if we are ourselves alone, says Max’s face as Tara moves seamlessly into one of her alters.
she’ll probably win an emmy for this show after it’s canceled
In a recent episode, Tara’s parents came to Overland Park intending to take the children away. Instead, Tara’s newest alter — a poncho gnome that pissed on things — made her father think his lack of bladder control was proof he was no longer equipped to raise children. Tara looks like a better parent put in that kind of perspective, but her failings towards her children are obvious. She gets a light hand from the show’s writers, because no one could sympathize properly with someone they believe to be a bad mother.
I think people have a hard time empathizing with Toni Collette’s Tara, even though she is doing the acting equivalent of the five minute mile every week. It’s easy to pull a Winslet and flop your tatas around for giggles, but Collette’s range is so breathtaking it really is fun to watch, even if most struggle to connect with Tara’s level of mental illness. As difficult as it is for the person with the illness, there’s something exciting about it for her family and friends. In the end, there’s always another Tara to feel bonded to.
Eleanor Morrow is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in New York.
“A Daisy Through Concrete” – Eels (mp3)
“I Like Birds” – Eels (mp3)
“Something Is Sacred” – Eels (mp3)
“Estate Sale” – Eels (mp3)
PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING
What can you say now.
Robots in disguise.
Where he would live.
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Image (Withheld)
by Jaye Bartell
The Alps
Brandon Shimoda
Flim Forum Press
(Get your copy over at the Flim Forum.)
NOTE: The blank squares accompanying each poem in The Handmaidens and Bridesman section of The Alps struck me immediately, fascinated and moved me to respond. The squares display vivid possibility, actualized by the writing beneath them, poems that are far more than captions. Possibility, in fact, is the prevailing sentiment I’m left with; there is much to discover in The Alps, and the squares serve as a kind of field guide. They at once refuse to be empty, or to contain anything. The slightest suggestion of an image, –gold / lightning struck / water–, and the square floods. Turn the page, a new square is presented, empty, simple, but vulnerable to the foment of cognition, memory, grasp, and total loss.
The presence of a blank square terrifies. It is end or, worse, beginning, and again, which signifies an end, and one come to nothing but the recurrent initial form.
The picture, implicit, brought forth, shown by the shape it would occupy if present, or leave as mark, if gone. Describe what could be seen within such a dimension. A poem, aspiring toward image, a presentation, cannot hide the strain caused by omission of the fundamental picture, of its basis. Nothing new can be said that would exceed the size of a postage stamp. The frame expanded, a life of days gain narration, new, because told anew. The frame expanded, just so, becomes a window, to see what may be all of it.
The image fractures when given to language alone, failed when words are sole mechanism, to restore experience to the blinded—it falters, gives only sound, the effect, what remained, after reception, and embodiment. An image seen, but so quickly passed from view, that even if photographed, the air is absent, missed. Toward what direction did it all tend, the now unapparent.
It will not. The dimensions, too variant; the sky that held the breaking, dispersed, as if a part. Fixity allows for the emergence of clarity—a beam, a fount, a shaft— from chaos. The hole, drilled in ice, a geyser breaks the punctured surface, and threatens reversal, of surface, that what once contained is no longer, and blurs. A line dropped, into the amorphous, filament, endless particulate, suffused to become element.
shimoda (right) and frequent collaborator phil cordelli
In cold water, memory, languid, what passes among, objects once actual, become debris, of another, no longer possessed, but observed, elsewhere. What new image, to give form to voice, that recalls, and bringing back, sees again as, and not of, away, distant, what picture, correspondent.
Perimeter, both permits and forbids. There are only so many roofs visible from the window, so many arching bared trees, and the cars and lights, ephemeral. Value, defined: that it could have been anything, but was this, what took place, which had first to be made.
Memory, attempting. Looking, as light recedes and perception becomes its object, fade. The picture withheld, the risk, that all is false, that day and its weather. Were my hands not in gloves and those gloves not in my pockets, as now they are not. Am I at all, or have ceased. If not continuity, than at least recurrent, as in again and again, in myriad pieces of dissimilar snow.
The volition, frustrated, the violation, forcing ghost into body, a rehearsal of procreant need, against piety, that dares flicker when the darkening way struggles to preserve opportunity. We kneeled in soot, and in the morning, coughed, ash into the air, we must further live.
Out of phantasmagoria, a shorn plot, to let come what will and must. As if a clearing was all that was ever needed, to allow the story to determine its own course and contents. For once, a gap, uncluttered. Decimate the crowded halls, the stuffed frame, the heap of images, all existent color massed, black, in confusion. A small space but of enough dimension, backward, giving way, for the further image, what next comes to fill, and dispelling, leaves frame, for faces, hands, grasses, the time, all possibility, retroactive, to come again, but as unknown, emptiness given image, its truer name.
Jaye Bartell is a contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in North Carolina. He blogs here.
“When A Man Loves A Woman” – Karen Dalton (mp3)
“One Night of Love” – Karen Dalton (mp3)
“Take Me” – Karen Dalton (mp3)
PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING
Maybe I’m crazy.
I think you’re crazy.
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The New York Review of Hooks
by Alex Carnevale
Here’s some research I did:
Me: what albums should I review that I’m not reviewing?
Danish: http://tumbledore.tumblr.com/post/77816250/these-are-the-2009-album-releases-ive-acquired
Me: TLDR
We haven’t spoken since. As the world collapses around you, do you really need a soundtrack?
“The Death of Me” – City and Colour (mp3)
“Body in the Box” – City and Colour (mp3)
Throaty singer-songwriter pablum…with a harmonica! At first you’re asking yourself what you’ve done to deserve this. If Elliott Smith never existed, what would have become of male angst? Answer: it probably would have stuck to Langston Hughes poems. Sometimes Dallas Green (the city and the color GET IT? GET IT?) sounds like a parody of a college music station, and other times he sounds like Justin Vernon if he never got dumped by that betch Emma. Standout track: none.
emma?
Was there ever an outing of Emma? Are we sad or happy that she dumped Bon? How was the sex? Did he sing during sex? Was she like, if you don’t score above an 8.0 on Pitchfork I’m never going down on you again? I guess I’ll have to wait for a tell-all biography, I’m too lazy to do anything else but send the Aubrey O’Day Playboy spread to all my closest friends.
Why has this woman not guest starred on Nip/Tuck yet? She also seems so down to earth. I really hope we see more of her, possibly in Penthouse or The Paris Review. Either way I want to be present for what’s sure to be a tumultuous emotional journey. I can only hope Gavin Rossdale and this chick get engaged down the road. She would also be fantastic as the rumored fifth friend in the Sex in the City sequel.
There was this weird equating in Sex and the City: The Movie of Miranda’s paramour Steve’s infidelity with Mr. Big not showing up at Carrie’s wedding. No-showing a wedding is way worse than getting your business on with some Brooklyn hottie. For one you’re just having a little fun down at Union Pool, and in the other you’re coming up empty on the biggest day of Sarah Jessica Parker’s life. I feel I will regret saying this, but it is true.
LeBron and Dwight Howard doing half-court shots is the second greatest YouTube experience of my week. It comes on the heels of a Kevin Garnett commercial for NBA TV that inspires me everyday.
There is no amount of times I will watch this commercial and not sob. Whoever put this together deserves an honor higher than whatever crap Danny Boyle movie won Best Picture.
“Daniel” – Bat for Lashes (mp3)
“Moon and Moon” – Bat for Lashes (mp3)
“Peace of Mind” – Bat for Lashes (mp3)
Scott Walker and Yeasayer pitch in but this is a more confident album than anything she’s ever done, and it’s more fun, too.
You guys haven’t been watching The Bachelor? Last week the talky-friend type got dumped, and in this case we were able to enjoy it all the more because the woman dumped, Jillian, is (a) Canadian and (b) an interior designer. She never stopped talking, and when the most annoying bachelor since Charlie O’Connell showed his vagina in front of a live studio audience on The Bachelor Tells All is telling you to hit the road…you’ve hit rock bottom. When it came time for the tearful limousine ride, Jillian openly wondered in her distinctive accent whether or not she was too independent for this d-bag, while the viewing audience wondered why exactly she was pronouncing aboot like that. Also, when you are a small man, and this d-bag is a small man, do not let yourself be photographed in New Zealand unless in fact you are a member of Flight of the Conchords.
John MacLean’s new album is happy sounding dance music, sounding like it’s from every other decade than the one it’s in. Where LCD Soundsystem is on some level desperate and cynical sounding, MacLean brings Puritan New England to the dance floor and ends up making something both familiar and new, as on the utterly addictive single, “The Simple Life.” Like in James Murphy songs, vocals appear and disappear. This would probably be a James Murphy album if it wasn’t for all the optimism. The Puritans made this world so they can try to save it, too. “Now you’re gone,” croons Nancy Whang, and you come back again.
“Accusations” – The Juan MacLean (mp3)
“Happy House” – The Juan MacLean (mp3)
“The Future Will Come” – The Juan MacLean (mp3)
“Printemps” – Coeur de Pirate (mp3)
“Berceuse” – Coeur de Pirate (mp3)
“Francis” – Coeur de Pirate (mp3)
The hot version of Madeleine Peyroux is 18 year old singer-songwriter Beatrice Martin. It will surely not be long before she’s winehousing herself all over the place, and probably ending Johnny Depp’s marriage and ruining the emotional lives of his children.
“Head Rolls Off” – Frightened Rabbit (mp3)
“Keep Yourself Warm” – Frightened Rabbit (mp3)
“Who’d You Kill Now?” – Frightened Rabbit (mp3)
This is a live recording of the 13th best album of last year. Frightened Rabbit has the best covers in the business, and unlike most of these bands they are an excellent live act. Excessive production is just flat out unnecessary.
You can bet the record would never have been mixed like this before Justin Vernon was born into the world. This is pop and dance music masquerading as goth-folk. On her blog she talks about being strong and resisting covering Joni Mitchell but she has the voice for it. Crooning “life seems so empty” on “Heart Paper Lover” is half-laughable. “Ghosts and Lovers” deserves an upbeat dance remix, but it’s pretty good on its own. There is nothing more enjoyable than a depressing album, but I don’t know that she sounds all that sad. Pop music is for everyone to enjoy. With that said this is probably the most enjoyable release of the year so far.
“Brittle, Crushed, And Torn” – Marissa Nadler (mp3)
“Little Hells” – Marissa Nadler (mp3)
“Ghosts and Lovers” – Marissa Nadler (mp3)
“Ring Ring” – Sleigh Bells (mp3)
“Holly” – Sleigh Bells (mp3)
“Infinity Guitars” – Sleigh Bells (mp3)
DJs and tattooed female vocalists are the third best invention of the past 20 years, topped only by the George Foreman grill and erotic Twilight fan fiction. Brooklyn-based duo Sleigh Bells everyone. “Ring Ring” is my mother’s favorite song of the year.
“The King Must Die” – Elton John (mp3)
“Sixty Years On” – Elton John (mp3)
“Your Song” – Elton John (mp3)
This talented young singer-songwriter has exploded on the scene with his debut self-titled album. Sers though, the idea that EJ once played backing vocals blows my mind. I just want to do it all over again with Elton. That’s my real problem with him being gay and in committed relationship. If he was straight he’d have divorced several times by now and he would need to keep recording better albums to pay off his exes. The world would have been better served if Elton had just rehabbed that sexual preference. God damn it.
“Yoko Ono” – Ben Lee (mp3)
“Bad Poetry” – Ben Lee (mp3)
I don’t know what shocks me more, that Ben Lee is now married to Ione Skye or that he’s recorded four albums since I last seriously listened to him. Lee is more well known in his native Australia, but he was known to me in 1998 for writing hot love songs for Claire Danes and appearing suspiciously like what I imagine a weevil looks like. Lee’s always been a good pop songwriter – “Cigarettes Will Kill You” and “Nothing Much Happens” are both minor classics – and The Rebirth of Venus is either terrible or brilliant, and sometimes both. “Rise Up” is the perfect Lee song and that does wonders for the album. Plus the b-sides includes Lee covering a song “Ben Lee” by the Ataris about how much he sucks. The Ataris compare him (unfavorably) to Bob Dylan, but he’s more like a poor man’s Billy Joel. That’s no slam, and this album is definitely better than anything Baz Luhrmann has ever done.
I’m a little offended you haven’t already bought CapGun. It’s inappropriate, frankly. Do you know how hard it is to get Dick Cheney to write for my website? I had to make Lambert eat ramen noodles for over a month. Things are tight, even for blogs. I need your help to keep This Recording going, or else I’m going to curl up in a little ball and probably take Danish down with me. Please buy our third issue, it has already appreciated $7.4 percent. And you haven’t even bought it yet. At these prices, who can say no?
CapGun features the finest poetry in the land, prose from the most inventive new writers around, plus Will hand-letterpressed the covers. Well I guess more properly he managed a small, illicit sweatshop that hand-letterpressed the covers, but either way, it’s a significant outlay, and I’d like to thank Will for doing that. Please buy the third issue.
“Heartbreaker” – MSTRKRFT ft. John Legend (mp3)
“Vuvuvu” – MSTRKRFT (mp3)
“Fist of God” – MSTRKRFT (mp3)
Pronounced Masterkraft, there are a lot of great dance songs here. It’s not a Justice album, but then what is except Cross? John Legend and Lil Mo stay ubiquitous, and other rappers make appearances. Young people and Danish will no doubt enjoy this music, and if I took ecstasy, I’m sure I would too. Unfortunately I am drifting towards the stage in my life where I can barely stay patient for the endings of movies (I just go to wikipedia and read what happens) let alone the ends of six minute long house music tracks. “1000 Cigarettes” is a hot track though.
I e-mailed Danish because I don’t understand this band, but I do like their cover done in blue Bic.
Basically what everyone’s been saying (and I agree) is that it’s no Source Tags and Codes but it’s a lot better than their last two albums (possibly due to the fact that they’re no longer on Interscope). It walks a fine line between dramatic and melodramatic, not really sure what the single is/would be.
“Halcyon Days” – …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of the Dead (mp3)
“Fields of Coal” – …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of the Dead (mp3)
“Luna Park” – …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of the Dead (mp3)
“We Build Then We Break” – The Fray (mp3)
“Ungodly Hour” – The Fray (mp3)
I didn’t really understand how a person as attractive as Patrick Dempsey could be depressed, and then this four-piece outfit from Denver explained how to save my life. Would that Grey’s Anatomy were just a compilation of Ellen Pompeo taking her bra off to different songs by this talented pop band. They have truly filled the role Coldplay was born to play of recording the same song to a slightly different tempo so people can be soothed in the waiting rooms of doctor’s offices. This is an underrated skill — like women who are easily fulfilled sexually, The Fray are the great unappreciated champions of this depressing time in American life.
“Heartswarm” – Swan Lake (mp3)
“Spanish Gold, 2044″ – Swan Lake (mp3)
Sometimes the very thing you’re looking for is the one thing you can’t see. Sometimes the snow comes down in June, sometimes the sun goes ’round the moon. Just when I thought our chance had passed, you go and save the best for last.
Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He lives in Manhattan, and he tumbls here.
PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING
The best of William Faulkner.
A little less conversation.
Ambiguity is so attractive to the young.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Molloy and Malone
by Alex Carnevale
Quietly and unobtrusively, like an elephant tiptoeing through a church, the No. 1 comedy in television is a show about which you’ll never hear critics crow. Highbrows phonies disdain the laugh-tracked adventures of philanderer Charlie Harper, his chiropractor brother Alan Harper and Alan’s son Jacob. For most of its audience, Two and a Half Men is a bunch of belly laughs from a bygone era where sexual innuendo and wry put-downs were enough to entertain a generation.
charlie and his nephew jake
But there is something deeper and more disturbing going on in Mssr. Harper’s shiny Santa Monica beach house, more Paradise Lost than The King of Queens. With a bare minimum of sets, props, and actors, the milieu emerges comfortably from knowing banter between familiars. Much of it is cheerful babbling between likeable fops, but there’s just as many vicious insults and moments of utter darkness. Without it, there would be little reason to watch the lives of spoiled whites.
alan and kandi
The show is really about Alan Harper, played by veteran sitcommer Jon Cryer. After his wife kicks him out of the house he spend years working to own, he moves in with his brother to create the latest version of Neil Simon’s battle of opposites. Alan is a desperate weasel, with an attitude towards sex that would push most men to abandon the idea of not paying for it. He loves being a father, but he’s not a very good one. And, burdened with alimony payments, he depends on his brother for most things.
On the surface, it’s a game setup. Alan is fastidious and repressed where his brother is loose and free. Each has something to learn from one another.
But they never do. On most shows, months pass, things are learned, life goes on. On Two and a Half Men, upwards of ten years has passed, with Alan’s son Jake turning from a cute kid to a pudgy preteen to a slim, handsome teenager to prove it. And yet even he has learned barely more manners than he began the show with. Though he has lost the pudginess that typified his character, neither his uncle or his father have noticed. For them, he is forever eight.
As a result, a strange Beckettian tone has taken over the proceedings. Many of the episodes have similar plots, and yet the characters learn nothing. It is the furthest thing from the expectations of traditional drama, and yet it happens again and again.
Charlie Harper is a boozer, and in one episode he even learns the word for what he really is: misogynist. He has to look it up in the dictionary, granted, but at least he is permitted to know what he is.
He’s taken the brief vagaries of a career in jingle-writing, and turned it into an existence that most men with a pulse should envy. If a beautiful woman walks and talks, Charlie Harper can wriggle his way into dumping her at some point down the road after the novelty of sex with her has faded into the bother of a relationship. He is constantly vacillating between two essentially male state of minds — the moments before sex, when a man will do anything to have it; and those moments after sex, where no matter the place, the woman, or the future you have with her, the man wishes she was still and lifeless between thousands of pounds of seawater and fresh air.
Between the bars, he has been given a chance to remedy the error of his ways. His first real chance came with a storyline that had him cozying up to his real-life squeeze, Denise Richards. You can wager a guess as to how that ended, although to be fair it was a good deal better than it did in real life.
Next was ballet dancer Mia. No woman was more reluctant to agree to Charlie’s advances; as a result winning her was even more special a prize. And yet at the final moment of embrace, Mia demanded he cut loose his brother on the world so that they could make a life together — and he refused. What could be a zanier version of ourselves?
Charlie at least has the barest reason not to want to change his life — it’s pretty great, even if the hangovers are dissipating a lot slower than they used to. But his brother navigates, in many ways, the same worn path. And yet he manages to choose even more disastrously than Charlie Sheen. This is a feat indeed.
Alan Harper’s last two serious girlfriends were castoffs from the freight train that is the Charlie Harper experience. The first was the lush, brilliantly opaque 22-year old, Kandi, whose limber body and less-than-limber mind took Charlie mere seconds to tire of. Alan was endlessly entranced by Kandi’s willingness to pursue intercourse with him, and he even married her. Divorce predictably came shortly after.
Next was Alan’s chirpy receptionist, a small little sprite who charmed her way in and out of his brother’s pants. She then “chose” Alan, and things were going on quite swimmingly until he ate a pot brownie and hooked up with her mother (Carol Kane). You see, these characters resist change in every form it offers itself. It reminds them suspiciously of their mother, who also wanted to change them, and is portrayed by Holland Taylor.
The gifts of modernity are empty to these two brothers. They never use the internet – Charlie is once amused to find there’s a defamatory website about his exploits with the fairer sex, but that’s all. Sometimes they watch television – Alan sipping wine and sampling his brother’s private jacuzzi plasma while he’s off on his latest conquest.
There is nothing of these two lives we would want, and yet they exist all the same. Like two sons of God, Alan and Charlie carry on completely differently, and yet neither is satisfied. No matter what we do, this riddle of a show tells us, we are doomed to be dissatisfied. When we are closest to our own idea of happiness is when we are farthest from it. Such creatures, humans, can never truly be balanced, lest they make up a fiction they can enjoy better than the pitter-patter of time coming to claim where they live, up against the ocean.
Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He lives in Manhattan, and tumbls here.
“The Magpie” – Bishop Allen (mp3)
“The Lion and the Teacup” – Bishop Allen (mp3)
“The Ancient Commonsense of Things” – Bishop Allen (mp3)
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We taxied out in a storm.
Aren’t you here tonight?
This is love.
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CapGun 3
The third edition of CapGun, the literary magazine/event of the year, comes out tomorrow. When you see it arrive in your mailbox you will have the closest thing to an orgasm that such a creation can trigger in the unsuspecting or suspecting recipient. We heartily recommend this third edition of CapGun as a gift for others. It can get you laid, and it will provide for the child that frenzied sex creates should you be so lucky. The cover is hand letter-pressed for christsakes.
What awaits you inside:
Colophon Teaser: CapGun 3 was designed by Will Hubbard, and printed and bound in an edition of 250 at CapGun Press in Brooklyn, NY. The title face, Gotham, was created by Tobias Frere -Jones in 2000 to approximate vernacular lettering found throughout New York City. The text is set in Bulmer, which was used by John Boydell in 1805 for his famous, gilded, and financially ruinous edition of Shakespeare.
We rarely ask you to support This Recording, but we need your help now. Every issue of CapGun you purchase not only keeps this website afloat but gets you an enduring keepsake you’ll want to pass down through the generations.
We thank you for reading This Recording, and we ask that you prepare for your coming orgasm.
Alex Carnevale
Will Hubbard
“Sad Days, Lonely Nights” – Spiritualized (mp3)
“Amazing Grace (Peace on Earth)” – Spiritualized (mp3)
“I Want You” – Spiritualized (mp3)
PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING
Where else you might like to submit your work.
Jackie Delamatre’s story from our second issue.
Bob Creeley’s poem from our first.
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American Manufacturing in Disguise
by Alex Carnevale
When we look back at the achievements of this lost decade, film students will, in their infinite stupidity, miss the finest contribution of the aughts. There has never been a more subversive piece of art than Michael Bay’s Transformers, and with the collapse of industry that marks each day’s evening news, there may never be again.
On its surface, Transformers is the same product tie-in pablum we’ve all been forced to endure since Star Wars made a fortune’s worth of dubloons in secondary markets. And yet the tale that was told is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. On its surface we have the long war between the Autobots and the Decepticons, now staged on the battleground of Earth.
The version of the Mythos in the film is this: Shia LaBoeuf’s granddad finds the Decepticon Megatron ensconsed in ice at the Artic Circle. Clad in black, Megatron resembles a Satan, or at the very least a Dark One. It never occurs to Admiral Witwicky that he has unearthed a hero in the ice.
Bred in the combat pits of Cybertron, Megatron was raised for fierceness. Essentially, he was a slave for the Autobot hierachy and was pitted against other monsters for the amusement of the Autobots. It is easy enough to see the prodigious hand of American imperialism here, when the powers-that-be were content to let so-called lesser nations fight amongst each other. Instability was profitable: it limited rebellion and it made for good business for those who supplied the weapons.
Once Megatron became too strong for the prevailing Autobot hierachy, they saw the strength of the being they’d created and began his long exile. Megatron is vulnerable, neutralized in a government facility when Michael Bay’s film begins, and the Autobots are free and clear.
The prevailing assumption lent to the viewer is that the Autobots are the fighters of freedom. The film then gives the audience more than a few clues that the Autobots aren’t all they seem to be. History is written by the victors, and the Autobots were the victors in the Great War, a conflict that led to the Pax Cybertronia. Under the terms of this pact, the Deceptions became second-class citizens, and little was told to a young transformer about what had happened in the past.
Our American heroes start in Revolutionary War days, and so on from there. It is clouded so that our people barely remember the real history of what happened. Yes, the states had more than a right to demand freedom from taxation. But to tell the story in that fashion omits the slave labor on which this country was built. Without the value of that labor, America would never have been wealthy enough or strong enough to fight the King. Instead of freeing its black citizens, as Great Britain did, it turned its back on the very people to which it owed its victory.
The current irony is that we are being taxed more strenuously than ever — the very charge we levied on our colonial predecessors.
And so on, to the present, where automakers salvage billions from the taxpaying public. And for what, exactly? To keep their Autobot machines pumping vile toxins into our atmosphere, and gas confined to a racket between America’s power, perched on the back of the subjugation of Arab peoples in every oil rich nation? Instead of criticizing this country, it is easier to blame Israel, as if they were the ones who led to this state of affairs. They’re a victim of colonial power, not an agent of it.
Chief ally to the American military is Optimus Prime and his coalition of autobots. They are expertly trained to appeal to human emotions – shiny colors and cute noises emanate from our hero’s favorite destructive robot, Bumblebee.
The fact is, humans will believe anything. Does anyone hear Megatron out? He desires the AllSpark for the power it possesses to return him to his homeworld. Is it any wonder he doesn’t want his slavers accompaying him on the trip home?
I said the film was subversive, and it is. The portrait of the American military collaborating with the Autobots is of a deeply flawed, entirely helpless organization in which vindictiveness triumphs over caution, and John Turturro’s skepticism towards the prevailing Autobot view of things loses out over the machinations of a hormonally charged loser who wants respect from extraterrestrials as a means of seducing an underage teen. Such intercourse would be statuatory rape, but thirst for sex wins out over wariness.
We know the automakers want nothing good for us. Their executives fly around in private jets and congressmen pretend to be chagrined. It is the chaos that the Decepticons can provide that is what we need so badly, if only our vapid president would stop granting wishes like a genie in town hall meetings and see that we need a far larger change than he called for. Anyone who buys an American car is a bigger fool than a president who bails out American carmakers. In America, business is only charity if it’s big business.
All great civilizations perish on the backs of their own excess. “X is suffering,” cries this way of thinking. “We must solve for X no matter the cost.” The Decepticons posed a threat to a way of life on the all-metal planet, so they were banished and destroyed.
We have no need for American industry or the military as it exists. Our military strength grows still larger, to fight no enemy we can see. What should we be more afraid of? Thousands of Americans dead in the wake of mad men crashing planes into our Autobot superstructures, or the resulting war against nothing and no one that cripples the finances of the people this output was supposed to protect?
Instead of propping up companies we no longer have need for, let us have them die an appropriate death. Our new president is in hock to these fools. He cannot break free of them any more than George W. Bush could write his own name.
The planet Cybertron did not belong to the Autobots any more than it did to the Decepticons. In the resulting battle, “won” by the Autobots, the means of rebuilding Cybertron was destroyed by the Autobots’ human ally. Great job – better to destroy a homeworld than lose the battle. Soon we will hear “they are just machines” and the instruments of prejudice will be once again America’s, to use or put down as they like.
War contrives a reason for existing. We must fight to go on. But if the fight destroys us, too? We might be better thrown into the Laurentian Abyss, or the deepest point in the world, Challenger Deep and frozen even colder, even deader than Decepticons. Perhaps theirs is the better fate.
Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbles here.
“City of Lies” – Padded Cell (mp3)
“Savage Skulls” – Padded Cell (mp3)
“Faces of the Forest” – Padded Cell (mp3)
PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING
Smells return of what you ask.
We’re the best you’ve ever had.
Make it work please.
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Integrity in the Face of Apocalypse
by Karina Wolf
While waiting to see The International, I caught a trailer for its cinematic Siamese twin, that other Clive Owen thriller, directed by Tony Gilroy and co-starring Julia Roberts’ thong. I also discovered that Tony Scott has remade The Taking of Pelham One Two Three featuring Denzel Washington in a role created by Walter Matthau and with John Travolta as the lead hijacker. We’re in an age of covers, retreads and reblogs, so I guess it makes sense that the great films of the 1970s are being remade and purveyed to the viewing public. I’m trying to understand why so few of them work.
Sixty or seventy minutes into The International, two bloodied men (Clive Owen and Brian O’Byrne) burst from the Guggenheim, stumble across Fifth Avenue and collapse in front of the Central Park reservoir. One man says to his enemy/accomplice: “I told you they’d never let you take me in,” and then expires.
This is exactly when The International should have begun. The story’s not a mystery – a failing bank kills off enemies to protect its interests (“control the debt, control everything” says one wicked banker). But by pivoting the climax to the beginning of the film at least we’d look forward to its great set piece, the Guggenheim’s demolition by artillery. Assassins cause the spiral structure to collapse like a failed soufflé. It should’ve been legendary, along the lines of Popeye Doyle’s car chase under the West Side BMT.
I went to the movie for exactly one reason: the preposterously named villain, the IBBC or “The International Bank of Business and Credit.” I wondered how the sloppiness of this writing – it’s like calling a food shop “the multinational grocery of edibles and potables” – found its way to screen. Admittedly, the movie is being dumped in the late winter netherworld of action and chick flicks, but there are still pleasures to be gleaned this season. Defiance works as a by the numbers tale of vengeance and redemption; in Taken, Liam Neeson breaks loose from his noble giant routine and proves pleasingly sadistic.
The International, though, aspires to more and fails harder; it’s one of those films where you can tell there’s a mind behind the misbegotten production. Director Tom Tykwer attracted acclaim by directing two films: he turned bank robbery into a breakneck version of Orpheus and Eurydice (Run, Lola, Run) and a Teutonic-style myth into a moving magical realist love story (The Princess and the Warrior). He followed up these jewels by directing as stand-in for Kieslowski (Heaven), and now, it seems, for Sydney Lumet. Neither role suits his operatic aesthetic.
In the 21st century, it’s Tony Gilroy, director of Michael Clayton and writer of the Bourne pictures, who seems to be the go-to guy for noir (he also directed Owen in the forthcoming Duplicity). Tykwer’s film aspires to Bourne’s relevance and multi-national reach. The movie is cast with a virtual Neapolitan of European actors: among them, Ulrich Thomsen (Festen) as a COO wading into a sinkhole of corruption and Armin Mueller-Stahl as an ex-Stasi officer gone good. The locations span New York to Lyon to Milan to Istanbul, although most exteriors echo the glass walled architecture of Berlin, where it was shot.
Clive Owen’s star-making performance was in a bad movie (Closer) but his iconography was formed in the ambitious Children of Men. Integrity in the face of the apocalypse – that’s his shtick. Surely, he’s the right player for an intelligent parable about greed in the New Depression. The problem isn’t with the acting, though, but the storytelling. We never learn why Owen’s character has been ejected from Scotland Yard and spends his time at Interpol dogging the shadowy bank. Naomi Watts’ role is so hazy it wasn’t until the credits that I realized she is an assistant DA.
The plot also suffers because it relies upon the luxuries of the virtual age. Instead of risk in the face of corruption, there are video conferences, televised rallies, and rather tame behaviors on the part of the Sicilian mafia. There is exactly one action sequence. Amid all the exposition, at least something is explained: the preposterous “IBBC” is a cover for an arms dealing Ponzi scheme—so the name is understandably fanciful. When Owen implores Mueller-Stahl, an insider, for an explanation for the bank’s corruption, he gets the answer, “that’s the difference between truth and fiction. Fiction has to make sense.” Not always.
All thrillers today aspire to be thrillers from the 1970s. Why not? Those films boasted political relevance and characters with depth. What’s great about those older films is that they’re not aiming for the cohesive truth of fiction; they’re quite comfortable with the aberrant behaviors of real life.
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls puts forth the hypothesis that after the extinction of the studio system, filmmakers were inventing storytelling all over again. Before the business of the blockbuster and the mandated three-act script, these films were feeling out their territory, like a blind man navigating an unfamiliar room. It’s worthwhile to consider the oddity of those films, their rough and poorly joined elements as the flaws that comprise their genius. A kind of cinematic wabi sabi.
In the 1970s films, there’s never a sense of ineluctable conclusion. Marathon Man’s set up is personal and idiosyncratic – a grad student has a chip on his shoulder because his father was blacklisted by McCarthy. The movie works because of a few set pieces, a terrific villain and a terribly neurotic protagonist. In fact, all those golden-age anti-heroes have some very creepy traits that inform their social do-gooding: Stockholm Syndrome (Three Days of the Condor), stalking (Marathon Man and Taxi Driver), corrosive workaholism (All The President’s Men, The Conversation) and megalomaniacal tendencies (The French Connection). Serpico’s dress sense, enunciation and interpersonal skills anticipate the reminted Joaquin Phoenix.
The movies of the 70s feature the anti-plot as well as the anti-hero. There are elliptical jumps and coincidences which we accept as reasonable. These hiccups don’t alienate the audience; quite the opposite, they’re the elements that make people return to the films.
When Robert Redford meets and kidnaps Faye Dunaway in Condor, it feels exactly right for the paranoid desperation of the character and the era. The abduction creates an uneasy crisis of conscience for the viewer: why is a rather perverse love affair – or government corruption (Watergate) or pathological eavesdropping (The Conversation) – thrilling to watch?
Many of the players in those 70s films are peripheral to the larger conflicts suggested by their stories – even those in law enforcement or intelligence often have no experience that prepares them for the enormity of the disorder. Nonetheless, the filmmakers find a uniquely personal resolution for each.
If only The International had taken these cues and created Owen’s character as an innocent discovering the corruption at the same time as the audience does. What’s more, there’s dramatic potential in finding sympathy for the villains. The IBBC’s misdeeds are like those of Bernie Madoff – Shakespearean in nature – in the sense that one individual thinks he can overcome corruption with more corruption. The bank directors aren’t evil; they’re equivocators who think another bad deal will bring everything back to black. These missed opportunities just send me back to my favorites, the originals. Yes, there is such a thing as an original in film, and it does have an aura of authenticity which today’s filmmakers imitate but can’t duplicate.
Karina Wolf is the senior contributor to This Recording. She lives in Manhattan, and she tumbls here.
“Defy Me” – Jessica Grace (mp3)
“Stop Looking At Me” – Jessica Grace (mp3)
“What Is It In You” – Jessica Grace (mp3)
Jessica Grace myspace
BEST OF THE WOLF
Karina on Tennessee Williams
Karina on Cher
Karina on Audrey Hepburn
Karina on Julia Cameron
Karina on the cinema of narcissism
Karina on Purple Rain
Karina on her summer reading
Karina on Indiana Jones
Karina on In Treatment
Karina on Thanksgiving
Karina on what makes her laugh
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There is only one genius and this is him.
Or perhaps this is her.
Fancy taking it one way.
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Great and Elusive Men
by Meredith Hight
I was browsing at the Diesel Bookstore in Los Angeles when I came across a copy of The Great Man by Kate Christensen. It won the PEN/Faulkner award, thus enticing me further. But then I flipped the book over and sighed. The blurb on the back read: “Oscar Feldman, the renowned figurative painter, has passed away. As his obituary notes, Oscar is survived by his wife, Abigail, and their son, Ethan, and his sister, the well-known abstract painter Maxine Feldman. What the obituary does not note, however is that Oscar is also survived by his longtime mistress, Teddy St. Cloud, and their daughters.”
Here we go again, I thought: another story about some “great man” who is brilliant, talented, and successful yet constitutionally incapable of being committed to a woman, to a family, or even to friends. He’s deeply intellectual, he’s troubled, and he’s painfully aware of his own shortcomings. This awareness, however, does not keep him from coming up short, time and time again. He can’t help it. He’s just not capable of commitment. Or he just can’t seem to express his emotions. This makes the women in his life completely bananas and they often spend a lifetime just trying to “figure him out.”
I speak of the Great, Elusive Male.
Just like Big in Sex and the City. (Get ready, the sequel will almost certainly involve Big somehow, someway questioning his relationship with Carrie. The story depends on it.) Then there’s Steve Martin, the wealthy executive in Shopgirl. Oh, how he cared for Claire Danes and oh, how unable he was to be in a relationship with her.
In Elegy Ben Kingsley is an esteemed professor, widely respected for his views. But he just can’t seem to love anyone, not even Penelope Cruz, until (spoiler alert) her very life is compromised. There was, for a short time, Aaron Rose on Gossip Girl. And how I could I forget Hugh Grant in Bridget Jones’ Diary, widely known to be modeled after Pride and Prejudice, indicating the longevity of the Great, Elusive Male prototype? And I could go on.
Of course, Great Elusive Males are not always merely the invention of artists, depicted in pages and on screen. The artists themselves are often Great, Elusive Males. As Daphne Merkin recently wrote in profile of V.S. Naipaul for Elle, “behind every great man peeks a long-suffering wife or abused mistress, and sometimes both at once…the list of writers who have killed their wives softly whilst producing their art includes Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, and Leo Tolstoy.”
Let’s talk about some others. I decided to finally check out some of Charles Bukowski’s work, after coming across his poetry inscribed onto a public restroom in Venice Beach. Yes, that’s right. But after reading Hot Water Music, a book of short stories that are essentially tales of individual sexual conquests, I am convinced that he is a just a womanizer who can write really well about womanizing. Also, he appears to have some kind of egg fetish.
Unfortunately, with age comes the realization that a proclivity for womanizing and misogyny exists among many male writers/artists. A coworker and I were recently discussing The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera of course, and she mentioned re-reading it recently and realizing that he is a total misogynist. Unfortunately, I think this is true, and something I did not quite catch on to when I was 21 and reading it for the first time.
I did not seriously object to the predominance of the Great, Elusive Male, however, until I realized that the Great, Elusive Male is in fact, not much of a man at all. And that is because the measure of a man lies not just in what material or creative success he achieves. The true measure of a man lies in how he treats all those in his life, from friends to family to yes, the women.
This struck me while attending the funeral of a friend and former colleague, who is survived by a beloved wife, five children, eighteen grandchildren and nine great grandchildren. Between the family, friends and colleagues, we barely all fit into the small, faded white church. I knew the service would be packed, because my friend was the kind of person who was a friend to anyone who crossed his path. He would always, sincerely, ask you how you were doing —never in that polite, “How are you? (Oh, please do not say anything other than “fine”) kind of way. He would always offer a warm hello, a kind word, and a helping hand, to all of us at the office.
And even though we worked for the same company for a number of years, all things considered, I wouldn’t say I really knew my friend all that well. But that’s the thing about men like him. You don’t have to know them that well to know their character.
I just didn’t have to know him that well, to know he was a good man. And sitting in the crowded church that day, it struck me that it is the good men, who quietly and honorably live their lives, that deserve more of our accolades. It is the good men who stand by you and support you. It is the good men who work hard and try to do the right thing. It is the good men who care about those in their lives, and and make sure they know it, in the smallest of ways. Sometimes, it’s better to be good than to be ‘great’.
P.S. I read The Great Man, anyways, suspecting that the title may be an ironic part of the story. I was right. Read it.
P.P.S. I used to have a thing for Great Elusive Males in training. You know, the younger version. Not anymore.
Meredith Hight is a contributor to This Recording. She last wrote in these pages about her move to Los Angeles. She lives in Los Angeles, and she tumbls here.
“It’s Not Supposed To Be That Way” – Phosphorescent (mp3)
“I Gotta Get Drunk” – Phosphorescent (mp3)
“The Party’s Over” – Phosphorescent (mp3)
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Her vagina hangs like the sleeve of a wizard.
Things to be amused by.
Would be master of all forms.
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And You Said You Wanted To Go Back To The Island
by Dick Cheney
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
– John 3:16
Life is full of important questions. Jack Shephard is the biggest control freak I know, so he has to take on the vast majority of life’s crucial queries. For example — if an Arab of indeterminate origin passes along his condolences before you board a flight with him to Guam, do you alert the authorities, or at the very least Benry Gale? Also, if you have sex with distraught Kate after she’s abandoned Aaron to a well-meaning Los Angeles-area Jewish family, it’s rape, right?
I can’t start throwing stones in glass Dharma stations. Let’s be honest: rape is a small price to pay. This is the island we’re talking about. It is coveted, and to get something that great, like intercourse with a hot doctor, you have to pay a price.
pre-rape kate
A pendulum traverses the continents — we presume of this world, but we don’t know for sure. “The island is moving,” Faraday’s hot mother tells them. Uh, yeah. The entire earth is moving, old lady. It’s called orbit, you daft witch.
Eloise Hawking’s secret plan to get them back on the island includes “taking a flight” and “packing a nice pair of shoes.” This is what my grandmother told me every time I visited her at the home, and yet I didn’t act all weird like it was fate. RIP Grandma Chene-ster.
Of course, Mama Faraday is by no measure the wackest bitch to occupy Lynne and mine’s television on a typical Wednesday night. That honor goes to American Idol‘s Tatiana, whose dreams of fame and stardom with her patented “international” renditions of songs we’ve all heard before. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tatiana was also the name of the whore tiger who attacked some people at the San Francisco Zoo a couple of years ago. I believe my boss pardoned the tiger, but not the atrociousness of this blabbering wannabe. See ya, betch.
saving all my love for this crazy betch
Still, Tatiana is way better than Danny Gokey who is (a) 28 and (b) using his wife who passed away for cash purposes, much like George Constanza did on Seinfeld when he showed one photo of Susan to models in the meat-packing district to elicit their sympathies. Also, who the fuck sings “Hero”? He’s lucky Chris Brown isn’t his boyfriend. He’s also lucky he didn’t pick Jack Shephard’s bed to sleep in. NO MEANS NO JACK.
As Jack is giving Kate a capital R and then pouring her orange juice and coffee (together?!?) before leaving to steal his grandfather’s shoes and kiss Locke’s bald head in his coffin, we can’t help but feel sympathetic. Has one man ever had to handle so much?
it is traditional to make the lady a post-rape breakfast jack
Give the guy something to do with himself, and he’s clean-shaven and purposeful. Give him a reason to doubt and he’s whimpering “Jeremy Bentham stole my mojo” in an Austin Powers accent and Benry is holding him as he whines, “It’s not your fault” in a even gayer version of that classic scene that ruined Good Will Hunting.
you’re just so facking special Will
It took a man with real balls to write something this perverse and wrong. Actually, it took two big men to write this episode: executive producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof. (Although, to be fair, even Michelle Rodriguez is one bang away from getting an exec producer credit on this show. The opening titles now run into the half-hour mark.)
Does it make you feel tough to ruin Evangeline Lilly’s career, guys? It wasn’t enough that she dated a hobbit, now she’s just another statistic in Joe Torre’s Safe at Home Fountation? For shame.
J/K Carlton, we know you’re a Red Sox fan. The real reason they needed the honchos to write this one is that their devious plan to get the Oceanic Six back to the island proper was to break out the rarely used Ocho Ex Machina, wherein eight implausible plot threads are glossed over because the guy who is supposed to keep track of continuity is too busy being interviewed by The New York Times and fucking the continuity chick on Life on Mars.
Maybe Carlton and Damon can record a cryptic podcast with hints for subplots that will later appear in the show as coy literary references. Wow, Ben’s reading Ulysses. Is he majoring in English at Hampshire College at the tender age of 48, or did leaving the island simply sprout a vagina in his pants?
wait a second bro — is benry gale actually james joyce? that would totally explain Finnegan’s Wake
Hey assholes, do you really think we’re just going to sit back and accept that your show has more loopholes then Obama’s Retarded Bailout ’09?
One of the messageboards I lurk on had the following point:
I don’t think you can buy 78 seats on a flight and insist that the airline keep them open. I thought the rule was that if a passenger doesn’t check in 10 minutes before take-off, the airline can give the seat away. I can see Hurley booking 1 or 2 extra seats because of his size, but not 78.
That is what you are questioning?!? People like this are out there, and a chimpanzee that just wanted some ass gets shot to death. Go sit in the dunce chair, internet user. God I hate what this nation has become when I stopped controlling it for just a single month.
clearly Good Will Hunting was more seminal than we thought
Let’s focus on what we do know. We now know that it’s Hurley’s voice repeating the numbers from the radio tower to the Frenchies, years after/before he strangely heard his lucky ones muttered on the frequency.
this is the bare minimum, i hope you toned up since you had jin’s baby sun
We now know that Jin has slept with nearly every woman in the Dharma Initiative, and when Sun gets ahold of his ass, he’s going to have a lot of ‘splaining to do!
We now know that Locke is destined to come back to life as a druid. He is the one who built Stonehenge; another mystery solved! They’re in the Bermuda Triangle! Locke is a Decepticon! Michael Bay is helming Lost‘s season finale! Shock! Surprise! Rape!
jesus’ wounds feel like a pussy, true story. it’s in the bible
The hits just keep on coming. Ben r’s Penny, Jack r’s Kate. Eloise Hawking watches Locke kill himself after he gets in a last bang with the chick who escorts Sayid to the flight of doom. Eloise is pretty much Thomas the Apostle. In fact, due to time travel, she is the original Thomas the Apostle. And Locke is actually Jesus. Shit, now that the show is up against American Idol, how else are they going to appeal to the Christian demographic? That jackass Danny is a church choir teacher? We have Jesus.
Dick Cheney, the former vice president of the United States, is the senior contributor to This Recording. His location can only be reached through Al Ajira flights.
hell yes i put my finger in her asshole, what do you think?
THERE WERE NO SURVIVORS, NONE LEFT ALIVE
“Red Tide” – Neko Case (mp3)
“Prison Girls” – Neko Case (mp3)
“Don’t Forget Me” – Neko Case (mp3)
“The Pharoahs” – Neko Case (mp3)
THE PAPER SAID SEVENTY FIVE
Cheney’s Lost so far:
Observing your favorite betch covered in your own afterbirth is even worse. The only thing harder to get out of your mind is the image of Hugo Reyes in an orange jumpsuit.
Lynne wheeled me in front of the television for last week’s two hour premiere of Lost. I was more confused than Larry Summers at a wedding shower, or Rahm Emanuel if his penis accidentally got inside a woman.
PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING
We came from the mountain.
Georgia puts a book down her pants.
From clay to stone.
the lamp post
Filed under: Uncategorized
The Sun Is God
by Will Hubbard
A small fishing boat about to be tossed onto the shore by a violent, confused wave. Or maybe the boat will not be smashed. Such is the tedious ambiguity deliciously attractive to the young.
He was 20 years old at its conception. The blue pall of the seascape, from memory, not a photograph. A plastic plaque: “the contemporary vogue for moonlit imagery.” Contemporary vogue for moonlit imagery? Another painting in the room is entitled “Sheerness as seen from the Nore.” It simply must be a spoonerism.
Whether it be the members of Odysseus’ crew or merchants pounding fish-heads on the smoky Thames, these beings are phantoms, half-present, weak embodiments of former ambitions, the beacons of a collective past. Even the living recall the morbid angels of Blake—seething, suffering arias of consecrated flesh.
He turns to the light, the morning and afternoon and setting sun. Always distant, it makes all ether an X, a joke of perspective.
When the water of the sea and the water hanging over the sea veil the light, they break into vectors that actually move. Composition can no longer be a trick—careers were born in this idea, and in the apprehension of this idea.
Still later, the sun is a funnel drawing the eye infinitely away from life. Death on a pale horse—to die on a pale horse, to be visited by death riding on his back on the shoulders of a horse hardly intelligible for all the vile terror.
To approximate oil painting with watercolor—to approximate watercolor in oils. To paint “not so much the objects he saw as the light which played around them.” Finally, utter abstractions, save in each the ghostly outline of an animate form—the suggestion of a calf makes a pool of water, cliff beyond; a ring of huddled forms makes a beach and the cold.
Will Hubbard is the contributing editor to This Recording. He tumbls, but never reblogs.
“Drugs” – Black Lips (mp3)
“Starting Over” – Black Lips (mp3)
“Trapped In A Basement” – Black Lips (mp3)
PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING
You must examine the wackness.
Jesus Was Black and Fleet Foxes
Impotent Desire: There Will Be Blood & No Country For Old Men
Filed under: Uncategorized
BALLISTIC: BANS VS. LAMBERT
by Lauren Bans and Molly Lambert
He’s Just Not That Into You
dir. Ken Kwapis
“I actually suffered one of those exact rotten guys only maybe two weeks ago. It was just like a scene in the movie. I was at a bar. A fellow who’d texted me promised follow-up texts. I sent follow-ups when I didn’t get anything from him. And I made the excuse to myself that my phone must’ve been blocked. That I didn’t hear it. That it had SIM card issues. I told my mother. She said, ‘Call him.’ People at the bar said to me, ‘You’re acting out from the movie. He’s just not that into you.’ So I reluctantly decided the hell with him.” – Ginnifer Goodwin
Bans: So according to that opening montage our moms and female friends are the ones inadvertently responsible for brainwashing us into believing we’re too amazing for the doods who break up with us. I never even thought of it that way. What stoopid betches. I’m going to disown my Mom.
Lambert: I was not bored for the retardedly long 2 hours and 15 minutes running time. I wasn’t mad initially, but then the more I thought about it postmortem, the madder I got.
Lambert: I feel like this movie was the girl version of Sin City in some ways. Really simplistic and totally sexist but occasionally satisfying.
Bans: Love Actually is just as sexist, only more insidiously!
Lambert: definitely but it coated the misogyny with Xmas fluff.
Lambert: This movie was at least sort of “Woody Allen” themed so I expected serious discussions between white people in nice apartments and title cards and on those counts I was duly satisfied.
Bans: Very Woody Allen-esque! I think the Woody Allen Gaze is perhaps more dangerous than the regular “male” gaze, for it’s coated in the kind of intellectualism that makes it seem okay to boink your 17 year old stepdaughter.
the WAG (Woody Allen Gaze), demonstrated
Bans: That said, I love him and I may have internalized WAG. My major sexual fantasy is walking into a room to see ScarJo on a table naked, covered in Lox, reading Tolstoy.
Lambert: speaking of sultry Jewesses, did you hear Ryan Gosling might be dating Natalie Portman? Fucking sad day in McGoslingville.
Bans: No!!!!!!! RACHEL AND RYAN FOREVER!!!! I thought Rachel Getting Married was the footage of their wedding mashed up with The Notebook, no?
Lambert: Unexpectedly charmed by Justin Long!
Bans: I was also unexpectedly charmed by Justin Long. So much so that I bought 4 Macbooks as soon as I got home. Though he’s terrible as the narrative voice of the “He’s Just Not That Into You” philosophy, his storyline is more like “He Doesn’t Even Know How Into You He Is.”
Lambert: Justin Long was so charming that he kind of transcended the material. In fact, so was Ginnifer Goodwin, and their scenes together seemed really adorable even though in retrospect he was written as a tremendous douchebag who changes at the very last second (just as we are warned multiple times is the exception, and not the rule, in dating.)
Bans: I actually found Ginnifer decidedly uncharming, besides for her haircut and wardrobe. She kind of made me feel uncomfortable being a woman.
Lambert: I love Jennifer Aniston. I don’t even care that she always has to play opposite dogs.
Bans: I love Jennifer Aniston too. She has her sanity. Should I cut my hair like Ginnifer’s?
Lambert: don’t cut your hair like Ginny’s. remember that she has a Mormon haircut.
Bans: Drew Barrymore’s lisp gets worse with each rejection. I liked how the script accommodated her impediment by having Kevin Connolly tell her at the end, “Your face doesn’t match your voice. In a good way.” Thank god that girl has a face!
Lambert: I was hoping she’d be like “I hope your dick doesn’t match your height.” Perhaps I ask too much.
Bans: HAHAHA. That movie is called “He’s Just So Way, Way Up Into You.”
Bans: I also liked how the subtle undertone of the Kevin Connolly/ ScarJo plot was “Dood, she’s too hot for you.” That was the only unsexist thing in the movie. Enough with Apaturdian doods thinking they deserve chicks way out of their league.
Lambert: yeah I appreciated that it showed the issue from both sides. A guy stringing a girl along for sex = a woman stringing a dude along for cuddles and pep talks. Kevin Connolly was a chump, just like his character on Entourage. But who wouldn’t get chumped by ScarJ and her incredibly prominent boobs.
Bans: Totes, and poor ScarJo had to pay for her soulless slut ways at the end– what was she in the last montage, a depressed lounge singer on qualudes? Plus the movie wouldn’t even run a clip of her actually singing. That’s got to sting. I am so surprised she could not work at least one Tom Waits cover into the script. She needs a new agent.
Bans: But on that: I am scared for when ScarJo starts aging. She needs to go to college.
Lambert: all of ScarJo’s talk about how she has to show her boobs off while she’s young makes me think she’s worried about aging the way of Brigitte Bardot. Then again Scarlett has Jewish genes, which might fortify her beauty.
Bans: MySpace as the “hook up” website? Hello, what is this, 2001?
Lambert: I think this movie was on the shelf for a while, hence MySpace as the hookup website.
Bans: I am annoyed they didn’t confront emo-caddery at all. Basically all menfolk keep in contact nowadays, the more insidious dating types are the ones who write/txt/wax emo poetic but have no follow-through. I think it’s a recession thing – words are super cheap. That’s why I date T.I. who says I can call whenever I like.
Lambert: ugh yes people who have online/text game but no real life presence are the worst. that’s why I think this movie was interesting, because it did bring up some of those issues. essentially it was a big budget Hollywood mumblecore.
Bans: That was Drew Barrymore’s entire purpose in the movie. She totally got cast as the “new technology dater”, and communicated with men over all these weird mediums like MySpace, txt msg, Blackberry, Email. That is why she had so many gay friends in the movie. She was, like, way more advanced than the other characters. Also, are real estate ad sale companies notoriously gay or did she work for the paper itself?
Lambert: how awk do you think it is between Justin Long and Drew Barrymore on the press tour? how embarrassing is it when you get your cute new younger bf a job and then the relationship implodes and you still have to promote the film?
Bans: I’m sure they slept together during production, if only to ease the tension.
Lambert: The same thing happened with Cam Diaz and Justin Timberlake with Shrek 3. Note to Charlie’s Cougars: if you emasculate your boyfriend by using your Hollywood A-List status to get him a job, he will dump u. Let him book his own Alpha Dogs, k?
Bans: From what I can tell from my glossy reading, Drew seems to be the kind of girl who likes to be friend-exes. Mostly because I imagine if someone dislikes her it’s a refutation of her entire being.
Lambert: none of the character’s motivations made sense, like Bradley Cooper and Ben Affleck wouldn’t be BFF if Brad is really such a dick and Ben’s really such a good guy.
Bans: why did they show the preview for the movie All About Steve in which Sandra Bullock stalks Bradley Cooper after their 1st date until he starts to fall in love with her? mixed msgs much? I am so confused.
Lambert: Bradley Cooper does not have “an ass that makes me want to dry hump.” He has hair that makes me think about getting highlights. And a body that makes me consider pilates.
Bans: Bradley Cooper does have a fantastic body, which actually makes him a little weird for rom-coms. I feel like usually rom coms are reserved for the face actors, action movies for the body actors. Bradley Cooper has an asshole face. Not that it’s not cute, he just looks like an asshole. Ryan Reynolds really paved the way for hot-bodied asshole types in the leading man romcom genre, because Bradley Cooper is ALL over the place now.
Lambert: I loved Jennifer Aniston and Ben Affleck. We all know he has a thing for Jennifers. It was so ridiculous that this movie took place in Baltimore. I loved the Domino Sugar neon sign in their window.
Bans: They had really good chemistry. I wish one of them wouldn’t have been white.
Lambert: I was waiting for actors from The Wire and there were none, but Luis Guzmán played the construction foreman and Kris Kristofferson played Jennifer Aniston’s dad.
Bans: Where were all the people from The Wire? Everyone knows when you film a Baltimore movie you cast Wire actors. Hello, Step Up 1 & Step Up 2 are basically The Wire, with some dancing thrown in.
Lambert: Jennifer Connelly seemed out of place, but what better contrast to Scarlett’s alternate brand of voluptuary beauty? Like, could they be more different? Aside from being beautiful high-paid Hollywood actresses married to B-List actors.
Bans: I was really touched when Jennifer Connelly broke the mirror and grew a spine. I made some tears.
Lambert: I kept comparing it to Adaptation, in that it spends the first two thirds of the movie sort of setting up these rules for itself, and then the last act breaking all of them. But joylessly!
Bans: Basically I left the theater gleefully gurgling, “IZ CAN HAS BOOYFWIEND????” and sucking my thumb.
Lambert: the underlying message of this movie was?
Bans: It’s always a good idea to have a boat, as a back up.
Lauren Bans and Molly Lambert are into you, okay?
You Ain’t It – Sleater Kinney: (mp3)
Why Not Your Baby – Dillard & Clark: (mp3)
Ballad Of Big Nothing – Elliott Smith: (mp3)
I Know I’m Not Wrong – Fleetwood Mac: (mp3)
I Won’t Be Good For Nothin’ – Lefty Frizzell: (mp3)
A House Is Not A Home – Luther Vandross: (mp3)
I’m Not In Love (10cc cover) – Red Red Meat: (mp3)
Nothing – Love: (mp3)
You Are Not Needed Now – Townes Van Zandt: (mp3)
I Think I Thought I’d Nothing Else To Think About – The Chills: (mp3)
PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING
Annie Hall; still the best romantic comedy ever made
Why we are the way that we are.
Frank O’Hara was the man.
This Recording is the awkward space between you on the couch
Filed under: Uncategorized
Killing Themselves To Laugh
by Julia McCloy
A year ago a friend tackled me in a snowball fight. It was all fun and games, but I tore my ACL and pretty much made salsa out of my knee. I spent a couple of months on crutches. Not only did I look pathetic, but I sounded pathetic too. I made these horrible crutch noises any time I entered a room. Like I was constantly hitting the rim of a snare drum gently and out of time. I had just cut my blonde hair very short and that paired with my small frame gave me the appearance of Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. And America loves that kid. No one wanted to see him on crutches dressed like a 31 year old woman. Which is the way I dress since I am both 31 and a woman. And not in fact Macaulay Culkin. I got a lot of attention. I got a lot of questions.
People I didn’t know constantly asked me how I hurt myself. If there were anything positive that came out of my torn- up knee, it was jokes that I could make out of my appearance. So when people asked me how I hurt myself, I would lean my weight onto the tan rubber at the top of my crutches and I would look at them straight in the face, then I’d say “My boyfriend found out I was pregnant… he pushed me down the stairs.” Then I would shrug my shoulders, look down, and crutch slowly away.
I did this to be funny. But I had a specific audience I was playing to. It was my friends whom I would tell the story to later. I chose to make myself look either demented or more pathetic (or both) for a laugh that I wouldn’t even get to have until I was balancing uneasily on a barstool or with a phone pressed hard against my face. My audience is my friends. I want their appreciation and I am more than happy to freak out a few people to get it. Appreciation in the form of laughter is pretty close to love. I want either/or. Appreciation or laughter. I am willing to feel pain for the cause too.
I am not the only one who feels this way either. Gilda Radner famously broke her rib in rehearsals for SNL by running again and again into a closed closet door, because that what her character was supposed to do. Radner then had her rib taped and proceeded to perform in the show.
Lucille Ball was once knocked unconscious during the taping of The Lucy Show. She was wearing roller skates and was instructed to skate under a table as men lifted the table into the air. She didn’t duck low enough and hit the table straight on. With her head. When she came to she told the screenwriters, “It was my fault; I mistimed it. You just keep writing ‘em, I’ll do ‘em, don’t worry. That is what we do here.”
Ball continued with these shenanigans through her life and made a Times critic uncomfortable with her physical antics in the1980s when she returned to TV. The critic claimed (and correctly) that viewers were more likely to “wince than giggle. When the person slipping on a banana peel turns out to be elderly, the threat of a truly serious injury overwhelms the joke.” We like our old people mellow, fully insured, and wearing foam caps that say, “I don’t give a shit. I am retired.” We also like it when we are pretty sure they don’t know that they are wearing this hat. Because they are wearing it during church.
There is a place in a joke where the joke teller puts the audience at risk. It can be at the onset, the end, or the whole damn thing. If humor is just the presence and then the release of anxiety, then the joke teller must gauge how much anxiety your mere existence causes in order to gauge what kind of potential your joke has. Old people scare Americans. Real bad. And not just because we saw a whole lot of them making out with aliens in Cocoon. Although that certainly didn’t help.
But the elderly are not the only people who scare us gentle Americans. Foreigners and men who wrestle women (or play with gender roles) are the hell out of us too. Andy Kaufman proved that again and again. He was happy to put people in both physical and emotional peril to make a joke. In turn he endeared himself to an army of annoying twenty something males who love to ruin parties by loudly explaining to everyone in earshot that “you have to be smart to get Kaufman. If you don’t get him maybe you’re not smart enough, or know about WHAT IS FUNNY. But whatever it is, if you understood humor then you would think he was funny.” I don’t think he is funny and I have received this lecture several times. Eventually I just starting roofie-ing myself at the onset of the lecture at parties with hopes that I would forget the whole lecture ordeal. If I woke up with my underwear on –well, that was just a bonus.
The above sentence never happened. I have never roofied myself and generally I know where my underwear is. But it is a joke I am willing to make. It falls into the spectrum I am willing to joke about. Very little falls outside of this spectrum, including physical stunts. I want people to laugh at me. And I am more than willing to tape up a jammed finger or make a stranger grimace to get it. Before you judge me, I would ask you to ask yourself what is the craziest thing you ever did for a person that you had a crush on (have you ever written bad poetry, snuck into some place you are not supposed to be). Whatever it is probably much more humiliating than I have ever done. It is probably much funnier as well.
Julia McCloy is a contributor to This Recording. She lives in Memphis.
“The Prince of Parties” – Flight of the Conchords (mp3)
“A Kiss Is Not A Contract” – Flight of the Conchords (mp3)
“Au Revoir” – Flight of the Conchords (mp3)
PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING
Champion fruit juice.
Tiny little organisms.
Double-mint gum.
Filed under: Uncategorized
This is the latest entry in our series about writers of the American South. For past entries, look here.
On Tennessee Williams
by Karina Wolf
“High station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.” Tennessee Williams’ remarks at the death of his sister allude to the difficulty of living with mental illness — his relationship with his schizophrenic sibling had been fraught.
Rose was a perpetual source of concern, constraint, and provocation for the family, and while the playwright was in rehearsals for The Glass Menagerie, his parents allowed surgeons to lobotomize her. Psychosurgery has often been coercive at best, and the operation is medieval in its imprecision. The doctor severs the brain’s prefrontal lobe by inserting metal spikes through holes in the skull or through the eye sockets. The surgery left Rose permanently compromised and terminated her hopes for recovery.
Williams called Menagerie a memory play. Perhaps this designation was meant to excuse its elliptical narrative; certainly it alluded to the story’s biographical conflict, about a mother’s hope for her daughter’s return to normalcy and the sibling who acts as mediator. “It is sad and embarrassing and unattractive,” Williams admitted, “that those emotions that stir…are nearly all rooted…in the particular and sometimes peculiar concerns of the artist himself…a web of monstrous complexity…from the spider mouth of his own singular perceptions.”
For the Williams family, madness was an impenetrable cloister. The diplomacy of insanity demands anticipation, misdirection, suppression. A spouse or visitor can never comprehend the hidden hurts that bind, the minutely calibrated behaviors and the disappointed hopes in the family of the disturbed. Outside the tempest, one bears witness. It’s arguable that most writers create memory plays in one way or another; that Williams would name his form reflects how intimately these conflicts branded him.
*
I came late to Tennessee Williams. Maybe this is a function of the American paradox. To paraphrase a Yankee poet: we Americans contradict ourselves, we are a multitude. I hope the purpose of literature isn’t just to reify the importance of our own concerns, but the gentility of the South, its norms and mores and modes of expression seem utterly alien to this Northerner.
I recognized Williams, at last, in the works of contemporary film-makers: in the febrile moods of Wong Kar-Wai (an entire section of Blueberry Nights is lifted straight from Streetcar), in David Lynch’s pathological normality and expressionist experiments. When discussing All About My Mother, in which a character plays Blanche Dubois onscreen, Pedro Almodovar acknowledges a debt to Williams but insists that his character performs scenes from Streetcar as preparation to negotiate her own conflicts.
We can all learn from his conceit. The Spanish director dedicates his film to “women who act.” The idea, of course, is that “woman” and “performer” are exchangeable terms – and therefore the film is dedicated to more than biologically-mandated actors. Certainly, to be gay when Tennessee Williams was alive was to perform. And to be insane in the South of Tennessee Williams is a highwire act.
Despite the good breeding and the heavy drawl that earned him the handle “Tennessee,” Williams is not the most Southern of writers. He aspired to Southernness, and he came from a family with a society name (Lanier), but he was also gay, which left him at odds with the culture beyond his gothic family. (When queried about the provenance of her son’s toxic female characters, Williams mother regularly issued the disclaimer: “I have no idea where he comes up with them.”)
*
When you think of Tennessee Williams, what do you think of first? Marlon Brando’s tortured screams and the comfort from the woman he loves, when he shoves his brutish head against her belly. It’s hard to imagine a character of more inchoate passion than Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski.
You have to understand Williams’ cultural genealogy. He is the descendant of Artaud, Brecht and Cocteau. He was aiming for a theater of gesture; after all, when it works, writing is more of a sculptural than a logical art. “I think of writing as something more organic than words, something closer to being and action,” he wrote. Suddenly, Last Summer has nothing in common with contemporaneous dramas by Miller or Osborne – its roots are in European Expressionism and the Gothic romance of the Brontës. Williams’ emotional landscapes are elemental and volatile and poisonous. The Southern artifice is just a fractal outgrowth of the characters’ pathologies.
Williams’ success also coincided with the development of method acting, itself an exponent of rawness, not merely of naturalism. I find I can’t really talk about Williams without talking about film because that is how I was introduced to him – through the framings of Elia Kazan and Joseph Mankiewicz – and how I finally understood him – through his filmic imitators.
Even so, it took me a long time to understand the appeal of the plays. At a young age I could discern how Marlon Brando’s performance differed from the mannered banter of other actors. But he was repellent – it’s only later that you can see he’s appealing, how his coarseness is an antidote to the delusions of his wife and her sister.
In Suddenly, Last Summer I found my skeleton key. There are more famous and more revived works, but Suddenly, to me, is the yardstick by which all others can be measured. The play contains Williams’ archetypal characters: the fragile woman-girl “like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf”; the arachnid mother; the depressive young man who must mediate an arena of monsters.
In the drama, brilliant and sensitive Dr. Cukrowicz is charged with eliciting funds from wealthy socialite Mrs. Venable in order to build a new psychosurgical hospital. The price of the new building is clear: Dr. Cukrowicz must perform a lobotomy on Mrs. Venable’s niece, who has been unmanageable since the death of Mrs. Venable’s son. Kathy, the niece, was witness to Sebastian’s violent and mysterious demise while the two were on vacation in Spain.
Before meeting the patient, Dr. Cukrowicz presses Mrs. Venable to specify her niece’s illness. The diagnosis is imprecise, but the affliction is universal: “Memory. She lacerates herself with memory.”
There’s that word again. Caught in memory, the self becomes two mirrors facing one another – an endless feedback loop in which the singular ego, or identity, gets lost. You start searching for yourself. As Kathy does, you start writing your diary in the third person.
A bizarrely un-Southern triad of players enact the filmic version of Suddenly, Last Summer. Katharine Hepburn is the widow Venable, whose name seems to be a conflation of veniality and veneration. Her comportment is loathsome to her niece and subservient to her beloved son. Hepburn struts around in the headgear and outfits of an older version of her screwball character from Bringing Up Baby, but here the gaffes reveal deadly intentions.
Elizabeth Taylor has always been decadent; the instability we associate with her compensates for any thinness in performance. Her beauty is dated but manifest. She was made for perfume commercials or the affectless formalism of Last Year at Marienbad; she’s perfect for the film, where the framing creates the drama as much as anything she says. Her power is not only her illness but in her knowledge. There’s something about Sebastian that Mrs. Venable wants to contain.
Montgomery Clift’s Dr. Cukrowicz has a welcome detachment. In essence, he’s allowed entry to the family secrets as he tries to determine whether to agree to perform the lobotomy. As he defers his decision, the surgeon develops an odd intimacy with his patient. He lights her cigarettes like a lover, allows her to wear high heels and Paris-bought fashions.
Clift, like Brando, was an actor of his moment. He embodied a new technique and carried a vulnerable, pansexual mien – a type of male so repellant to John Wayne that the star refused to socialize with Clift when they shot a film together. Clift was tortured by the sensitivities that can go hand in hand with addiction. He was further handicapped by changes to his appearance after a gruesome car accident. Marilyn Monroe once said of Clift that he was the “only person I know who’s in worse shape than I am.” Because the crew indulged his poor behavior, Hepburn reportedly spat in the face of the director at the end of filming.
It’s spot on casting, though, for a character who must serve as a Williams stand-in. As the ethical surgeon, he dithers, asking Mrs. Venable, “I can’t guarantee that a lobotomy would stop her—babbling!!!” To which the aunt responds, “That may be, maybe not, but after the operation who would believe her, Doctor?”
Mental illness, particularly hysteria, has often been the affliction of women. Straight men may offer protection, comfort, diagnosis or salvation; but illness is a feminine domain. The pseudo-diagnosis of hysteria is similar to that vague term with which Kathy is classified, “dementia precox.” Even the doctor knows that this is a blanket categorization, empowering the doctor and belittling the diseased.
In many of Williams’ plays, the arrival of a man offers hope and redemption – all thwarted by the hysterical behavior of the patient. There’s the sense that madness is consequent to a family imbalance that has no outlet. At best, the patient can achieve an awareness of the illness as it damages host and those around her. Think about Britney Spears’ helpless dissociation as she markets her bi-polarity versus the adult recognition of Sinead O’Connor, who talks with self-awareness about her disease, even as she periodically erupts into mad behaviors.
All this is to say: madness is viral. The lives of those surrounding the afflicted are irradiated by pathology. As in Grey Gardens, the illnesses must be symbiotic or the unit fails.
*
Something has failed in Williams’ Gothic spook sonata – a character has died and another must be silenced. So what is the need on the part of Mrs. Venable to hide from the strange facts about Sebastian? She can hardly speak the truth about him: his mother, and then his cousin, act as nurse/muse/procurer for the gay poet. As Kathy rightly says: “Sebastian wasn’t a man, he was a vocation.”
Like a good actor, Williams finds himself in his characters. Tennessee was prone to depression and limited by endless sensitivities. Certainly, his suffering must’ve inspired the troubled Doctor as well as the relationship between Kathy and Sebastian, which trespasses into Wuthering Heights’ incestuous taboos.
Williams’ first erotic experiences were closely linked to his sister: his concern for Rose transferred to the student pianist who arrived at the house regularly to practice with his sister. Williams writes: “For the first time, prematurely, I was aware of skin as an attraction. A thing that might be desirable to touch. This awareness entered my mind, my senses, like the sudden streak of flame that follows a comet. And my undoing… was now completed.”
A shocking ambivalence of thought and sensation tortured him, “Yes, Tom, you’re a monster!” he told himself. “But that’s how it is and there’s nothing to be done about it. And so continued to feast my eyes on his beauty.”
In Suddenly, Last Summer the self-loathing and the compulsion are both present. As much as Tennessee had to battle with his domineering mother and fragile sister, he himself was also damaged.
Mrs. Venable’s speech about Sebastian suggests something of Tennessee’s delicacy:
A poet’s vocation is something that rests on something as thin and fine as the web of a spider, Doctor. That’s all that holds him over!—out of destruction….Few, very few are able to do it alone! Great help is needed!
And then there are Williams’ letters. When his good friend Carson McCullers considered visiting him in Rome, Tennessee warned her: “You must remember all the bad things about me, my sensuality and license and neurotic moodiness at times – all the irregularities of my life and nature – I cannot put all those things into a letter! – and then ask yourself if you could really endure a close association or would I perhaps add to your worries and your emotional strains.”
Who is the greater monster in Suddenly, Last Summer? Mrs. Venable, who wishes to suppress the truth, or her son, who uses people to perverse ends? Williams imbues a toxicity to all. Kathy is fragile, but the entire family is mad. Ultimately, the doctor elicits the story of Sebastian’s behavior and violent death with a serum – as if the truth will solve the family’s pathology.
Truth, in fact, is Williams’ second subject. In Streetcar, Blanche Dubois admits: “I don’t want realism. I want magic. I don’t tell the truth. I tell it as it ought to be….A line can be straight or a road. But the heart of a human being?” And here I find the greatness of Williams: truth and lies coexist – as do love, hatred, and indifference. Sane or mad, the human heart is troubled because it embraces contraries.
Karina Wolf is the senior contributor to This Recording. She lives in Manhattan, and she tumbles here.
“Siren Song” – Bat for Lashes (mp3)
“Daniel” – Bat for Lashes (mp3)
“Moon and Moon” – Bat for Lashes (mp3)
“Peace of Mind” – Bat for Lashes (mp3)
PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING
Molly Young enters the box.
Sarah just wasn’t that into this movie.
