IN SNOB CASTLE

recent books, movies, music I have experienced

IN SNOB CASTLE

Taking on The Free World by Louis Menand was for me, an ambitious undertaking as I can’t read for shit these days. I have so many books I’ve foolishly made commitments to review, and most days I’ve read fifteen or twenty pages of those volumes and I’ve felt my soul leak out of every orifice to escape the notion of finishing reading them. Reading is not fun in these cases. It’s work.

For me this book by Menand is huge and it was insane to think about completing in the middle of this reading drought. Put simply it is a relatively dense but oddly easy-to-read history of culture and ideas during the Cold War, which Menand delineates as between 1945 and around 1968 or so, as the Viet Nam War goes bad. In those decades so much happens in the life of the mind. Societies after Word War Two lift themselves out of economic collapse and insecurity, and a vast political and philosophical competition with the Soviet Union commences. Menand’s central thesis is that the war for freedom was not specifically fought with weaponry (although wars did happen) but more significantly with ideas and cultural influence. Arts and entertainment, criticism and advertising, popular music and media all played a role in this fight, this message that freedom mattered. People argued over books, movies, and music in a way they just don’t quite seem to these days—or if they do these days, the sense of the stakes have become so much more muddled, perhaps because there is no such battlefield now in a way. The conditions of modern life have warped and morphed into something that it is difficult to imagine a historian being able to lay a hand on, much less wrap their arms around. Menand does it with the midcentury life of the mind in a way I’d never seen it written about before (granted, the last serious history reading I’d done was in college regarding the 1930s and the 1940s, and also my long fascination with the history of espionage and intelligence agencies that ended with my personal lifeboat as a reader being shredded on the rocks of middle age). The Cold War has shaped our history in ways we maybe can’t see just now but it is there.

Warhol, the Beatles, advertising, Italian product design, the French New Wave, Sartre, William Faulkner, anti-censorship, John Cage, the “Anthology Wars,” James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, the Beats, the CIA’s covert funding of student movements—these are just some of the few subjects taken up by Menand. It is truly like a novel with a hundred characters, and you get a very clear, very witty view of all the personalities that influenced the course of Western culture. At times the visuals are too close; I didn’t have as much interest in the social lives of Abstract Expressionist painters and the gallery owners that pushed them which Menand takes great pains to outline. At other times you feel like Menand might be flitting from topic to topic in a fashion that is a little too diaphanous, a little too bubbly. But this is an excellent panorama from which to start if you want to go deeper into these areas, each of which could have their own smaller panoramas painted within. It’s one of those painfully well-researched books with a hefty index and notes section that I didn’t even really look into, I couldn’t.

A major figure in Western culture during these years who received not much mention at all was Marilyn Monroe. I have not yet read Joyce Carol Oates’ novel Blonde which was the source of the Netflix movie that I did watch. I read Gabriel Hart’s essay on the novel a few weeks ago and along with seeing the movie, I felt like that gave me a good glimpse for now.

I haven’t kept detailed notes on the outcry over the movie. Except to say that it seemed like a Rorschach ink blot where certain people saw what they wanted to see, sometimes according to their own political axes that were being ground in 2022. I know what I saw, which was an eerie, phantasmagorical, sad, shocking, and well-made movie that posed interesting problems for viewers, problems it takes effort to try to resolve. For some viewers, these problems were too much. One problem which bears discussion (and having not read the novel I can’t really speak with authority) was the way that the movie seemed to position itself as “fiction about real historical figures.” The distance between such a conceptually tenuous, rarefied creature, and a typical Hollywood “biopic” as we’ve seen numerous times over the years, was a complicated and long squiggly line the average movie viewer couldn’t follow, at the risk of sounding elitist. I think that viewers want to see beleaguered celebrities overcoming adversity, not swept into a deadly undertow by cruel historical forces. It was a downer. I also quite frankly think that many viewers of a certain persuasion were made uncomfortable by how much of the movie Marilyn/Norma Jean was topless. The male gaze was activated in complicated ways in Blonde, and the viewer was supposed to be made to feel implicated in the on-screen “torture” of Marilyn Monroe. Many viewers bucked at this. Joyce Carol Oates herself has relayed that some of her friends are afraid to see the movie. It’s a horrifying movie at times. It’s also a partial interpretation of a life, and not “the” life. The iconic height of Marilyn Monroe gathers difficult, obsessive aeries of contemplation around its subject, an intoxicating, unpleasant mist that many people don’t want to breathe. It is with some guilt that I admit that I haven’t seen really any of Monroe’s movies besides The Asphalt Jungle where she played a snoozing piece of arm candy. Maybe this was part of the complicity and guilt of watching the Netflix movie: “you know nothing about the star because you’ve never really seen any of her movies!” You just know the stories, the legend. There’s a barrier up, and once you see The Misfits or Some Like It Hot (my movie experience is full of gaps) you will break through that barrier.

I just filled in one of the gaps by watching Last Year at Marienbad finally. Director Alain Resnais worked together with novelist and screenwriter and theoretician Alain Robbe-Grillet to make what at the time the early 1960s was probably somewhat groundbreaking: a feverish puzzle of a movie in which you are misled through editing, narration, costume changes, labyrinthine location shoots, and flat performances into not knowing what the fuck is going on and specifically, what time it is. What happened in a flashback, what is the present, what is imaginary, what is real. It’s somewhat clear that Buñuel, Kubrick, and Lynch drew something from this well to make some of their pictures. It’s worth seeing to get a grip on how movies are made, how to bend narrative straight lines, what opacities can be pulled off by filmmakers, what an art film is. It’s an important movie. I don’t think I’ll ever watch it again as it wasn’t a load of fun.

Much more diverting as an artistic experience, much more rewarding, has been my discovery of a hitherto unknown (to me), parallel dimension of music, specifically the music of Cucina Povera. Cucina Povera, which in Italian means “poor cooking,” or “making do with few ingredients,” is the title chosen by the Finnish musician Maria Rossi for her musical projects which incorporate electronics and her voice. Rossi is apparently from Finland, just on the border with Russia, and has been based in Glasgow, Scotland and now London. She makes music in collaboration with other artists, and the combinations are truly haunting, as with her work with Ben Vince on the record “There I See Everything” which came out this year. I don’t know a lot about her but I discovered her music while listening to the Belgian art/punk/industrial underground radio show L’étranger which is broadcast from Brussels every other Sunday on the channel known as Radio Panik. Much music on L’étranger is vey harsh and abrasive, and is interlaced with spoken word AI robot voices reading from selected writings shoplifted from the literary scene that I feel an affinity with and am still trying to wrap my head around: Expat Press, Amphetamine Sulphate, Schism, etc. I have had my writing show up there on L’étranger unannounced and it’s a pleasantly odd and alarming feeling to see your name tagged in Dr. Koper’s tweet when you’ve never heard of the radio show and had no idea of the seething musical underground that he draws recordings from.

This has put me onto a whole musical world I knew absolutely nothing about. I put L’étranger on and do other things in a distracted way and occasionally I look at my phone to try to figure out where in the track listing I currently am, which is like trying to decipher hieroglyphics. You can’t skip to a track exactly, it’s one long frightening centipede of a recording where you can’t differentiate the segments. It was in this way that I first heard Cucina Povera & Ben Vince.

The music of Cucina Povera, to the degree that I’ve since heard multiple works by her on bandcamp and on YouTube, is often constructed of loops of recorded singing in Finnish put together with “electronics” which is the best way I can describe it. It’s breathtaking and recalls to me some of the best material done by the Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance, both of which made atmospheric ethereal music heavily dependent at times on otherworldly, incomprehensible female vocals. It’s extremely emotional and stirring although you have zero fucking idea what she’s singing about—but it doesn’t matter. The foreignness of the language is part of the teleportation the music offers you. It’s highly introspective and meditative which is right up my alley.

The recording “There I See Everything” I guess is available as digital recording which I don’t do, or as an extremely limited edition cassette tape which I see is now sold out. This is unfortunate and my slow, primitive technical abilities have worked against me once again. I wish I could get this music, any of it, on CD but it doesn’t exist on physical media that I can acquire.

The track of this outfit that has meant the most to me is the second half of the final track on the album which is called “Pikku Muurahaiskeko,” or “little anthill” in Finnish, and the most simply and eloquently I can put it is that this is the soundtrack of suicidal ideation evaded. I’ve been very fucked up these past few days, and scared and sad, and this music, this voice, and these sounds, have calmed me down and helped me to transcend out of something very disturbing and alarming, the icy grip of an extremely scary, out of the ordinary depression has lessened. I don’t know if it would mean anything to anyone else, so much of music is personal and subjective, and you are not exactly where I have been recently. Part of the pleasure and yet bittersweet nature of finding new music, new movies, new books, is the desire to share it with others and yet the lack of certainty or guarantee that others will see what you see, hear what you hear, read what you read. Art is a thing which may not reliably transmit across the membrane between selves.

I have at times less hopefulness about such a communion than some of my friends do. I feel isolated here in my snob castle, and the consolations of art have an incompletion to them, a lack of resolution. Book reviewing, I am learning, is a rewarding, aesthetically enlarging experience. It is also fraught with ethical thorny patches. I don’t like the feeling that when I’m reviewing a book I’m sucking somebody off in exchange for love. I don’t like the triangular relationship by which a publisher might ask you to do a book review of an author’s book for a publication, with no certainty that you’ll like the book or that the publication will accept your review. The source of the impulse to review, the incentives or forces at work, must be investigated. I feel like a cleansing of motives should take place. I also think that I am living on social media far too much and that it really is an addiction which is impacting my mood and, to put things in terms that are tinged with a capitalism I hate and especially reject since I’m not usually getting paid for things I review, impacting my “productivity.” What’s the value of reading, watching movies, listening to music, and reporting on it to your friends and subscribers many of whom exist at like the metaphysical level of pixels on a screen? What is this engagement with the community, what garden am I watering, where will be the fruits of this labor? Is the quest for respect worth making yourself crazy over? When am I going to feel equal to my heroes? When is it going to make sense to continue as a writer and an artist and a human being?