Something nice happened
to me; since then, I have been
looking for words
to talk about a
thing too new for much talk, but
so sweet that I can't
not want to tell it.
It's fall in Prague, and the streets
are dark and wet. I
kick through the fallen
leaves when I walk to the bus,
and feel like singing.
So, family and friends, something big is happening here, and it's this: my monkey is moving to his father's house in California.
When Monkey's father and I split up, he was a baby -- only 2 years old. My ex moved out of the house, but he was always nearby, and from that time until now has had an active, and extremely consistent role in our lives, motivated completely by his very real, and very acted upon love for his son. I often crack wise, and say that if I were going to have an estranged husband, I totally picked the best one on earth, because he has always been there for both of us, no matter what pain we caused each other when we divorced. He's a good man, and I've got nothing bad to say about him.
My parents were divorced when I was 5 or 6 years old. My brother and sister and I grew up with our mother, and spent weekends and summers with my dad. I can't say it was always smooth sailing. We were well-loved; my mother worked hard to take care of us, and we spent a lot of fun time with my dad, but when I was a teenager, I found that that arrangement left me feeling like my relationship with my father lacked any real depth. Things are different for the better now, but in those days, there were battles and recriminations that emerged directly from the crushing sense of disappointment I felt in the difference between what I wanted and imagined in my archetypal vision of "A Father", and the man who actually is my father.
I love my father very, very much, but I think things were difficult for us because our circumstances never really gave him a chance to be my father, or me a chance to be his daughter. Instead of having a relationship that was built on weathering the storms of growing up together, I think we both sealed up our hearts in some ways, and I don't mean to speak for him here, but I think it's taken a long time for us to just accept each other. I don't want that to happen to my son. His father deserves every opportunity to be his father, and my son needs what his father has for him.
Since we made the decision to split up, it's always been a possibility that Monkey would, one day, go to live with his father. That time has come, in part, I think, because we have spent this past year so far away. Truthfully, I can't imagine what it's already been like for my ex not to have had his son with him every day of his life, because right now, I feel like I'm having a limb amputated. That's why, if his father wants him to live with him now, I feel like any argument I could make to keep my baby with me would only be selfish and impossible to rationalize; none of which makes it easier for me to imagine what my poor, sad life will be without my monkey.
When he and I moved here to Prague, he was nervous about what was, for him, a leap into the unknown. I told him that where ever he and I were together, we would be home. I told him not to worry, that all would be well. At the time, I thought I was comforting him by saying that, but now, thinking about how far away my sweet baby will be from me, I know I was comforting myself, too.
The new Nine Inch Nails record was officially released today, but I bought a copy at Coachella on Sunday. Now I can admit to having had it for a month, and having listened to it aproximately 7231 times since then. Yesterday I posted a look back at one of my personal favorite CD's of all time on blogcritics.org, 1994's The Downward Spiral, and today have posted up my review of the new one, With Teeth, which as my review makes abundantly clear, I love very much. My thoughts on The Downward Spiral can be found here, and my review of With Teeth is here.
People, it's a big day for me, because, as some of you know, my only other previous public writing has been sports coverage. It's always easy to write, because at the end of the day, if you screw it up somehow, it's only a bike race. Bike races are comforting, because you get to see this glorious human performance, and at the end of the day, someone wins, so you know who was good and who wasn't. Art isn't easy, because for every person who loves and thrills to one work, there are more who can't really see it, or hate its guts. Bike races don't need audiences to be what they are, though. Art does. When you write insensitively or badly about works of art, you create a bad place for them in the world, and that's truer for popular art forms more than any other. Music journalism, in particular, is so revoltingly dominated by hacks with no idea what makes art good that I have always said I would never dirty my hands with it; but now I have. I hope it's not retarded.
I've said before on this blog that when I love works of art, it's with whole-hearted gratitiude to them that made it for showing me the things I most needed to see. Works of art that pull me in a way not unlike the way the moon pulls the tide have always confronted me with a moment when hearing becomes response, and response becomes love in the impossible space between the voice of an other and my surrender to it, when the great gulf of that difference is transformed into shimmering echoes and a correspondence that makes me buzz with desire and imagination. T. S. Eliot once said that response to a work of art can only truly come after having surrendered oneself completely to it, and recoving a self that has been changed by it. I think that's true, and if it is, then I am qualified to write these two reviews.
Finally, here's a picture that totally captures my glee immediately following the immense pleasure of being squeezed senseless by 30,000 people while Trent Reznor rocked Coachella. Just to put the entire notion of hip, ironic detachment to bed for fucking ever, not that there's even a scrap of it left on this website.
In other news (and people, get used to it, because it's all about Nine Inch Nails for the time being), Trent Reznor sums up what made The Fragile such difficult listening: "I can see now, clearly I was on a slippery slope headed to disaster. I couldn’t think and I was terrified. I couldn’t think clearly enough to write lyrics, really, and I didn’t have great lyrical concepts, but I could improvise in the studio indefinitely, and that record grew into this big blob of what it is, because that’s what I could do at that time - that’s the best thing I could do. I listen to it now...and I feel proud of that record, but it feels really weird to me, because it’s like, I know I’m about to walk off a cliff after I finish that record, and I can now hear insights."
I am so fucking glad he's feeling better. When that record came out, I listened to it a few times, and then had to put it away. I heard all of his usual genius there, but in a lot of ways, it was a much scarier and more shattering record even than his full metal paean to self-loathing and destruction, The Downward Spiral. The Downward Spiral was a hermetically sealed and flawless masterpiece; the emotion was extreme, but the form was 100% control. The Fragile felt courageous to me, in that it felt like less of a hard, protective casing, but there was a losing battle afoot, I could hear it, and I hated to hear that the trajectory was still downward. I wanted him to be well, and I was worried that he'd never pull it out, so that record gave me a sort of a sick feeling. I worry, people! Because, you know, I don't have enough to worry about with my own business.
I'm feeling totally gay about how stupid with excitement I am to hear the new record, and how ridiculously, mind-bogglingly thrilled I am to see his show at the end of May. It's totally epileptic and freakish, as predicted. I find it really embarrassing, because like nearly all of my hugest favorites, there's something too big and too (melo)dramatic about Trent Reznor and his bag of tricks. Here's the thing, though: listening to Nine Inch Nails is like reading Wuthering Heights: if you keep a distance from it and don't really give it your heart, it looks like a silly gothic romance - melodramatic and over the top; but, if you really picture the scene, and imagine Heathcliff frothing at the mouth over Katherine's dead body, and then let the emotional violence, self-hatred, and resulting evil sadistic behavior really sink in, and then add in the fact that everything that's so ugly and frightening in it is born out of the disappointment of true, bone-deep love, then it's a pretty fucking brilliant book. That's how Trent Reznor is: a bit over the top and loaded with drama, but at heart, full of the best thing there is, and my friends, even if it makes me the biggest gaywad on earth, I'll never deny that I FUCKING LOVE THAT ABOUT HIM beyond all sense and reason, and with the white hot passion of 1000 burning suns.
Albert's Camus' Notebooks, 1935-1951 is one of my favorite books, and in keeping with my most recent topic, is not only one of my favorite narratives, but definitely my favorite kind of narrative - a sort of accidental one. Page after page of disconnected little thoughts, observations, bits and little seeds of future essays and novels, political ruminations - just all these little pieces and parts - Camus' notebooks let you see something no other kind of more intentional narrative ever could, and what you see is a portrait of a deeply moral, humane, and gloriously soulful human being.
Camus wrote incredibly beautiful essays, too, but I've never really loved his novels, which feel too much like vehicles for intention; his characters too like ideas masquerading as people. The combination of his notebooks and novels reminds me of Walter Benjamin's notion that "truth is an intentionless state of being."
That said, I love Albert Camus, and not least for this quote:
You and me both, Albert.
I've been thinking about the whole concept of love letters lately, prompted by my recent paean to the special genius of Trent Reznor, no doubt. Before we go on, though, I want to point out that I chose an especially ludicrous picture of Mr. Reznor and his shiny rubber gloves for that last link, because even though it is possible to locate a photograph of him looking fairly average - or even totally delicious, give or take an ill-considered hairstyle - I wanted make sure to get some irony in here. That's right, bitches, I'm already laughing, so SUCK IT.
Anyway, I wanted to point out that there's an interesting situation where love letters are concerned, and this is what it is: on the one hand, one's love, the love in one's heart, feels real, and worth expressing, even if it's just that you love the bejesus out of some rock star in leather shorts whom you've never met. On the other hand, I wanted to point out that when you actually DO express something of that nature, it sounds like you're totally freaking lame, especially if you're over 30 years old, and the subject of said love is (arguably) a sexy rock star who you don't at all know, and who it's quite possible you'd feel like karate-chopping into oblivion ten seconds after saying "hey, nice to meet you."
To step deeper into the proverbial shit on this topic: one time I was reading this article about Viggo Mortensen, whom you may know as the sexy actor who brought my first literary crush ever to life when he played Aragorn son of Arathorn to fantasical perfection, but who is also a very respectable writer and visual artist. (See? Just typing that sentence was somewhat mortifying.) In the article, Viggo the Magnificent said something I really liked about writing love poems, and it was this: "I've done it before. I don't think I'll do it again. It scares people. They think you're insane." Now, no doubt Mr. Mortensen was talking about writing love poems for actual loves - you know, people with whom one is engaged in an intimate relationship - and I'm talking about something else, and that's a love of stangers and their work that can only be requited by the presentation and reception of more work, but here's what I wonder: in both scenarios, why do people think love letters are insane?
All this reminds me of another quote, one from my personal favorite postmodern literary critic J. Hillis Miller, who wrote the best article I have ever read on the topic of Gerard Hopkins, and for which, I will always love him. In his book On Literature Miller compared the experience of reading to that of a romance: "The relation between reader and story read is like a love affair. In both cases, it is a matter of giving yourself without reservation to another." Even more beautifully put, in my opinion, is his notion of the relation between the critic and the work he studies from his essay Literature and Religion: "The proper model for the relation of the critic to the work he studies is not that of scientist to physical objects but that of one man to another in charity. I may love another person and know him as only love can know without in the least abnegating my own beliefs. Love wants the other person as he is, in all his recalcitrant particularity. As St. Augustine puts it, the lover says to the loved one, 'Volo ut sis': 'I wish you to be.' " Let me just say this about that: nice shootin', J. Hillis.
Now, I often wish that this blog of mine were funnier and more ironic, but most especially when I do something like telling the world how much I love Trent Reznor. The truth is, though, that as easy as it is to laugh at me (and for me to laugh at myself), and as easy as it is to laugh at Pennsylvania's Prince of Darkness, for carrying on the way he does, I totally respect his absolute lack of irony, and although I am capable of cracking wise and heckling, and have a totally clear view of the truly massive amount of heckle-able material involved, it's not the way my secret self feels about that work. The truth is, I love it.
When I love works of art and artists, it's with earnestness and gratitude to them for finding ways to show me things I needed to see, and I'm totally not kidding, even if said artists are curtain-haired, drum machine-having goth angels covered in cornstarch, and their work consists primarily of overwrought expressions of totally straight-faced angst, about which they are totally not kidding. It would take a lot longer than I want to spend right now to enumerate the many regards in which I think Trent Reznor's work, as hysterical as it often is, is genuinely worthy of much more intelligent consideration than it ever receives, but at the very least, I LOVE the way that guy fully means it.
Which reminds me of something else, and that's the way people always say "Oh yeah, I liked the OLD U2 - you know, the "Live at Red Rocks" U2 - but now they suck. You know why people liked the old U2? I'll tell you why: there wasn't an ironic bone in their bodies back then.
Back in the proverbial day, Bono was ripping up the Irish flag to achieve the "white flag of surrender," and people ate that shit up because he was 100% in earnest, and that ruled. Youthful U2 was unambiguously lovable, but then the heckling began, because it's always easy to laugh at earnestness. After that, Bono found it necessary to start wearing the goggles and dressing up in the devil costume to visit the Vatican, and it became necessary to sort through layers of irony to realize that his heart was right where it had always been. Then, with tiresome predictability, people started shouting "SELL-OUT", and that's because, for the most part, people don't have much attention span.
Personally, I think the U2 that drips irony is every bit as brilliant as the U2 of earnest boys I fell in love with when I was 13, and that's because the defense mechanisms of that manufactured distance are an even more interesting territory than Bono's feeling that the strife should end in Ireland, but here's why: he's always been beautiful and prayerful, and he's always been savagely serious even in gold lame and horns. All of his songs have always been in absolute earnest, and they're all about love, one way or another. People, I LOVE that about him, and I will never stop.
My point, I guess, is this: irony is totally over-rated, but you know what? Love isn't.
I'm not going to beat around the bush on this one, kids. I'm just going to tell you outright that Nine Inch Nails auteur Trent Reznor has a permanent place in this girl's heart.
There was a time, some 10 years ago, when I was seriously on pins and needles as to what might next emerge from Reznor's New Orleans funeral home batcave; a time when I was filled with the kind of worry and apprehension that he would falter that accompanies an emotional investment in an artist's output which could be considered a little obsessive. (Go ahead, Matt. Laugh it up.) Could Reznor match the genius of The Downward Spiral in future work? I was HANGING on the answer to that question, as if all my hopes for the transcendency of mankind hinged on it. People, I was a big fan of Nine Inch Nails.
At the time, I was up to my neck in politicized postmodern and feminist aesthetic theories, and also, experiencing a full-on existential crisis (a story for another day). Suffice it to say that The Downward Spiral was my #1 soundtrack for awhile, and Trent Reznor was my favorite kinky, rubberized angel. I was riveted by the astounding effectiveness of his feral animal schtick, and the way his work was obssessed with objectivity and control, all the while distancing his squeamish narrative "i" from the archetypal powers of his Ultimate Object (all you out there who've ever read any postmodern feminist theory will know the object of which I speak). I was rapt at the way he framed his broken-hearted wretchedness and masochistic sexual stylings in so much raw competence and aggression as to manufacture a positively riveting relationship between himself and his audience, because as much as his literal and figurative sense rejected The Object and it's Powers, he was so clearly and impressively the master of them that his performances were a veritable exercize in penetration. I positively adored the way that heady mixture of over-intended, pure, dominating egotism, and totally Julia Kristeva Powers of Horror-worthy abjection and shame fueled Reznor's stage persona, producing slavish armies of sweaty little dominatrixes and boys in fishnets and eyeliner, feeling all naughty and conflicted, except in their desire to make sweet love to their cornstarch-coated rock and roll fetish doll; a reaction which rightfully intensified Reznor's reasons for nuclear weapons grade angst. Good shit, people.
That last paragraph sounded good (and hilarious) to me while I was writing it, give or take a run-on sentence or two, but it throws into laughable relief my disingenuous desire to make it seem as if all my reasons for obsession with the Prince of Darkness were aesthetically scientific and held at a safe intellectual distance. In fact, I was powerless against his pale, waxen beauty in photographs, and undone by his soft-spoken intelligence in interviews. I had nothing but admiration for his complete mastery of the pregnant heavy metal pause, and the way he geekily tinkered away on works of metal madness that featured 75 separate guitar parts on one song, very likely in a darkened basement with his computer. Most importantly, I enviously loved his ability to express his full-throttle rage at volumes that actually made it seem hotter in the venue, and the way he seriously looked like if he didn't bring it down a couple notches, someone was going to put an eye out. Personally, I've never felt free to break that kind of shit out, but god knows I'd like to. I saw the Nine Inch Nails show a few times back then, and all I'm saying is that I loved the way the molten intensity of the sheer volume seemed to liquify my very bones while I breathed in the violence and raged vicariously through Trent Reznor. Also, sweet jesus, was he ever 5 foot 6 inches of pure dirty. Have I mentioned how much I loved that guy?
Since then, I have to admit that I've found it hard to follow along with Mr. Reznor in that level of continued total hysteria. It seems to me that one cannot rage full-on for all of one's adult life on the same tired old topics. When his last full-length effort seemed to have moments of being disappointingly free of interesting process(*), and his self-presentation started including big muscles and an orangey sort of tan, I moved on to some other angst-peddlers that seemed more in keeping with the tone of my changing times (cough, RADIOHEAD, cough). Still, the other day, when I purchased a ticket to see Keanu Reeves rock some very fetching trousers in Constantine, I was intrigued to be handed, along with my ticket, a glossy little card with the telltale letters "NIN" on it, with a record release date on the other side, and my dormant affection for The Rez flared up enough for me to write this blog post.
Apparently, it's called With Teeth, and oh man, how I hope it's a good one. I must say, though, that Reznor's recent assessment of his latest line-up's preparations to hit the road that ends with the statement "We are preparing to destroy you," doesn't really do much to buoy my hopes for some reason. Nevertheless, hope springs eternal, and residual admiration dictates that he will have however long it takes of my undivided attention to give this latest effort its proverbial day in court.
I'm a little nervous, but I'm game. Bring on the cornstarch.
(*That needed some qualification. It's below, in the comments.)
My latest project is emptying out every single nook and cranny of my office. I have a lot of getting-rid-of to do around here. As can often be the case in the midst of such a project, I found something good while I was at it. There was a time in our young lives when my brother left our home in Massachusetts to spend some time living with my father and his wife in Northern California. While he was there, he sent the following letter to my sister and me:
Lately, I've been experiencing something of a crush. Yes, it's true, and just as epileptic, yet anemically pursued as usual.
Last week, the object and I went out together to study a few times. He'd recently suffered a major defeat at the hands of our teaching practice, and I was overcome with the desire to be solicitous in his moment of need. I invited him to join me at my favorite study haunt here in Prague (yes, I have a haunt in Prague), and offered to lend a helpful ear to his process.
We spent a lovely evening together, working on his plan, talking about films and music, negotiating agreements and differences, smiling and laughing, listening with raised eyebrows: All the things you do when you're making a new friend, and finding correspondences with a person you want to like. It's always a great pleasure for me to be of service, and the fact that he is awfully sweet, has a delightful accent, and a brightly attentive way of listening and responding makes it an even greater pleasure.
All the while that I'm sitting there with him, it keeps coming back to me that I'm in Prague, in a smoky cafe, drinking coffee and talking to a lovely creature who wore black robes when he studied at Cambridge University. He's telling me his thoughts and ideas with bright eyes and real sweetness, and I'm feeling lucky and satisfied; loving the opportunity to savor a moment like that.
On the other hand, I'm suffering that epilepsy of desire: admiring him in all of his rather glorious concrete reality, and wanting to stroke and smooth him. He's tall, narrow and a bit pale, with black hair, and he curls up his little finger when he writes. He's got straight, black eyebrows over greenish eyes, holds his cigarette in long, graceful fingers, and rests sharp elbows on the table with beautiful angularity all his own. Every detail of his presence makes explicit the concrete poetry of joints and limbs - that sense of rare and individual beauty that isn't flawless, but is all the dearer for it. Yesterday, he told me that 400 crowns per night to stay on in his current apartment after the course was "a bit dear, really," and it's in that sense that I mean it - something just a bit more than you could comfortably give up.
In one sense, I'm just grateful to be there, drinking coffee and enjoying the perfection of it all; and in another, I'm kind of wanting to consume him, and suffering a bit of disappointment because, seriously, that would be impossible.
Yet another sublime moment from Prague.
My friends, the rockstar librarian over at Sheets & Blankets has given me an idea. Unfortunately, since there is no one to whom I am authorized to write actual love letters, I've decided to institute a new feature on my blog called Love Letters to People I Don't Know. Rest assured that often, while I'm writing them, I will be sighing deeply, as tears splash melodramatically and copiously on my keyboard.
Gregory Peck will be first. He died last year, but he lives on in my heart as, seriously people, the ultimate man. Whenever I pass his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on my way back from the Farmer's Market on Sunday mornings, I always leave flowers; and whenever I see a movie at Grauman's Chinese, I put my hands and feet into his hand and foot prints on the sidewalk. I love Gregory Peck, my friends. He was bewilderingly handsome, and by all accounts, virtuous and kind. Even in his later, white hair, enormous glasses, and bushy black eyebrows days, sometimes I'd run across him hawking KCET on my TV box or something, and close my eyes and just listen to his voice. Dreamy. They just don't make 'em like that anymore. So on that note:
Dear Mr. Peck,
I was only a girl when I saw you in To Kill A Mockingbird with your kind, handsome face, gentle hands and that beautiful summer linen suit. After that, I imagined what it would be like if you were my father. I grew up in my mother's house, but the way you played Atticus Finch made me wish for a father I could lean on: steady, honorable, and tall enough to lift me high above any troubles that might pull me down in the woods. That's not to say that I don't love my own father very much, but he's always been far away, and he's never really been available to watch over me or defend my honor. Later, it struck me that you'd have made a supremely comforting doctor, too. I imagined that as I suffered in the throes of some terrible sickness, you could put one of your enormous brown hands on my knee and tell me in your sonorous voice that everything would be alright, and there's no way that everything could ever make a liar of you. If you had become a priest, as I once read that, as a young man, you wanted to do, I would have embraced the Roman Church on the strength of your presence there alone, and should I have confessed tearful sins to you, I would have prayed my rosary with fervent passion, and believed completely in your absolution.
Later, when Roman Holiday became part of my personal mythology, I experienced my first blinding crush on a movie star with epileptic intensity. If I had been Princess Anne, and you had kissed me on the banks of the Fiume Tevere after we swam to shore from a barge lit for dancing to escape the secret service of my fictional country, I know I could never have returned to the palace. Princess Anne is definitely a better woman than I am. Oh, how cheerfully I would have forsaken all of my crunching crinolines, satin slippers and duty to my country to die the poor wife of an American newspaper man! I can remember watching as a little girl, my lips parted with rapt and breathless expectation, the scene in which your Joe Bradley says his good-byes to Audrey Hepburn's Princess, and crushes her birdlike frame against his broad chest. My stomach was actually churning with the physical sensation of envy, but I knew my love for you was the kind of sensation that would keep me on the straight and narrow in the years to follow, and would always make me dream of something finer. I still watch Roman Holiday once a month. A girl needs to be reminded.
I've never quite been able to believe that I deserve, or could bear the love of a man like you: so tall, handsome and good. It seems like such a thing would be too rich for a girl like me, and I would feel greedy if it were all mine. When I imagine what it would be like to be looked upon with affection by a man with your soft, brown eyes, it's with girlish purity of heart, all trembling chasteness and downcast eyes. I would want to be sure there was a pink satin ribbon in my hair, and that my nails were perfectly modest.
Love,
Jane
