the archeologists, 1968

The Stupidity of All Mankind

by GIORGIO DE CHIRICO

In 1935 the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico spent over a year in New York. It was his first trip to America. 

I was disgusted by the low level, material and moral, to which painting in Paris had sunk. I therefore followed the advice of a friend and after a short rest in Tuscany I had a certain number of canvases packed up and left for New York.

I embarked one August morning, at Genoa, on the liner Roma. It was infernally hot and the liner was like an enormous floating boiler. In addition, the continual motion of the ship made me terribly ill. I was also very depressed in myself. Isabella had not been able to leave with me. On the boat were many parties of young Americans returning home from holidays in Europe and they made an infernal din; these noisy young people caused a good deal of disturbance and all this increased my physical and moral discomfort. The voyage from Genoa to New York has remained in my mind as one of the worst memories of my life.

South Ferry Finally, after nine days of pitching and tossing and the deafening noise made by the young Yankees, we arrived in New York; the sea was soapy and warm, the light that of a greenhouse or aquarium, the temperature equal to that of a Turkish bath, and I was dead tired. I was so impatient to reach the end of this infernal trip that I had not been able to sleep during the night before arrival and spent the entire time on deck. With the first light of morning the skyscrapers of Wall Street appeared on the horizon; I thought of Babylon and of certain archaeological reconstructions modelled in plaster of Paris I had seen in a museum in Germany.

A damp heat, a tropical, mineshaft heat, hung over the oily water in the harbour. The sun could not been seen; men and objects had lost their shadows; a diffused light, as though we were in a photographer's studio at the end of the last century, hung over everything.

After the interminable formalities of passports, visas, interrogations, customs and even a medical examination, I succeeded in leaving the floating boiler. On the quay, in an atmosphere saturated with strange odours, Isabella's aunt and uncle, a lady and gentleman whom I had met in Paris, were waiting for me. Meeting these two people, who were so noble, cordial and understanding, consoled and encouraged me greatly. I had barely set foot on American soil when I felt a great nostalgia for Europe, for any European country whatsoever, even for the least beautiful, even for the least interesting.

It was strange how in the city of New York I felt I had died and been born again on another planet. Those smooth, monotonous buildings, from which protruded no balcony, no capital or column, no cornice, no ornament, no pole or nail, alarmed me greatly. I thought with nostalgia of the warmth and humanity of the baroque style, the Second Empire style, and even the Umbertino style and art nouveau. I consoled myself by remembering that I had come there for my work, for my paintings. I thought that Isabella would soon join me and that I must bury myself with my exhibitions and that afterwards I would be back in that old, harassed, awkward but, all things considered, pleasing Europe.

Later I discovered in New York a certain beauty, a certain metaphysic, but I will speak of this another time.

Automat, 977 Eighth Avenue by Berenice AbbottI came to know a few art dealers and realised that there also, as in Paris, the disgraceful totalitarianism of those who trafficked in painting still persisted. Among those I met was Mr. Julien Levy, who was the classic type of good, well-educated American Jew and who, among all the art dealers I met in New York, Americans, Frenchmen, Germans and Poles, seemed to me the most honest and intelligent and, although in his gallery he often exhibited the 'daubs' of the modern painters, he was the least intellectual and the least snobbish of all of them. It was decided that Julien Levy would hold an exhibition of my work at the end of October.

julien levy

In the meantime I met Dr Barnes, whom I had known in Paris and who owned twenty-five of my paintings, including a portrait of him which I had painted during one of his many stays in the French capital. Dr Barnes had a passionate love of painting and near Philadelphia, at a place called Merion, he has founded a type of museum where all the paintings he bought in Paris have been put together. The method used by Dr Barnes to attract the attention of his contemporaries towards his museum consists in being as contrary and misanthropic as humanly possible; it is the same method, with a few variations, as that of Derain. Special permits have to be obtained to visit the Barnes' museum; there are some imbeciles who even make the journey from other American cities, a whole day by rail away from Philadelphia, in order to visit the museum, after interviews, telephone calls and long waits. Many people return home having failed in their purpose, after a categoric refusal from the Doctor.

There is no doubt, as Renan says, that the stupidity of mankind is as infinite as the universe, otherwise there is no explanation as to why people apparently of sound mind will go to so much trouble and make so many efforts to see one of those pictures which can be seen in any gallery or at any dealer's in Europe and the States. One need only tell the Americans that at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and at the Frick Gallery in the same city they can see such collection and such quantities of masterpieces that a hundred Barnes' put together, collecting paintings for the whole century, could not have exhibited even half as many.

In the meantime autumn came; Julian Levy's gallery had inaugurated my exhibition which had achieved an outstanding success; various paintings were sold; dollars poured in; I opened a current account with the Chemical Bank and Trust Company. After the pettiness, avarice and meanness of Paris during the crisis period I confess although I have never been mercenary, the receipt of this money did in fact give me a certain pleasure and a certain sense of security. In the meantime Isabella had arrived from Europe and I had begun to work again.

Life rushed by. For me it was not the ideal life, but in fact I worked and when I work I am always more or less calm and happy. Some magazines, including Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, asked me for illustrations and I did some, but I must confess that the atmosphere of these magazines, just like other atmospheres where the snobbery of American elegance flourished, were totally unpleasing to me, for I have observed in them such stupidity, such ignorance, such ill-will, such cynicism and such disguised vulgarity that in comparison the lowest illiterate Neapolitan beggar, thief and pimp seems a genius, a gentleman and a saint.

Winter passed and spring passed. Summer came, the terrible American summer. Since I had agreed to hold another exhibition, again in Julien Levy's gallery, in the following autumn, Isabella and I decided to remain in the States. The heat, however, was suffocating and we sought a little coolness by a strange beach called Oyster Bay. The place was a few miles from New York. We left by train and arrived at a place where we took a kind of mail coach or bus which went to our holiday destination.

I had rented a bungalow there, a small villa built of wood and consisting of a ground floor and a first floor. The beach was very ugly: not a single rock or a single villa. For ugliness it even surpassed the beach between Poveromo and Forte dei Marmi, which is saying a lot. Strangely shaped trees, which I believe no professor of botany would have succeeded in classifying, were scattered here and there, as though by mistake.

We lived a monotonous life by the sea, in a humid, colonial heat. We passed most of the day on the beach, lying in the sun and sometimes going in the water. When I lay on my back I made drawings, in order to keep my hand in, of the bathers who surrounded me. At night we were disturbed by the shrill sound of some kind of nocturnal crickets which made an infernal din from a kind of tree which local people said were oaks. In fact, the ground beneath the trees was covered with acorns, but the trees bore no more resemblance to oaks than does a sewing machine to a lightning conductor.

Autumn came. The atmosphere (in a metaphorical sense) of autumn in New York has nothing in common with the classic atmosphere of the good old autumn sung by the poets and writers of our dear old Europe during the last century. No leaves falling, no melancholy, memories, yearning, and nostalgia for the villas and castles left behind and the abandoned beaches; nothing, adieu vive clarte de nos etes trop courts! No heartbroken accents of the romantic poets. If Victor Hugo had lived in New York he would never have been able to write those beautiful lines:

Quand novembre de brume inonde le ciel bleu,
Que le vent tourbillonne et qu'il neige des feuilles
O ma muse en mon âme alors tu te recueilles,
Comme un enfant transi qui s'approche de feu.

Even less, O reader, will you find in New York, in autumn, that ineffable melancholy, that strange, distant and profound poetry that Nietzsche discovered in the clear autumn afternoons, especially when they lie over certain Italian cities such as Turin.

Ariadne, 1913During autumn in New York you are either oppressed by the duration of the damp heat, or you are subjected to cyclones with downpours of torrential rain which are reminiscent of certain old American films, and galoshes, umbrellas and raincoats with hoods are powerless against them.

Solitude, 1914

I came back to exhibit at the Julien Levy gallery; I had worked hard during the year in the States. I had made progress with my research into technique and I had perfected the preparation of primings. Many works which I had exhibited on this second occasion were superior as regards quality of painting and plastic power to those shown at my first exhibition. The critics took an interest and several articles appeared, not very intelligent but fairly favourable, together with reproductions of my paintings, in the magazines and newspapers.

Naturally the critics, as always as in every country, had understood nothing of the quality of my pictures and spoke only about the subject matter. In the meantime I had begun to tire of the States. During my stay there, in July 1936 to be precise, I received the very sad news that my mother had died. A few months previously my brother had written that our mother's health was declining, and the feeling that I was at the time so far away from her, with that vast ocean between, made me very sad.

One night I had a dream; I dreamt that I was in Greece, in the countryside near Athens; I saw those trees and bushes which I had seen during my childhood, and the place where I found myself in my dream was somewhere I once went to paint a landscape with a friend of my own age. In my dream I saw the olives and pine trees just as I had seen them in my distant childhood, and between the trees I saw the back of a little church painted pink, with its small apse jutting out and a door at the side, just as I had painted them so many years before. Suddenly my mother appeared among the olives and walked towards the little church. I wanted to go and meet her, but I could not move. I wanted to call out to her, but my voice failed, my heart filled with worry and anguish. I saw my mother, who seemed very old, small, bent, weak and unsteady on her feet, just as I remembered her from the last time I had seen her in Paris. I saw my mother pass like a shadow near the apse of the little church, come up to the side door and then disappear.

I woke up troubled and weeping and with the terrible thought that my mother had died just at that moment: in fact, when ten days later I read the letter from my brother in which he told me that our mother was alive no longer, I compared the date of the letter with that of my dream and, taking into account the difference in time between the United States and Europe, I realised that this really was the case.

I decided to return to Italy.

You can purchase the memoirs of Giorgio de Chirico, translated by Margaret Crosland, here.

"We Are The Tide (live)" - Blind Pilot (mp3)

"Go On, Say It" - Blind Pilot (mp3)

"Things I Cannot Recall" - Blind Pilot (mp3)

The Archeologists IV, 1914

How and Why To Write

On any given morning Flannery O'Connor would just wake up and bust out a short story, for example "A Circle in the Fire" ("Sometimes the last line of trees was a solid grey blue wall a little darker than the sky...") and that was it. She really didn't have to do anything else during the day. One morning she was like, "I have some opinions about the Holocaust, and bam, "The Displaced Person." We could all stand to be a lot more like her, although that can never be, since she knew nothing of the internet.

Please revisit the first three parts of this series below:

Part One (Joyce Carol Oates, Gene Wolfe, Philip Levine, Thomas Pynchon, Gertrude Stein, Eudora Welty, Don DeLillo, Anton Chekhov, Mavis Gallant, Stanley Elkin)

Part Two (James Baldwin, Henry Miller, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Margaret Atwood, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Nabokov)

Part Three (W. Somerset Maugham, Langston Hughes, Marguerite Duras, George Orwell, John Ashbery, Susan Sontag, Robert Creeley, John Steinbeck)

Part Four (Flannery O'Connor, Charles Baxter, Joan Didion, William Butler Yeats, Lyn Hejinian, Jean Cocteau, Francine du Plessix Gray, Roberto Bolano)

Flannery O'Connor

Point of view drives me crazy when I think about it but I believe that when you are writing well, you don't think about it. I seldom think about it when I am writing a short story, but on the novel it gets to be a considerable worry. There are so many parts of the novel that you have to get it over with so you can get something else to happen, etc, etc. I seem to stay in a snarl with mine.

Of course I hear the complaint over and over that there is no sense in writing about people who disgust you. I think there is; but the fact is that the people I write about certainly don't disgust me entirely though I see them from a standard of judgment from which they fall short. Your freshman who said there was something religious here was correct. I take the Dogmas of the Church literally and this, I think, is what creates what you call the "missing link." The only concern, so far as I see it, is what Tillich calls "the ultimate concern." It is what makes the stories spare and what gives them any permanent quality they may have.

I beat my brains out this morning on a story I am hacking at and in the afternoon and I am exhausted is why I haven't got down to the typewriter. It takes great energy to typewrite something. When I typewrite something the critical instinct operates automatically and that slows me down. When I write it by hand, I don't pay much attention to it....

There is really one answer to the people who complain about one's writing about "unpleasant" people — and that is that one writes what one can. Vocation implies limitation but few people realize it who don't actually practice an art.

I don't know how you would tell anybody his writing was mannered, except you say, "Brother this is mannered." I once had the sentence: "He ran through the field of dead cotton" and Allen Tate told me it was mannered; should have been "dead cotton field." I don't hold that against Allen. Give him something good to criticize and he would do better.

I hope you don't have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re: fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

Charles Baxter

In day-to-day life we play these little games of comparison-contrast in which we are usually the contrast. I wouldn't have done it that way. Look at him, now, the one who did it, sinking. At least it wasn't me! By telling stories in this manner, we become narratable. We find a story for ourselves. We spin around ourselves, in what seems to be a natural form, the cobweb of a plot. We move our own lives into the condition of narrative progression. Plot often develops out of the tensions between characters, and in order to get that tension, a writer sometimes has to be a bit of matchmaker, creating characters who counterpoint one another in ways that are fit for gossip. Our hapless friend is character, but not yet my character. With counterpointed characterization, certain kinds of people are pushed together, people who bring out a crucial response to each other. A latent energy rises to the surface, the desire or secret previously forced down into psychic obscurity.

It seeks to be in the nature of plots to bring a truth or a desire up to the light, and it has often been the task of those who write fiction to expose elements that are kept secret in a personality, so that the mask over that personality (or any system) falls either temporarily or permanently. When the mask falls, something of value comes up. Masks are interesting partly for themselves and partly for what they mask. The reality behind the mask is like a shadow-creature rising to the bait: the tug of an unseen force, frightening and energetic. What emerges is a precious thing, precious because buried or lost or repressed.

Anyone who writes stories or novels or poems with some kind of narrative structure often imagines a central character, then gives that character a desire or a fear and perhaps some kind of goal and sets another character in a collision course with that person. The protagonist collides with an antagonist. All right: We know where we are. We often talk about this sort of dramatic conflict as if it were all unitary, all one of a kind: One person wants something, another person wants something else, and conflict results. But this is not, I think, the way most stories actually work. Not everything is a contest. We are not always fighting our brothers for our share of worldly goods. Many good stories have no antagonist at all.

Joan Didion

The most important is that I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I've done that day. I can't do it late in the afternoon because I'm too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages. So I spend this hour taking things out and putting other things in. Then I start the next day by redoing all of what I did the day before, following these evening notes. When I'm really working I don't like to go out or have anybody to dinner, because then I lose the hour. If I don't have the hour, and start the next day with just some bad pages and nowhere to go, I'm in low spirits. Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it. That's one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish things. Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it. In Sacramento nobody cares if I appear or not. I can just get up and start typing.

w.b. yeats (left) with andre gide (right)

William Butler Yeats

In Paris Synge once said to me, "We should unite stoicism, asceticism and ecstasy. Two of them have often come together, but the three never."

I notice that in dreams our apparent subjective moods are almost limited to very elementary fear, grief, and desire. We are without complexity or any general consciousness of our state. If we are ill, our discomfort is transferred apparently from ourselves to the dream image. An image created by sexual desire, when our health is bad, may for instance be a woman with a swollen face, or some disagreeable behaviour. Indeed, when we are ill we often see deformed images. I suggest analogy between the form of the mind of the control, also superficial, and our apparent mind in dreams. The sense of identity is attenuated in both at the same points.

A good writer should be so simple that he has no faults, only sins.

Lyn Hejinian

Because we have language we find ourselves in a special and peculiar relationship to the objects, events and situations which constitute what we imagine of the world. Language generates its own characteristics in the human psychological and spiritual conditions. Indeed, it is near our psychological condition. This psychology is generated by the struggle between language and that which it claims to depict or express, by our overwhelming experience of the vastness and uncertainty of the world, and by what often seems to be the inadequacy of the imagination that longs to know it - and, furthermore, for the poet, the even greater inadequacy of the language that appears to describe, discuss, or disclose it. This psychology situates desire in the poem itself, or, more specifically, in poetic language, to which then we may attribute the motive for the poem.

Language is one of the principal forms our curiosity takes. It makes us restless. As Francis Ponge puts it, "Man is a curious body whose center of gravity is not in himself." Instead it seems to be located in language, by virtue of which we negotiate our mentalities and the world; off-balance, heavy at the mouth, we are pulled forward.

Jean Cocteau

I must make a disagreeable confession. I read nothing within the lines of my work. I find it very disconcerting; I disorient “the other.” I have not looked at a newspaper in twenty years; if one is brought into the room, I flee. This is not because I am indifferent but because one cannot follow every road. And nevertheless such a thing as the tragedy of Algeria undoubtedly enters into one's work, doubtless plays its role in the fatigued and useless state in which you find me. Not that “I do not wish to lose Algeria!” but the useless killing, killing for the sake of killing. In fear of the police, men keep to a certain conduct; but when they become the police they are terrible. No, one feels shame at being a part of the human race. About novels: I read detective fiction, espionage, science fiction.

francine du plessix gray w/ jonathan williams at black mountain

Francine du Plessix Gray

Recently the compulsion has been less intense, a week or two can go by and then I catch up in my big streak: angers and anxieties and sarcastic reports on overhead conversations, any snazzy metaphors that come to mind, phrases and ideas for current projects, a lot of nature notes — smells, sounds, colors, birds. I sometimes wonder why I have to look back and record precisely what I was experiencing on such and such a day. No one’s given a satisfactory explanation for this compulsion writers have to keep a laundry list of the soul: Virginia Woolf, her need to jot down who came to tea every day, and the pitch of Lytton Strachey’s voice and the kind of cucumber sandwiches she served. It’s as if we feel constantly other from the person we were the day, the hour before, and this sense of flux is terrifying, we have to crystallize, fix every moment of ourselves in order not to disappear altogether, as if our very identity were constantly threatened with dissolution.

I get up fairly early and have an overabundant physical energy in the early hours, even without caffeine, which I gave up decades ago. I’m rather like a hyperactive child in the morning, it’s very hard for me to sit still and concentrate on any writing then. So those hours are reserved for the more passive work: reading what I call my sacred texts, poetry or the Bible or the classics; recently I’ve gone through Lattimore’s translation of Homer, and Virgil’s Aeneid in the Fitzgerald translation, and a history of the cabala.

Then after this most treasured hour of the day, which I always spend alone upstairs in my room, with some tea and fruit and honey, I go about the business of life: notes to friends, shopping and planning for the family, answering phone calls, thanking people for this and that, thanking the world. As if I have to earn the right to write by being a good girl—all about me must be perfectly rinsed and dusted before I can start working. That’s in part due to my great fear of interruptions, but even more to an excessive proclivity to order and neatness that prevails in my mother’s family. Compulsive Slavic hospitality, and a tedious dutifulness and domesticity, are probably my most time-consuming vices.

Roberto Bolaño

Now that I’m forty-four years old, I’m going to offer some advice on the art of writing short stories.

1. Never approach short stories one at a time. If one approaches short stories one at a time, one can quite honestly be writing the same short story until the day one dies.

2. It is best to write short stories three or five at a time. If one has the energy, write them nine or fifteen at a time. 

3. Be careful: the temptation to write short stories two at a time is just as dangerous as attempting to write them one at a time, and, what’s more, it’s essentially like the interplay of lovers’ mirrors, creating a double image that produces melancholy.

4. One must read Horacio Quiroga, Felisberto Hernández, and Jorge Luis Borges. One must read Juan Rulfo and Augusto Monterroso. Any short-story writer who has some appreciation for these authors will never read Camilo José Cela or Francisco Umbral yet will, indeed, read Julio Cortázar and Adolfo Bioy Casares, but in no way Cela or Umbral.

5. I’ll repeat this once more in case it’s still not clear: don’t consider Cela or Umbral, whatsoever.

6. A short-story writer should be brave. It’s a sad fact to acknowledge, but that’s the way it is.

7. Short-story writers customarily brag about having read Petrus Borel. In fact, many short-story writers are notorious for trying to imitate Borel’s writing. What a huge mistake! Instead, they should imitate the way Borel dresses. But the truth is that they hardly know anything about him—or Théophile Gautier or Gérard de Nerval!

8. Let’s come to an agreement: read Petrus Borel, dress like Petrus Borel, but also read Jules Renard and Marcel Schwob. Above all, read Schwob, then move on to Alfonso Reyes and from there go to Borges.

9. The honest truth is that with Edgar Allan Poe, we would all have more than enough good material to read.

10. Give thought to point number 9. Think and reflect on it. You still have time. Think about number 9. To the extent possible, do so on bended knees.

11. One should also read a few other highly recommended books and authors— e.g., Peri hypsous, by the notable Pseudo-Longinus; the sonnets of the unfortunate and brave Philip Sidney, whose biography Lord Brooke wrote; The Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters; Suicidios ejemplares, by Enrique Vila-Matas; and Mientras ellas duermen by Javier Marías.

12. Read these books and also read Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver, for one of the two of them is the best writer of the twentieth century.

translated from the Spanish by David Draper Clark

"Unwritable Girl" - Gregory Alan Isakov (mp3)

"Fire Escape" - Gregory Alan Isakov (mp3)

"Words" - Gregory Alan Isakov (mp3)

susan sontag

It's Easier To Do Things When Someone Tells You How

Part One (Joyce Carol Oates, Gene Wolfe, Philip Levine, Thomas Pynchon, Gertrude Stein, Eudora Welty, Don DeLillo, Anton Chekhov, Mavis Gallant, Stanley Elkin)

Part Two (James Baldwin, Henry Miller, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Margaret Atwood, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Nabokov)

Part Three (W. Somerset Maugham, Langston Hughes, Marguerite Duras, George Orwell, John Ashbery, Susan Sontag, Robert Creeley, John Steinbeck)

Part Four (Flannery O'Connor, Charles Baxter, Joan Didion, William Butler Yeats, Lyn Hejinian, Jean Cocteau, Francine du Plessix Gray, Roberto Bolano)

margaret atwood in cambridge, 1963

Playing Piano On Top Of A Truck In Traffic 

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Five Easy Pieces, 1970

dir. Bob Rafelson

MOLLY LAMBERT V. JACK NICHOLSON: ROUND 2

I encountered Jack Nicholson onscreen for the first time in 1997, when I saw James L. Brooks' As Good As It Gets. In that film Jack Nicholson plays a character whose entire existence requires the context of "Jack Nicholson" to make any sense. Here is how I saw it: a sad neurotic old man totally undeserving of love gets his wish fulfillment fantasy via a much younger waitress who doesn't really make any sense as a character and Greg Kinnear is gay. I had never been so mystified to see a movie win so many awards. "Man, Hollywood..." I said, shaking my head perplexedly and being fourteen.

I enjoy an intellectual romantic comedy as much as the next English major but I could not get behind that movie. We're all trying for Annie Hall but there's nothing worse than characters that assume your sympathy without really earning it. Woody's heroes are often horrible people but they manage to be sympathetic. Woody's worst movies have many of the same problems as As Good As It Gets. "You make me want to be a better man." What made you so sure you're such a bad man to begin with Jack? 

My freshman year of college I saw Carnal Knowledge, a movie which opens (semi-hilariously) with Jack Nicholson as a freshman in college. Suddenly I got Jack Nicholson. I got what As Good As It Gets had assumed I would already know. And I understood that the current Jack Nicholson, the grandfatherly type in sunglasses in the front row of the Oscars, still felt exactly the same inside as this guy I really wanted to fuck. And that was really weird, vaguely creepy, confusing, hot, and the very end of puberty.

1970s Jack Nicholson is THE man. He wins everyone over and gives the appearance of not trying. He walks into the room and pushes the needle off the record player. He looks incredible in clothes. He says something completely terrible and insulting and then is forgiven because he smiles to acknowledge that he knows he is being terrible. What he wants he just takes and if he can't get it he destroys property. He is charming but he is also evil. Are all charming people evil? Isn't that sort of what charm is about?

image probably repeated on This Recording the most times in different posts 

Jack Nicholson believes that men are innately different from women ("cunt...can't understand normal thinking") He thinks men have egos that overpower everything around them and appetites that require constant maintenance to be restrained. He does not understand that this is the human condition. It would be insulting to say that he is too old to learn this, but I suspect it is something he has secretly known all along, and that most of being Jack Nicholson is pretending to be "Jack Nicholson" for the enjoyment of people wishing to live vicariously through his imagined lifestyle.

That men have a brute sexuality uncomplicated by emotion is the biggest lie ever. So why is it pushed on us so hard, in Jack, James Bond and Jay-Z? It is the founding lie of rap music and pornography. Remember how cool Jay-Z used to be and how lame he is now that he's crazy in love with Beyoncé? Why did he seem so much cooler when he was pretending like no woman ever had any effect on him? Because the truth; that men are vulnerable, with emotional needs, things projected on people like Jennifer Aniston (who is fine, duh) is so deeply threatening to the present order of the universe. 

The men who admit to these vulnerabilities are free. To quote myself to myself: It's not emasculating if you like it. The other human condition is being deeply horribly sensitive in a way you are convinced must be specific to you. We are all the main protagonist of our own life. That is why Jack Nicholson is so beloved. He is bigger than everyone else onscreen. I don't think everyone who has a good live show hates themselves necessarily, but that is certainly the message suggested by Five Easy Pieces. Plenty of people just hate themselves and don't even have a good live show. 

There's an early scene where two girls hitting on Jack start talking about his hair and he looks tremendously worried all of a sudden, like they might start talking about how he is balding. That men have no physical insecurities is the other biggest lie ever. Vince Vaughn might not have any physical insecurities but damn dude you fell off SO HARD. In Husbands Cassavetes is constantly bringing up his own shortness. Can a woman have a Napoleon complex? I'd still like to be tall every time I'm at a show.

"Hey Dennis. Hey Dennis. Hey Dennis, man. Hey Dennis. I'm going to fuck your wife."

And yet young Jack Nicholson is as attractive as a person could possibly be, in part because he pretends not to care. Is it pretending not to care that is attractive? Actually never caring about anything is completely impossible. We all care in some situations and feel nothing in others. And then pretend to care/not care in various amounts. Thus is Don Draper. Bill Murray's whole pathos is perched on the gulf between them.

We associate sunglasses with cool, and Jack Nicholson with sunglasses. Sunglasses block the eyes from view, thus blocking others from being able to see what emotions a person is actually feeling. They do not prevent you from still feeling those emotions. A character like Jack Nicholson's Bobby in Five Easy Pieces, who so aggressively displays his ability to hurt people and not ever feel bad about it, is more terrified of getting hurt than anything. Hurting other people first is merely a preemptive strike.

Value is largely construct. Competition creates value. I guarantee you Warren Beatty never once left Julie Christie alone with Jack Nicholson. The reason Warren would never have left Julie Christie with Jack Nicholson is because he knows just how easily he Warren Beatty, the great seducer, was seduced by Jack. The weird thing about straight male sexual competition is how little it can have to do with women. That's why it is so refreshing when men treat you like a human being. That it is refreshing is depressing. 

Discussing the Warren Beatty/Jack Nicholson/Dustin Hoffman FMK post Julie Klausner and Natasha Vargas-Cooper wrote for The Hairpin (a truly astonishing piece of writing that is, to quote James L. Brooks on Annie Hall, "like watching a spaceship land") in an e-mail with me Klausner said "Well, the '60s caused the '70s. And in some cases, the '70s caused the '70s. These three bros basically caused the women's movement."

It is not hard to feel totally horrified reading the infamous Teri Garr AV Club interview where she talks about how Dustin Hoffman grabbed her ass in every take of a scene on Tootsie and Sydney Pollack thought it was hilarious. I get the impression this is why Megan Fox actually left Transformers. I want to radicalize Megan Fox so fucking bad. I am sure she has caught on by now that it is still always Mad Men somewhere.

Five Easy Pieces alternately celebrates and repudiates Jack Nicholson's brand of charisma. It is Easy Rider's black swan for sure. It understands that volatility is not without expense, but neither is it without enormous payoffs. Nicholson's character Bobby is not violent, but he uses speech as violently as The Shining's door axe chop. Talking is a sexual act and Jack Nicholson is always trying to fuck everything in sight.

The problem with being a woman and romanticizing a boys' club is that you would not actually be welcome. The fantasy of being welcome there is an impossible fantasy, one nobly attempted by Anjelica Huston. You never feel completely welcome, because your presence makes it into something else. Not all groups of men are boys' clubs. Boys' clubs specifically involve the exclusion of women with the occasional tokenism.

Five Easy Pieces is a slice of life movie. Much of the tension comes from putting characters in rooms together and then leaving the audience in suspense a little bit about what their relationship is to one another. You think Bobby is a blue collar drifter and then it turns out he's an upper class kid trying to escape his intellectual family. It's very beautiful and realist (László Kovács!), evoking Ed Ruscha in the oil fields portion and the figurative work of Fairfield Porter in the last act at the family estate.

The famous "chicken salad sandwich" scene, where Jack as Bobby (but let's face it, Jack) berates a waitress is about the way you put yourself on stage sometimes in order to perform your personality. Involuntary non-genuine performance (as in working retail) is different from voluntary genuine performance. Whether genuine performance is a contradiction is an ultimate question. I had just been talking with Tess about how we both often insist on ordering for everybody at restaurants. What the hell is that about? 

Performing yourself all the time is exhausting. That's why traveling with people is so hard. There's no person that doesn't need downtime from being themselves. The public self is such a weird thing, especially for women. Kartina Richardson wrote a great essay about Black Swan and bathrooms, bathrooms being one of the only places you can escape the gaze of others (also the only thing I remember about The Bell Jar).

Jack Nicholson can be a truly astonishing actor. He may be arrogant bordering on sociopathic, but he earned it with his performances. Towards the end of Five Easy Pieces there's a moment where he stops at a gas station bathroom, looks at himself in the mirror, and you can see him think "Who the fuck are you kidding?" The most performative actor when he speaks, Jack does subtle remarkable work with silences.

He illuminates the intimate connection between the two; performing one's self, which you attempt to control and through that control other people, and then just being one's self, which nobody can control. That's what makes him so magnetic as an actor. He is never just a dick. If he were really just a dick, he would not be nearly as interesting. Jack, it is implied, is only such a dick because he is so deeply emotional. Endlessly relentlessly unable to stop feeling things, always trying to silence his inner self. It is what makes his performance in Chinatown so insanely perfect and poignant.

In Five Easy Pieces Jack Nicholson expounds so much forceful energy creating and implementing his persona, and then is disgusted by anyone who can't immediately see through it to his white hot core of self-loathing. He can't respect anybody who'd respect him. Does Jack Nicholson actually hate himself? His films are constantly positing this as a corrective to his real life image and insane seeming levels of narcissism but it could just be wishful justification for him fucking Paz De La Huerta.

Lest you think only men can be Jack Nicholsons, I give you Paz De La Huerta and Angelina Jolie. All eight hundred kids aside, I'm not sure Angelina Jolie is capable of putting anyone before herself any more than Jack is. When you take Ayn Rand as gospel certainly you can achieve some ambitious goals, but other more mundane ones become impossible. Compromise is seen as weakness, and human relationships require compromise. You can't really love anyone without giving up some control.

Taylor Swift's insane crusade for true love is just as impossible and entitled as Jack Nicholson's endless fuckquest. What is so super hilarious about Taylor Swift and her surprise face is that no amount of fake humility can cover up her tremendous ego, her enormous feelings of entitlement, and barely-disguised Kenny Powers rage that she has not been immediately given everything she feels she justly deserves. She won't own up to her aggression. She is a Jack Nicholson who is a virgin who can't drive. 

Swift's experience with Taylor Lautner seemed to open her up somewhat to realizing that this thing she thought she wanted more than anything might not actually be what she wants at all. That there is a certain perverse pleasure in wanting and getting not necessarily present in having. That she desires John Mayer because she can't have him and doesn't care about Lautner until he is unavailable. That on a sick level she wants it to be hard, correlates difficulty to satisfaction, and like Jack is making everything impossible for herself. Hopefully she figures out next that she's primarily just horny.

Warren Beatty fell in love onscreen a hundred times before he ever fell in love. It's like the gap between John Mayer's music and John Mayer. If Jack Nicholson tells us in films and interviews that he is sensitive, that what he really desires is to be dominated by a woman with a personality as strong as his, does it matter if he's really still out fucking twenty year old cocktail waitresses? I am sure nobody finds the idea that getting laid by a new girl constantly is supposed to be making him happy more ironic than Jack. 

How much of charisma is related to being a prick? I've always respected aggression much more than passivity. We all want to ask for things and be given them. At what point does aggression become poisonous? To what extent does its poisonousness aid in its effectiveness? Kanye, Brando, Tony Soprano, Tony Montana, Frank Sinatra, Don Draper, Kenny Powers, Kobe, LeBron, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Daniel Plainview.

this doesn't need a fucking caption why are you even reading just look at these two

The man with no self-restraint is the American archetype. But he is always just kidding himself that he has no capacity for self-restraint. He restrains himself every day, even if it is mostly to restrain himself from restraining himself. There is wildness in restraint. People like having their bluffs called just as much as they like bluffing. They can't believe everyone buys what they're selling and they secretly hope someone won't.

That is also why I talk about John Mayer so much. If he brought any of the aggression that he brings to his own life to his music, he'd be making early Elvis Costello albums. Although to be fair, those early (perfect) Elvis Costello albums are about my least favorite kind of prick, the person who is a vengeful angry prick about how he's not getting laid, which is really the same kind of prick Taylor Swift is. Ladies is pricks too. 

Everyone is chasing the feeling of winning. The feeling of triumph. And yet while short term success does bring temporary happiness, endlessly chasing ephemeral successes is a guaranteed roadblock to long-term happiness. And then sometimes long-term happiness can get really fucking boring and you remember what you liked in the first place about the whole process of chasing it. No person can always be winning at all times. Into each life a little The Two Jakes/Anger Management/The Fortune must fall.

I also watched Nicholson's directorial debut Drive He Said, which has some genuinely astonishing shots and sequences. One wonders why Nicholson didn't direct more, although the failure of The Two Jakes probably accounts for that (Jack had no chance at topping Polanski). Drive He Said is not a film noir but a coming of age movie about a college basketball player. Nicholson never appears in it, but his aura is spread out among the three main characters. I was never bored and I was occasionally stunned.

The protagonist (William Tepper) is a troubled athlete, possibly more conventionally handsome than Jack but lacking any of his magnetism. The guy utterly looks the part but there is nothing there, no spark. Whatever Jack Nicholson has, this guy doesn't have it, which brings us back to what it is exactly that Jack Nicholson has. Michael Margotta plays the crazy radical roommate like James Franco in Pineapple Express.

Nicholson's deep understanding of cinematic aesthetics makes itself evident immediately. Hidden safely offscreen he elucidates some of his own private themes; the conflict between the athletic physical self and the intellectual spiritual self. Jack exposes the pure graceful masculine performance of basketball as the inspiration for his own acting style and generally proves that he is a sentimental Irish-Catholic boy.

The best and most revelatory performance belongs to Karen Black, who plays Nicholson's conception of a sort of female Jack Nicholson. It is a testament to Karen Black's acting talents that I had no idea she was not really her character in Five Easy Pieces, who is kind of a beautiful idiot. In Drive He Said she plays a female character that is so much more interesting and complex than most of what you see onscreen that it makes you a little depressed there aren't more movies with characters like this.

It's incredible that Jack Nicholson manages to do what seems to elude so many male directors; he gives his female character subjectivity. Karen Black's Olive is judged no more or less harshly than the men. She is naked several times but never merely objectified, which is amazing given Karen Black's cartoonish beauty. She is neither overly idealized nor overly cruel. She is idealized and sentimentalized by the main character but not by the film. Jack Nicholson is not a misogynist. He's a champion of pleasure. He doesn't hate women at all. He loves women. He loves them too much. 

Sometimes when I go in really hard on somebody I can't tell if it's obvious that I'm only going in that hard because I respect them a lot. I went in incredibly hard on Aaron Sorkin because I loved The Social Network. You know what's cooler than being quoted a million times? (yes, you do) Some things you love unconflictedly, but I'm always most drawn to the things that open up internal contradictions. It's not just that I enjoy Jack Nicholson's acting and want to fuck him but that I feel exactly like him constantly. 

I'm writing about him again because of all those contradictions; that me feeling like Jack in no way means that Jack ever thinks he feels like me (the mistake Madonna made when she took on Warren Beatty), that it can be really fun to watch somebody being a prick until they're being one to you, that channelling ability sometimes means having to crush everyone in your path and there's really no way to be nice about it.

That women, starting from birth, are encouraged and expected to be "nice" in ways that men are not, and then are rewarded and punished accordingly throughout their lives. How an old man can live on eternally in the memories of the extremity of his talents as a younger man. I will probably keep writing about Jack Nicholson forever. At least as long as we're still stuck in traffic and I've got this piano on top of this truck.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She twitters here and tumbls here, and runs GIF Party and JPG Club. She last wrote in these pages about author photos.

"In the Real World" - Bright Eyes (mp3)

"Singularity" - Bright Eyes (mp3)

"Lua" - Bright Eyes (mp3)

If he was alive, James Joyce would have been 129 yesterday.

Silence, Exile & Death

by WHITTAKER CHAMBERS

Last week a little group of people got together in Manhattan in an atmosphere of unaccustomed awe. They were friends of James Joyce — editor Eugene Jolas (transition) and his wife; poet Padraic Colum and his wife; Robert Nathan Kastor, brother of Joyce's daughter-in-law; others. Fortnight before, a terse cable had announced that the author of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake was dead in Zurich. Joyce's friends were forming a committee to aid his widow, daughter and son.

To many a baffled reader of Finnegans Wake, the death of Joyce meant merely that the "cult of unintelligibility" had lost its chief prophet. To his admirers, it meant the loss of the greatest figure in European letters since Marcel Proust. To his friends Joyce's death seemed like some simple lapse in nature, grandly tragic and fitting. Joyce's writings had been the most massive, inclusive, eloquent statement of Europe's intellectual and moral chaos, a chaos now audible and visible in the falling walls of Europe's cities. And Joyce had died in the midst of this downfall — perhaps because of it. There was something about his death that suggested the great Bishop of Hippo, St. Augustine, dying at the close of the Roman world to the echo of Vandal swords against the city gates.

Bit by bit, Joyce's friends in Manhattan pieced together a picture of his last months. It was a picture of monstrous ironies. Joyce, the young man who fled from Ireland to live by "silence, exile and cunning," died a destitute refugee from Paris. The mind that thought history "a nightmare to which I hope never to awaken," was caught in the fall of France. The man who resented even minor Government interference with his affairs, was caught in the wartime red tape of three Governments. The mind that created the Miltonic rhetoric, the subtle architecture, the poly-portmanteau language of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, found its last peace in talking to an eight-year-old child.

lucia joyce by berenice abbott

The Joyces (wife Nora, son Giorgio) lived in Paris. His daughter Lucia, who suffered from a nervous disorder, was in a sanatorium near St. Nazaire. A devoted father, Joyce worried much about Lucia, spent a good part of the income left him by Admirer Harriet Weaver on Lucia's doctor and sanatorium bills. When war broke out, he hurried to St. Nazaire to see her.

Giorgio's son Stephen was at Mrs. Jolas' school at St. Gérand-le-Puy, some eleven miles north of Vichy. The Joyces were invited there for Christmas 1939, had a big party. Even then Joyce was suffering a good deal of pain. For ten or twelve years he had had a mysterious intestinal ailment, which did not trouble him as long as life went smoothly, caused him agony when life did not. During the last year, friends claim, Joyce "ate practically nothing."

After Christmas the Joyces rushed back to Paris. Mrs. Joyce hated the Paris alertes, but Joyce could not stand the tranquillity of village life. They returned to St. Gérand-le-Puy for Joyce's birthday (Feb. 2), remained until the end of March. Joyce took long walks, read Goethe's conversations with Eckermann, occasionally went to a movie. He also read all the newspapers, though he would discuss politics only with close friends. Shortly before the time the Nazis moved to Norway, the Joyces moved to Vichy.

On June 11 Mrs. Jolas phoned Joyce that she had found a two-room flat in St. Gérand-le-Puy, urged him to move there for safety. Joyce refused. He added: "Have you heard anything about that book* that I asked you to get me from the Gotham Book Mart?" Mrs. Jolas said she hadn't. "Well," said Joyce, "it wouldn't hurt to drop a postal card into the box." The Nazis crossed the Marne.

Two days later, Mrs. Jolas phoned Joyce again to say that the Gare de Lyon in Paris was closed. Joyce said that couldn't possibly be true because his friend, Irish Poet Samuel Beckett, had just come from Paris. He added: "Have you heard anything about that book that I asked you to get me from the Gotham Book Mart?" Next day Paris fell. Day after that Mrs. Jolas ran into Giorgio Joyce on the street in St. Gérand-le-Puy, with all the Joyce luggage, looking for a place to stay. So, by then, were hundreds of others.

Zurich in 1938

At 8 the following morning the James Joyces, forced out of Vichy when the army took over, arrived at St. Gérand-lePuy. Joyce was indignant; he was not in the habit of going out before 11. Said Mrs. Joyce of the general situation: "Did you ever hear of such nonsense?" Two hours later friends found Joyce happily listening to the radio. The Joyces were not even disturbed when the Nazis occupied the village for six days. Joyce was a British subject, but they did not arrest him. Friends urged him to go to the Irish Minister in Vichy and change his citizenship. Joyce refused: "It would not be honorable."

A fellow refugee was Paul Léon who had worked with Joyce for ten years. Every afternoon at 4 sharp, Joyce and Léon reread Finnegans Wake. Joyce would sit with his long thin legs wrapped inextricably around each other while he held the book close to his eyes, studied it through a thick lens. Léon read aloud. They would then make corrections. When Mrs. Jolas reached the U. S. last fall, she took 30 pages of typographical corrections for a possible second edition of Finnegans Wake. As she was saying good-by for the last time, Joyce paused, said: "Have you heard anything about that book I asked you to get me from the Gotham Book Mart?"

Joyce made frantic efforts to get an exit visa so that he could take his family to Switzerland, scene of his World War I exile, birthplace of Ulysses. Thanks to influential friends (especially in the U. S. embassy), he finally procured a visa from Vichy. But the Swiss Government was fussier. At one point it refused to admit Joyce on the claim that he was a Jew. Then it demanded a $7,000 bond. The mayor of Zurich got the sum reduced to $3,500, which some Swiss friends got together. But on the day the Swiss entrance visa arrived, the French exit visa expired.

James, Nora, Giorgio and Lucia in Paris, 1924

When Vichy finally granted a second visa, there was no gasoline for the drive from St. Gérand-le-Puy to Vichy. Defying police regulations, Giorgio Joyce bicycled to Vichy, begged every embassy and consulate for gasoline. Finally a bank clerk gave his last gallon of gas, which was enough to take the Joyces to the train.

In Zurich the Joyces put up at a small pension. They had almost no money. None of Joyce's cables to London for money was answered (even air mail from London to Zurich now takes a month). Moreover, the Germans had canceled the permission (obtained through the Irish Minister at Vichy) to remove Lucia from occupied France. Friends say that the thought of his daughter's spending Christmas in a bombed area intensified Joyce's intestinal pains.

ezra pound visiting joyce's grave

He brooded over what he considered the poor reception of Finnegans Wake. More & more his bitter day dreams took on the prolonged, chaotic misery of the night dreams in his last great book. (A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights?) And as the voices of the awakening children humanize the nightmare in Finnegans Wake, the voice of his eight-year-old Grandson Stephen became Joyce's chief solace. All day he would sit telling the boy (the child we all love to place our hope in forever) stories from Greek and Roman mythology, the Norse sagas, Shakespeare. But when only a small sum of money arrived from the U. S., scarcely enough to pay a part of their debts, Joyce collapsed from worry.

An X-ray showed a malignant ulcer on his duodenum. Joyce at first refused an operation because it would be too expensive. After the operation, he had to have two blood transfusions. He tossed around, worrying about Lucia. Then he had a last brief talk alone with his wife. During the night he began to lose consciousness. (My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. . . . Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!) Unlike the Finnegans, Joyce never woke up.

Whittaker Chambers' obituary of James Joyce appeared without a byline in Time.

james and nora on their wedding day in 1931

"Downtown" - Destroyer (mp3)

"Kaputt" - Destroyer (mp3)

"Poor in Love" - Destroyer (mp3)

burt lancaster in john cheever's 'The Swimmer'

John Cheever in Massachusetts

by ELISABETH DONNELLY

John Cheever was one of the few writers to get the cover of Time. In fact, he managed it twice in his lifetime, cementing his position as the "Ovid of Ossining," a monster short story writer chronicling suburban malaise at the moment the suburbs were invented.When he got it together to write the occasional novel, they were an event, from The Wapshot Chronicle to his late-in-life comeback Falconer.

Cheever's work and reputation was intertwined with his life as a self-styled country squire of Westchester; a man with a nice house, drinking with randy housewives, taking the Metro-North down to Manhattan when the time called for it. The Cheever mythology of vacations on Martha's Vineyard and suburban intrigue has left its influence as well, playing out in Mad Men, where Cheever serves as a spiritual father to Don Draper. (There are numerous Cheever references in the show — from Don and Betty Draper's house on Bullet Park Lane, to the shot of Draper in the pool, echoing Cheever's greatest story, "The Swimmer.") Really, what Cheever was about, according to the writer, was "a long lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light... and almost everybody wore a hat."

Yet, as Blake Bailey's epic door-stopper of a writer's biography, Cheever: A Life, meticulously details — counting every morning swig of alcohol — like all the best writers, Cheever was a faker. And in a life filled with feints and contradictions, the biggest fake of all was quite possibilty his New Yorker-bred reputation as a merciless New York chronicler. Regionalism is a slippery thing to characterize writers with these days, as anything beyond New York, California, "the South," or some prep school New England is nearly alien. But there's a streak of Massachusetts to Cheever's work, steeped, specifically, in Boston-area Irish Catholicism. It was the side of Cheever that he denied for his first seventeen years, and it blossomed in the central tension of most of his stories: class divides and the gulf between who you are and who you want to be.

According to the great Boston bard Henry Adams, Massachusetts residents are shaped by the weather: "winter and summer, then, were two hostile lives, and bred two separate natures." It's a state that prides itself on its liberalism, while also being filled with staid, conservative-of-mind Yankees who never chance, and who would never admit to anything like Californian self-help or New York neurosis. Cheever, born in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1912, was a prime example, and his divided sides fought their way into his work. He had a gimlet eye for the ways that people mess up in life, from the morose Lawrence of "Goodbye My Brother" or "The Swimmer's" poor Neddy, vigorously moving through chlorinated oblivion, and he turned these sad stories into something transcendent with his trademark humanistic scope.

at home in Ossining, New York, 1979.Cheever presented his childhood in Quincy through rose-colored glasses, implying that he arrived in the world, fully formed as a man in his 17th year, where he dropped out from Thayer Academy while selling a short story called "Expelled" to The New Republic. (He claimed, of course, that he was en route to Harvard, yet Bailey notes that he was certainly not Harvard material as a student.) In a 1969 interview with The Paris Review, Cheever explained his aversion to his childhood: "If I looked over my shoulder I would die. I think frequently of Satchel Paige and his warning that you might see something gaining on you." And yet the events of Cheever's childhood, both traumatic and idyllic, certainly influenced The Wapshot Chronicle's family of eccentrics, be it his mother's embarrassing route from middle class austerity to the owner of a tchotcke shop, or his once-great shoe salesman father's fall into drink, and his confession that he thought John should've "never been born."

While Cheever kept mum on the specifics of his Quincy childhood, he "improvised a background for myself — genteel, traditional — and it is generally accepted." He exaggerated his once-seafaring family's past glories, claiming the Cheevers came over on the Mayflower, and a great-grandfather's boots were on display in the Peabody Essex Museum, when in reality, they were shoe salesmen. It's the type of hubris that sticks: as Bailey recounts in his Cheever prologue, later in life, deep in the throes of alcoholism, during a winter teaching at Boston Universtiy, Cheever would walk down Commonwealth Avenue in freezing weather, sans overcoat, since his father said overcoats make one "look Irish." When a cop came upon the writer, sharing fortified wine on a bench with a bum, he threatened arrest. Cheever's reply? "My name is John Cheever (pronouced Chee-vah). You're out of your mind."

Rock bottom came for Cheever when he was teaching at Boston University in 1974. Perhaps there's some sort of symmetry there — a man born in Boston, running away from it his whole life, spilling its secrets and odd little traditions down in song — the minute he gets back there for an extended period of time, that is when he can't function. Boston is a city shaped by loss; it was, at one point, the defacto capital of the country, until New York took proper hold as the greatest city in the nation. But in a particularly Yankee form of not letting go of a grudge, the city of Boston was shaped and still smarts from this loss. The dominant Irish Catholic culture in Boston's "Athenian twilight years" take a self-hating pride in keeping track of lineage, lines, and the class divides that come from money, as if keeping track of the ways in which people are different can potentially return you to your former glory.

A kindred spirit to Cheever's divisions, Boston native William Monahan, the Oscar-winning writer of The Departed, had sharp insights about the splits and doubles that define the city. A Boston state of mind, for Monahan, meant "a double world where I wasn't part of anything or invested in anything, because I was Irish, and very Irish, but also the other part of my family, not that it had airs, or money, was descended form the first minister on Cape Ann in the 1620s. So in Boston terms I was everyone and no one, with no social investment, no social insecurity, sort of Imitation of Christ in one hand and The Education of Henry Adams in the other, and because I was part of nothing I could observe everything without having anything personal invested in the findings."

with john updike

Because I was part of nothing, I could observe everything — those are fighting words for a writer, and words that could easily be applied to the Massachusetts life of John Cheever. Growing up in this state may have split the writer in two, but he was taking notes on the divide, prepared to sell people out. "Expelled" was the story that led to Cheever's escape — he left Thayer Academy (claiming, of course, that he was expelled in real-life, as well), and he left the South Shore of Massachusetts, the so-called Irish Riveria, and never looked back. Despite his likely denials, Cheever's first story, and all his stories afterwards, were sharp explorations of Massachusetts and its foibles, the scars that Massachusetts leaves you with; and it was a Massachusetts state of mind that would prove to be a constant muse for one of the great writers of the 20th century.

Elisabeth Donnelly is the senior contributor to This Recording. She last wrote in these pages about Joachim Trier's Reprise. She tumbls here and twitters here.

with his daughter, Susan, in 1976, photo by nancy crampton

"Helplessness Blues" - Fleet Foxes (mp3)

"It Ain't Me Babe" - Fleet Foxes (mp3)

"Your Protector" - Fleet Foxes (mp3)

photo by Stathis Orphanos

Turn Back Time

by KARINA WOLF

1987 was a good year for Cher: Suspect, The Witches of Eastwick, a popular fragrance, a pop-metal album, a bagel artisan boyfriend, and a best actress Oscar for Moonstruck. As Pauline Kael wrote, in Moonstruck, Cher was funny and sinuous and devastatingly beautiful.

Yes, beautiful. Like Fitzcarraldo's steamship lurching over a Peruvian mountain, Cher had arrived at a vertiginous instant of surgical perfection: nose, slimmed, teeth straightened and capped, mushroom cloud of hair, presumably not her own, but at least a believably natural hue. A few years later, she was sporting synthetic weaves and blue eyes, and promoting "The Shoop Shoop Song." That's not the Cher any of us want. Give us "Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves"; give us "Half Breed."

I was smitten, maybe because she was a cross between my other two other childhood idols: Lynda Carter, who made being a brunette bearable (brown in the 70s and 80s was like ginger today) and Dolly Parton, who instilled honor in being a painted woman.

Some well-meaning relative bought me a bottle of Cher's perfume, Uninhibited. I listened to Cher's metal version of Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang" and to what I think is the best-ever unisex karaoke anthem, "If I Could Turn Back Time."

But really what appealed was the movie; not just the transformation of Loretta, Cher's dowdy widow, into permed, borough prom queen, but the pleasure of spending time in a Bococa brownstone with the family. (This is post-Godfather but pre-Sopranos).

I don't know, said my mother, if these characters are setting a good example. I think she disapproved of the scene in which, after a bloody steak and a glass of whiskey, Nicolas Cage throws over his kitchen table, hoists Cher in his arms and takes her to bed.

Obviously, Moonstruck is not a field guide to building intimacy. But it is the I-ching for Jungian romantics:

Why do men chase women?
God took a rib from Adam and made Eve. Maybe men chase women to get the rib back.

Why would a man need more than one woman?
Because he fears death.

On whether to accept an ill-chosen engagment ring:
Everything is temporary. That don't excuse nothing.

The correct response to an ill-timed "I love you"?
Snap out of it.

There's also the definition of a good suit (comes with two pairs of pants); a good restaurant customer (a bachelor); the right meal to eat before a flight to Sicily (manicotti); the proper way to propose to a woman; and the exact time to hold a wedding (after mom's dead).

It's a corroboration of Norman Jewison's and the actors' skills that this dialogue is remotely plausible; they achieve exactly the right tone for the overheated characters. Imagine Al Pacino, who was originally pursued for the Nic Cage role, chewing through these lines:

I lost my hand. I lost my bride. Johnny has his hand, Johnny has his bride. You want me to take my heartbreak, put it away and forget it? Is it only a matter of time before a man gives up his one dream of happiness?

John Patrick Shanley's original title was The Bride and The Wolf, suggesting a scrapped Tarantino-Romero collaboration. Really it's a domestic drama with mythical dimensions.

Loretta wants to be a bride — will the groom be the safe choice (a lamb) or the dangerous one (a wolf)?

Nic Cage, festering like a bread-baking Hephaestus, is crazy like a wolf. Or so Loretta tells him when he relates why he lost his hand and his fiancée from a bread-slicing accident. You're a wolf. That woman didn't leave you. She was a trap for you. And you — you chewed off your own foot to get away.

Moonstruck is the last modern record of an adult receiving or perpetrating a hickey. It's also the last time a prosthetic could be seen as a plausible impediment to marriage (if only Heather Mills had been around as an example for Ronny).

It was released when Pauline Kael was still writing for The New Yorker, which means that there were still movies being made worthy of Kael plaudits. See Wes Anderson for further details.

Moonstruck has the visual dullness of mid-80s urban films, a bit of claret mixed in the granite and beige and inky palette. But Kael recognized its conceit: "it's an honest contrivance – the mockery is a giddy homage to our desire for grand passion. With its special lushness, it's a rose-tinted black comedy." Maybe that's the danger my mother warned about; the movies suggests that under a particular planetary configuration, we will be *pleasurably* confronted by our repressed passions.

Karina Wolf is the senior contributor to This Recording. She last wrote in these pages about Tennessee Williams and his sister. She tumbls here.

"If I Could Turn Back Time" - Cher (mp3)

"Believe" - Cher (mp3)

"Walking in Memphis" - Cher (mp3)

This is the second part of a series about the letters of Denise Levertov and Williams Carlos Williams. You can read the first part here.

Agonies of Indecision

The letters of the poets Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams quickly grew familiar. In Levertov, the aging Williams found a like mind eager to take up his artistic sensibilities. Because Denise disliked long phone conversations, she put it all into the letters to her mentor, impressing both with the poems that inevitably accompanied the correspondence as well as descriptions of her life in Mexico married to the woefully mediocre Mitch Goodman. The letters below chronicle her departure from Mexico in the late fifties after Bill first wrote her following an introduction by Robert Creeley.

My dear Denise Goodman,

A man should be able to react "big" to his admirers, it's due them, they do not throw their praise around carelessly. And so I always feel mean when I look into the back of my own head and see what a small figure I make to myself. I am not what they think. I am not the man I should be for THEIR sakes, they deserve something more. It is in fact the duty of the artist to assume greatness. I cannot. What a fool.

I can't believe even what I know be the truth of my own worth. When an individual says he or she "lives" by what I exhibit I get a sudden fright. But at the same time if I myself live by certain deeds why should not others do the same? But we are so weak, what we do seems the worst futility. I am willing to go down to nothing but I don't want to feel I'm dragging anyone down with me.

Here I sit in my little hole like a toad. Thank you for your letter.

Faithfully yours,

W.C. Williams

November 13th, 1951

Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico

Dear Bill

First, thanks very much for subscription to "Naked Ear." That's very kind of you. He has an extraordinary mixture of good & bad in there, hasn't he — mostly bad — but yet it's so open & simple (like, I've heard, the man himself) that one always feels better things may show up. And in fact they do, e.g. Bob's poems. Bob Creeley spent the 3 days after Xmas with us & he was describing Judson Crews whom he likes very much.

Coming to Guadalajara & finding us gone to the coast & the house empty, Creeley broke a window, entered, & did all the Goldilocks things including a little laundry. When the maid's husband came to make his daily inspection & water the lawn, there sat Bob at table with some food & a book propped up; with his one eye and his beard you can imagine the sensation he must have caused.

He was lucky not to have been shot for there've been robberies in the neighbourhood and Mexicans are gun-happy. Bob's inability to prove to Soledad & her husband that he really was a close personal friend of ours, & their agonies of indecision as to whether to treat him as a guest or a bandit (they arrived at a compromise) make a comic piece in the genre of Pirandello's The Jar.

At the beach we ate fresh coconuts & lobsters, saw a most beautiful insouciant armandillo, swam every day, walked in the palm jungle, caught some inedible fish (tho' the water teemed with edible ones) from an unbalanced & unresponsive canoe (on the lagoon) and in addition I distinguished myself by getting a bad attack of malaria, complete with nephritis, hepatitis, & gastritis. The day before we left the bay filled up with enormous sharks, something I wouldn't have missed seeing for the world, tho' I didn't care to swim any more after that. Once or twice we swam at night — once while Bob was with us.

We were obliged to go to bed early as the candles flickered in the sea wind & hurt our eyes, so we got up in the time to see the sun rise, most days.

The most delightful twinkle-footed little pigs of all colors & their lean long-snouted medieval-looking parents, were constantly wandering through the sandy village of palm-huts & snuffing abut the beach.

I have some poems to send you but Mitch has the typewriter and won't be back for another week so I'll wait till then.

The book from Ferlinghetti was to have been out by Xmas but there was some trouble about the typeface & cover so it will be a while longer.

John & Ruth Herrmann & Juanito have gone to Houston Texas where they intend to remain 6 months & then return to Mexico. John is going into the V.A. hospital there for another hernia operation, & hopes as a result to have his pension augmented. He spent a little time at the beach with Mitch before leaving. We hope, & so do they, that the complete change of scene (after 8 yrs in Mexico) will help Ruth who has just been killing herself with drink. I went into a spin over it for a while, until I realized that no one person, least of all an emotional one like me, can do anything to help a person in that condition.

An image that lingers with me: — her blurred voice & tousled gray hair, her ravaged face from which glowed one beautiful eye (the other half-closed from a terrific shiner) as she recalled you coming up to her years ago at some meeting & saying, "Ah, Ruth, your lovely face — your lovely face makes it worth while having come..." And the strange dignity she retained in her degradation, in the dirty chilly kitchen among the flies & the giggling servant-girls. Somehow she pulled up when John came back from the beach & left for the States in pretty good shape. John himself aside from his poor health is O.K.

I feel ashamed to be so remote, to have given so little thought and feeling, to the Hungarian rising — but it's from the feeling of distrust one has of all the reports — not of the fact of what happened, essentially, but to the way it is used by the worst people. For example I picked up eagerly a sort of supplement to Life consisting of pictures & history of the whole affair — and dropped it without looking because however many true photographs could have been taken there's always the sickening feeling that, in the Time-Life context, they're fixed. So that natural impulse to sympathy, indignation, etc, gets turned back on itself. All the passion and illusion of the thirties that fizzled out with the war is denied to one in the 50s because one's damned if one's going to be tricked and bamboozled. (Of course I was a child in the 30s, but I lived some of it through my sister, 9 years older than I — walked in May Day parades, held the soap box steady in Hyde Park etc) And then one feels ungenerous & introverted. Well, Schuhmacher, bleib bei dein Last, I guess.

Hope Xmas & New Years were happy for you and Floss, to whom please give my love as always.

Love-

from Denise

January 17th, 1957

Dear Denise:

I just mailed you a note about the certificate to be returned to me, thank you. But in the same mail with your letter telling me of my mistake in sending came Cid Corman's Origin with your poems — which you had sent me earlier in manuscript, at least the one called "Tomatlan."

Reading the poems it came over me how almost impossible it is to realize what it is that goes over from a writer into her poem. And how it gets there. Even the alertest reader can miss it. The poet herself might miss it and quit trying. And yet if it is important enough to her she will never quit trying to snare the "thing" among the words. Where does it lie among the words? That is the critic's business to discover and reveal that. You do not make it easy for.

I have never forgot how you came to me out of the formalism of English verse. At first as must have been inevitable, although I welcomed you I was not completely convinced, after all I wasn't completely convinced of my own position, I wanted you to convince ME.

Even recently I fight against accepting you unconditionally. It must always be so with a person we love and admire. It must be in the words themselves and what you find to do with them and what you have the spirit and trust to rely on the reader to find what you have put among them.

Where is it? In detail. Microscopically.

To take that poem apart or before that to view it as a whole, what do I see? But before that where else in this issue of that magazine is there something to challenge it. I'll have to pass that one up because I have not read those poems as carefully as I have yours.

Returning to that particular poem I have spoken of, to read it gives me a sensation of calm, of confidence. A countryside, a tropical jungle appears to me into which with my imagination I enter. It is done with the fewest possible words, with no straining after effect without the poet's apparent consciousness of making any effect at all.

The words used are copied direct from a vision seen, actually seen. The transition between the reader and what is being put down for him is direct, nothing extraneous has been allowed to creep in. This is a great preliminary virtue. It makes the final picture fresh as is anything seen for the first time, by a child, but let's not overemphasize that.

What, granted that, has the poet selected to use in her picture? She looking at the original picture must have selected significant details because after all she cannot see everything and what she seizes in her imagination reveals in the first place her intelligence and emotional range and depth. Her sight is keen, her mood relaxed.

I think the trick is done in the second stanza with the words "its silky fur brushes me". And later on "the palms shake their green breasts,"... Effortlessly, is the impression in the instantaneous exchange that takes place in the metaphor flares as a flash in our minds.

But a poet is not to be trapped so easily (it is all a flight and an escape) an internal battle of wits and the intelligence, a man and woman competing, wrestling for the crown of laurels, and some men and women write for cash. Denise Goodman has the ability to bundle the whole mess into one, balance calmly on her head, not giving herself away.

"New peace shades the mind here, the jungle shadows frayed by the sea winds." The test of how the poet is going to divide her lines is the test of what she or he is.

Bill

February 11th, 1957

Dear Bill & Floss

It's a long time since I last wrote — you'll have just about written me off as having disappeared into the Sierra Madre.

We had a long meandering bus trip down here stopping at different places & seeing a beautiful variety of landscape — the best being that between Mexico City & Puebla, which has not only its own riches, but the two snowy volcanoes Popocatepetl & the Sleeping Woman at its horizons. I had just received $80 for 2 poems from Mademoiselle, so in Mexico City we had a little leeway with money & bought a whole lot of books (since Oaxaca has no American library) which was fun. I don't mean eighty dollars' worth of course!

Finally we got down here to find that the house wasn't ready for us owing to a typical Mexico mishmash — that was the first week in July — now we've moved into 2 rooms & the kitchen & they're rebuilding the rest around us — it will be nice when it's finished but meanwhile the sounds (beginning at 6:30 am — continuing till sundown) of plastering, sawing, plumbing, whistling, singing & cement mixing (by hand) are driving us nuts, especially Mitch, and especially since the patio is almost completely obstructed by rotten beams (removed from the original structure) metal rods) to be used in the present structure) huge mudpuddles (it is the rainy season) and our landlord's family washlines (the landlord & family are charming friends and have adopted my mother for life, which makes it almost impossible to complain, especially since all this is not the fault of anyone in particular).

Anyway — Mitch is restless & wants to get back to New York; so he's probably going to drive up with some friends in a week & stay a couple of months. I guess we will all 3 be back next spring. The prospect of going back to N.Y. gave me the shakes as recently as a week ago, but I've now realized that it is inevitable because Mitch needs it, it is his native ground & he comes to a standstill when he's away too long. For me it is rather bad than good but I'm very adjustable once I can see there's no way out. So now I'm beginning to think of the good things about a return — the chance of seeing you for one. And seeing paintings, hearing music. Nell Blaine has been painting down here & I've gotten a kick out of her work (& finding what a good person she is too, after years of mere acquaintance) — & it makes me realize how much I miss that.

Insurgentes Avenue

Here, even in Mexico City, there's nothing. The Mexican painters don't interest me, except some of the engravers. Oaxaca itself & the great archeological sites nearby I love, but somehow none of it has the impact on me that the bare dry prairie & distant mountains around Guadalajara had a year & 1/2 ago — bitter & almost ugly, they seemed the right place to come at a bitter time. However once this damn house is fixed I mean to suck whatever savor is to be had from the remaining months here, if I can.

Today I discovered something odd — H.L. Davis whose poems (published by Harriet Monroe in the twenties) I'd found in an anthology & liked very much, also a book of his called Winds of Morning, & to whom I'd been meaning to write to ask if he still wrote poetry, is living right here just outside Oaxaca. I haven't met him yet but am going out there in a day or 2. It was rather like finding John Herrmann, to find him living here — tho I don't expect him to be such a nice person as poor John (from whom we haven't heard recently — & in his case that's not a good sign).

The electricity just gave out (see "The Plumed Serpent," very little has changed) and there's about 1/4 inch of oil left in the lamp. We were very glad to read about that Award they gave you. I hope you've both been well — has it been a good summer for you? — not that it's ended but there's a feeling here of summer visitors departing & fall beginning. I've been dyeing curtains all sorts of unexpected colors. We have a 16-year old maid called Lydia, she has terribly bandy legs but such a nice face. The workmen's wives and families come twice a day & they all have long civilized picnics among the rubble.

With love, always,

from Denise

August 25th, 1957

In a diary entry from November, Levertov wrote, "went to San Felipe to visit H.L. Davis. Liked him — gave him my book."

The letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams are edited by Christopher MacGowan. You can read the first part of this series here.

"Bitter Branches" - P.J. Harvey (mp3)

"In the Dark Places" - P.J. Harvey (mp3)

"The Last Living Rose" - P.J. Harvey (mp3)

The Dark Side of Audrey Hepburn

by ALMIE ROSE

Nothing about my ex-husband interests me. I have spent two years in hell – surely the worst in my life.

More than once, I was at the station seeing trainloads of Jews being transported, seeing all these faces over the top of the wagon. I was exactly the same age as Anne Frank. We were both 10 when the war broke out… if you read [her] diary, I’ve marked one place where she says, ‘Five hostages shot today.’ That was the day my uncle was shot.

I admit that people have often said they never really get to know me. But does anyone ever know someone else completely?

 It’s become cliché for teenagers and young women of our generation to love Audrey Hepburn. For some reason girls of the 90s grew up with an affinity for Hepburn to where it became, "Welcome to college, here’s your Breakfast At Tiffany’s poster for your dorm room." That film is based on a dark novella in which Holly Golightly doesn't get her cat back, doesn’t get the guy, and is generally a horrible person. But in the film, it’s not even really clear that Hepburn plays a prostitute. That completely went over my head the first time I saw it. I thought she just liked to wake up early and put on a party dress. Also there’s that horribly racist Mr. Yunioshi character that Mickey Rooney threw in there. So I guess if you really analyze it, there is a dark side to the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, just not in an obvious way.

And that’s the thing about Audrey Hepburn. She has darkness but it isn’t obvious. The problems of Marilyn Monroe became part of her legend but Audrey’s were carefully tucked away in a Givenchy handbag. A friend of mine once despaired about a fight she got into with a rude friend of a friend. She didn't even know this person and yet she was torn up about it. When I asked her why it bothered her so much, she said it was because she strived to be like Audrey Hepburn, and "no one ever said anything bad about Audrey Hepburn."

Challenge accepted.

She is a rank amateur who needed a dozen takes. – Humphrey Bogart

Bogart hated working with Hepburn, but he had a point. Though she had come off a major film (Roman Holiday) for which she won an Academy Award, her success was partly due to luck, timing, and the graciousness of her costar Gregory Peck, who insisted on giving the unknown equal billing. Before Roman Holiday Hepburn starred in the play Gigi. Paramount actually considered her "plump" and put her on a strict diet of steak tartare and greens before filming. (You know Hollywood is fucked up when Audrey Hepburn is put on a diet.) Hepburn herself never believed that she was thin.

According to her son, Hepburn would refer to herself as “fake thin” because her upper body and waist was especially thin and would give her an overall appearance of slightness. One can’t help but roll their eyes at her claim because, well, look at her. Rumors of an eating disorder plagued her, but if you consider World War II an eating disorder, then yes, she was very disordered. In 1944 Nazis occupied the Netherlands, where she and her mother lived.

Audrey and her family, with the exception of her Nazi sympathizer father, worked for the resistance. She suffered severe malnutrition and once had to hide in a cellar for a few days. When she was a child she almost died of whooping cough. This, combined with her poor nutrition during the war, lead to her asthma. Despite the fact that she had weak lungs and knew it, she continued to smoke for the rest of her life, even though she was consistently told that she "might be in the early stages of emphysema." Yes, it was the fifties and sixties and smoking was a vice, but even someone in that era with those symptoms would know it was a bad idea.

In the 80s she lamented over the condition of her skin, but it was typical of her to point out flaws. She would often call herself ugly and wished that she had a bigger chest. It is of course these "flaws" that have made her so iconic, but it’s very possible she had some form of body dysmorphic disorder or at least a very low self-esteem.

Her weight plummeted to an all-time low during her first divorce from her controlling and jealous husband Mel Ferrer. A child of divorce and with a child of her own, Hepburn desperately wanted to make the marriage work, but Ferrer's likely infidelity and definite need for complete control over Hepburn’s professional and personal life sent her into a deep depression. The man had to be a total asshole for Hepburn to refer to her divorce as "two years in hell" considering that she spent most of her early teens dodging Nazis.

During the separation Mel stayed with Hepburn but only out of concern for her health; she was apparently, according to a friend, "down to 82 pounds and looks thin and wan; she has never looked so frail in her life, even when she was ill." Again, quite the statement, considering that Hepburn compared her youth to Anne Frank's.

Their divorce was described as "absolutely unexpected" not only to her fans and the media, but their friends as well. One of them, Dee Hartford Hawks, said that only two weeks before their separation she ran into them at a nightclub in France and that "Audrey and Mel were acting like honey-mooners. They danced every number together – even the Watusi." The Watusi!! Who could have predicted this?? A second miscarriage also put a strain on their already frail marriage.

In an article by Tom Daly from the 1960s, he reported that Audrey attempted suicide twice. Once she tried to slit her wrists and it was Mrs. Yul Brynner who got her to the hospital in time. An unnamed insider said that "I've heard about Audrey’s suicide attempts, too, and that shocks me, but in a way I’m not surprised. Whatever that woman does she does with her whole heart and soul. And when she married Mel, she invested everything she had emotionally. It’s no wonder that she feels lost now." And it’s no wonder that so many sources (aside from Bogart and Hawks) wanted to keep such scandalous thoughts to themselves because Audrey was revered and famous for her elegance and charm. In an article "The Two Hepburns" (not referring to Katharine and Audrey, but to Audrey’s light and dark sides), Eliot George tapes into this darker side of Hepburn: "The wispy, sable-browed, gamin-faced Audrey is either Elfin Charmer or Iron Butterfly, depending on where you stand."

Another person who had plenty of bad things to say about Hepburn was Brenda Marshall, William Holden’s wife at the time that Holden and Hepburn shot Sabrina. Hepburn and Holden carried on an affair. (It was ironic that later in life Audrey would try so hard to create the perfect family and do anything for her children, though she slept with Holden well-knowing that he was married with three kids.) Holden would invite Hepburn over to his home for dinner and he, Audrey, and Marshall, who eerily resembled Hepburn, would all eat together. "Audrey felt guilty all through the meal." No! This is Watusi shocking!!

Everyone assumed that Holden would leave Marshall for Hepburn but as soon as she found out that Holden had a vasectomy and could not provide her with children, she left. Holden was also a crazy drunk who died when he fell and hit his head on his coffee table and didn’t realize that it was serious so he didn’t go to the hospital and just kind of bled out to death in his living room. Charlie Sheen has nothing on William Holden.

Paris When It Sizzles, 1964

Holden and Hepburn would reunite about ten years later for the film Paris When It Sizzles, which one column described as "the worst movie ever made by anyone at any time." It was also around this time that Hepburn's marriage slowly and painfully began to unravel, and one can see the stress this put on her body. Even for Hepburn, she is unusually thin in his movie, and it may have been the only time in her life in which the eating disorder rumors were true. Holden tried to reignite their affair, but this time she was the married one and would not cave in.

People think of Hepburn as ever humble and ladylike but even she had her moments of divadom and snarkiness. While filming The Nun’s Story in Africa, Hepburn demanded that, "quarantine laws in the Belgian Congo would be waved for [her terrier] Famous […] and most important of all, that a bidet would be installed and waiting for her... It was probably the only bathroom fixture of its kind in Central Africa at that time." Slyly ironic considering she was playing a nun and nuns are all living without possessions. She did routinely visit a leper colony and refused to wear protective gloves "out of sympathy with the afflicted." She then likely went to her guest house and freshened up in her bidet-equipped bathroom.

While filming My Fair Lady she wouldn’t let Ferrer see her until her street urchin Eliza Doolittle look was completely washed away, though even though this look consisted of mere soot dotted on her face, Vaseline smeared in her hair, and dirty finger nails, and of course she still looked stunning. After retiring from film she married second husband Andrea Dotti and announced, "Now Mia Farrow can get my parts." Perhaps she meant it as a way of passing the baton over to another doe-eyed actress, but there is a certain edge to the comment, considering that after divorcing Mel, Hepburn "emerged with a hairdo even short than Mia's!"

Though people praise her for aging gracefully, perhaps the most shocking Hepburn quote ever was given during a 1980s interview with Harper’s Bazaar: “I think it’s [plastic surgery] a marvelous thing, done in small doses, very expertly, so that no one notices.” Not even Nicole Kidman will admit to her notoriously frozen face, but here was a beauty icon freely praising plastic surgery.

It is just another part of Hepburn’s life that most people breezily skip past. She is more than that waif figure forever posed in that little black dress on 5th Avenue. She came from a god-awful childhood, suffered from depression, got divorced twice and had an affair. There is nothing new or evil about any of these things, but it is interesting that these aspects of her life remained hidden. Monroe was just as sweet, just as loving, but her secrets spilled out and are still notorious. Why is Hepburn so sacred? Granted, the work she did with Unicef was immense and admirable, and nothing should detract from that. But why must she be a goddess? She was human, like any of us. She had flaws.

And Grace Kelly really was a slut. I stand by that.

Almie Rose is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is the creator of Apocalypstick. She last wrote in these pages about her life with rapper Kanye West.

"Martha" - Tim Buckley (mp3)

"Martha" - Tom Waits (mp3)

"We All Fall in Love Sometimes" - Jeff Buckley (mp3)

I Paint

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Because I didn't go to art school, a class in the painting department was out of the question. Instead I signed up for the introductory painting class in the illustration department. The illustration department was a sort of more old style branch of the school, like what I imagined a 1950s art school to be like. The idea that you could teach somebody how to make art seemed as ridiculous to me as the idea you could teach someone how to write. You either could or you couldn't. You can or you can't.

I was deciding between drawing and painting. Like most people, I maintain a variety of side talents that I can imagine could be my main talent if only I were a little more focused on it, and I am very talented at drawing. I spent the majority of my school years drawing in notebooks during class and while my style is more caricaturish than strictly realistic, I am pretty fucking good. So the prospect of drawing in a real art class was exciting, as was that of life models, which seemed really official and traditional. But given the choice, the asceticism of drawing; the discipline and repetition verging on tedium, the limited supplies? It didn't stand a chance against the painting class. 

Painting, with all its accessories and trappings, had mystique I could not explain. It appealed deeply to my Irish-Catholic half, the side of me that enjoys going to botánicas and cataloguing sins and saints. But it mostly had to do with paintings. With the way that observing certain paintings could induce really powerful feelings in me.

I wanted to see what I had inside. The same way I was sure I could write a great song if I only knew how to play the guitar, I was convinced I had paintings in me. I was sure they would come out of me as soon as I got a brush in my hand. That when I had a little technique and a canvas in front of me it would be impossible to contain them.  

On the first day of class I ran into a really pretty girl I kind of knew who had inspired me a few months before to stop wearing bras entirely after seeing her at a restaurant in a wife-beater without one. "Wow, cool" I'd thought admiringly, "She doesn't give a fuck. And neither do I!" I tend to overdo it when I go to an extreme. She was on her way to the drawing class, and encouraged me to come so we could be in it together. I thought about it for a second. I loved making friends, especially very attractive ones. But I was really committed to the idea of the introductory painting class. To painting.

Every week after that I'd see her in the stairwell. We'd greet each other, then she'd turn the other way to head into the drawing class. Even when I didn't see her I would imagine her going to the drawing class to sketch and long to have followed her that first day. Being good at drawing, it turned out, had no bearing on other kinds of art. 

The painting teacher was a tall willowy bald man in a tunic with the kind of round frame glasses favored by older artist types. He commuted in weekly from New York. He was cold, with a zen master manner that appealed to me. I decided immediately that I liked him. In retrospect he was gay but I never thought about it at the time. During the first class he showed us some of his recent work; a series of grayscale oil paintings of the interior of a washing machine. "This guy is fucking serious," I thought admiringly.  

I was a senior in college, avoiding thinking about what I was going to do exactly after graduating. My boyfriend of a year had gone abroad and I was unprepared to feel so weird about our breakup. I'd decided not to do a thesis because a big project that was due all at once and mostly unsupervised seemed like the worst possible idea for a Ferris Bueller finish everything at the last minute person like me. But my friends were incredibly busy, and I had too much time to think about how I really felt (terrible).

Painting seemed like an elegant solution to all my problems. In lieu of a thesis, it would give me one thing to focus on. Going down to the art school would provide variety in my routine and I could devote all my unspoken for spare time to working on my paintings. To becoming a painter, a thing I was sure I could also be. It didn't occur to me that I might later resent my own arrogant blitheness that it would be easy.

I bought as many art supplies as I could afford, which was not all that many because I learned quickly that oil painting is a truly expensive pursuit. I was attracted to the accessories, the tinctures and tools. But I'd had no idea just how many accessories there really were, how much alchemy and liniment went into preparing the canvases. How familiar I'd soon become with the nightmarish poetic phrase "rabbit-skin glue."

I might have known some of this if I had asked any of my many, many friends who painted and took art classes even the most rudimentary questions about what a painting class might entail in advance of signing up for the painting class at the art school. But I had just charged in confidently like an idiot, like I generally always did.

The first few weeks of the class knocked the arrogance right out of me. I couldn't do anything. I had no knowledge, no background, no color theory. I thinned the paint wrong. I held the brush wrong. I couldn't mix colors correctly to save my life. Everyone else in the class seemed to know exactly what they were doing. They could all paint.

I asked for help every minute, but it didn't help any. I was terrible. Relentlessly terrible. Terrible in new and inventively terrible ways, ways that seemed to baffle the teacher and any classmates who caught a glance of my canvases. There was a wall between me and being any good at painting, and I could not get over the wall. I could barely even make out its sides. But I felt it there in front of my face, blocking me from my goal.

All we painted were still lifes. There would be three set-ups and over three hours, and each session was a lesson for me in abject failure. I was the worst person in the class by a long shot and it was humiliating. I fucking sucked. The teacher would come stand near me and just sort of shake his head. He was right to be confused. Why was I there?

Our homework was the same as the classwork. Three still lifes, a different color scheme each week. I went to the art building on my campus and set up my easel and materials by the picture window. I was jealous of the studio cubicles, especially of the clippings taped up inside, your own space to just dwell on inspirations and ideas.

Having a cubicle means you are a real artist, I thought. I saw the real artists I knew, working on their thesis projects, utterly consumed in themselves. "Why didn't I do a thesis? Why didn't I write a novel? Or short stories? Because I am a fucking idiot."

Then I tried to paint the shells that I was looking at again, and failed. Each attempt a failure in a totally different way. In one the shells are much too pink. In another the arrangement appears two dimensional. I found a new way to fail every time. I painted slower, then faster. Sober, then high. I went to the studio drunk and ended up falling asleep on the bench in the lobby. I woke up and outside the glass it was snowing.

I began to dread painting, because I dreaded being terrible. I hated the endless inevitable failures that were my attempts at translating an image from real life onto a canvas. I did not enjoy being terrible at it, and the classwork and homework were so rigid that there was no possibility of adjusting the subject matter to my outsider style, as I had done in other fields such as dance. I wondered a lot why it was that I so vehemently couldn't enjoy something I wasn't good at. How egotistical that was.

I was accustomed to picking things up easily, impressing and occasionally frustrating others with the seeming effortlessness with which I could pick new things up at will. There was no picking up painting. It was hard work and I was out of my depth. And I could tell. And the teacher could really tell, and he was getting sick of my excuses.

I had been able to bullshit my way through a lot of things in life, but I could not bullshit a painting. Furthermore, there was no failing, because I had already failed a class earlier in the year. I needed the credit to graduate. I stopped going to class.

My refusal to attend coincided with a big snowstorm after a long weekend and I wrote off the first couple weeks of missed classes as weather related. The third week I was just slacking and knew it. The teacher knew it too. He e-mailed to say he'd fail me if I didn't show up the next week. "This guy is fucking serious," I thought irritatedly. 

I came back to class and tried to be less of an asshole, but was almost definitely even more of one in this attempt. The only place I really thrived in the class was during the critiques. Oh I had opinions about everyone's paintings. Positive ones! I could talk all day about what I liked about one painting or another. I loved talking about what I liked about things. I was still the worst painter but I sure talked the most during the crits.

I thought a lot about this tendency I had, towards language. How when I saw a tree I immediately began describing it in my head. I had talked about it with my boyfriend right before he'd left. He had countered that he never did that. That when he looked at the tree he saw only the tree. And if he started to break it down, it was into colors and shapes. Images, not words. I didn't understand. He never read for pleasure either. 

Painting seemed more mystical than ever. Now that my fantasy of being good at it had been destroyed and replaced with the truth (that I sucked) I was in complete awe of anyone with any painting talent. Anyone who was better than me was a genius. I admired those with talents I couldn't master. It was like being good at a sport. 

I continued to go to class. I stopped dreading failure. I didn't expect failure, but neither was I devastated when it happened. My ego was no longer in it. I had no natural talent for painting, but that didn't mean none could be cultivated. Sometimes I'd feel as though I had gotten one detail about the set-up across in my painting, and that would satisfy me enough to keep going. I had a couple of stupid winter hats, and whenever I wore one I was mistaken for an art student (and then asked directions).

It was not sudden but I began to understand. I started to look at things differently. I learned to think about the quality of the light. How things appeared to be different colors depending what time of day it was. How to observe buildings. How to describe without words. How this was a whole other language, a universal one, and I did know it. I had just been trying too hard to force everything into my own native dialect. 

We stopped doing still lifes and started painting nudes. I liked the life models. I felt connected to my own brushstrokes and color choices in a way I previously hadn't. Whatever it was I was trying to comprehend, I couldn't possibly put it into words, and I understood now how that was the point (zen master indeed). I had climbed the wall.

As with any fallow time, when I think about this period of my life I just wind up romanticizing it. I remember how cold I was and how heartbroken, how thwarted I felt and how hurt. I see myself riding my bike to the studio through the snow, listening to Southern gangsta rap on headphones, the music you listen to that helps blunt your feelings (rather than the miserable music you use to indulge them) with my portfolio slung over my shoulder. How determined I must have looked. It makes me laugh.

I proposed a series of paintings of small toys for my final project and was approved. I hung out with my other recently single friend who was an actual painter and we worked on our art in her attic room which had a big awesome skylight. We smoked joints and listened to Electric Light Orchestra albums on her record player while we painted. That I thought I was miserable that semester seems so ridiculous now.

I had no idea if I was going to pass the painting class given those three absences, and passing was necessary for my graduating, and graduating seemed crucial given how much money I was now (am) in debt for. I was nervous regarding a lot of other things about my immediate future, absolutely none of which would turn out to matter at all. 

When I think of the thing I might have written that semester had I dedicated myself to it I feel no remorse. No regret that I failed to take on a big writing project instead. No curiosity about what I might have produced. It would never have been any good. You cannot produce something great on purpose or on schedule. The painting class was more important, akin to psychedelics. It was the most important class I ever took.

The teacher surveyed my final project; small still lifes of toy cars. In his affectless tone he said something measuredly complimentary about my curve towards improvement and I felt myself stir with deep pride. How could I tell him how much it meant that he had tolerated me, had humbled me, had let me learn the lesson for myself? And then how much I had learned? I couldn't tell him, so I didn't. I passed painting with a C.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She twitters here and tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about her feud with Jack Nicholson.

False Beard

The diary of Franz Kafka in the year of our lord 1911 reveals the most sensitive, perceptive artist of a generation. In turn of the century Prague he was a Jew among Jews among Gentiles, noticing every glance and putting off every task as if it were addressed to him alone. The eldest of six, he was conflicted about his father and basically everyone he met. He had yet to begin any novel writing; he began his first story ("Description of a Struggle") proper at the tender age of 20 and worked on it at times until it was published in 1905. Rather than assuming a forward-thinking shape of a whole, Kafka's early writing approached the elephant on a diagonal, finding in glimpses what he would eventually discern at length. The following selections from his diary are abridged from longer entries.

31 October 1911

When on Sunday afternoon, just after passing three women, I stepped into Max's house, I thought: There are still one or two houses in which I have something to do, there are still women walking behind me who can see me turn in on a Sunday afternoon at a house door in order to work, talk, purposefully, hurriedly, only occasionally looking at the matter in this way. This must not remain so for long.

1 November

This afternoon the pain occasioned by my loneliness came upon me so piercingly and intensely that I became aware that the strength which I gain through this writing thus spends itself, a strength which I certainly have not intended for this purpose.

2 November

This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart.

8 November

All afternoon at the lawyer's about the factory.

The girl who only because she was walking arm in arm with her sweetheart looked quietly around.

When I was waiting at the lawyer's I looked at the one typist and thought how hard it was to make out her face even while looking at it. The relationship between a hairdo standing out almost at the same distance all around her head, and the straight nose that most of the time seemed too long, was especially confusing. When the girl who was reading a document made a more striking movement, I was almost confounded by the observation that through my contemplation I had remained more of a stranger to the girl than if I had brushed her skirt with my little finger.

9 November

Schiller some place or other: The chief thing is (or something similar) “to transform emotion into character.”

11 November

I will try, gradually, to group everything certain in me, later the credible, then the possible, etc. The greed for books is certain in me. Not really to own or to read them, but rather to see them, to convince myself of their actuality in the stalls of a bookseller. If there are several copies of the same book somewhere, each individual one delights me. It is as though this greed came from my stomach, as though it were a perverse appetite. Books that I own delight me less, but books belonging to my sisters do delight me. The desire to own them is incomparably less, it is almost absent.

12 November

A tall, powerful man of fifty with a waistline. His hair is stiff and tousled (Daudet's, for example) although pressed fairly close to his skull. Like all old Southerners with their thick nose and the broad, wrinkled face that goes with it, from whose nostrils a strong wind can blow as from a horse's muzzle, and of whom you know very well that this is the final state of their faces, it will not be replaced but will endure for a long time; his face also reminded me of the face of an elderly Italian woman wearing a very natural, definitely not false beard.

14 November

Tuesday. Yesterday at Max's who returned from his Brünn lecture.

In the afternoon while falling asleep. As though the solid skullcap encircling the insensitive cranium had moved more deeply inwards and left a part of the brain exposed to the free play of light and muscles.

To awaken on a cold autumn morning full of yellowish light. To force your way through the half-shut window and while still in front of the panes, before you fall, to hover, arms extended, belly arched, legs curved backwards, like the figures on the bows of ships in old times.

Before falling asleep.

It seems so dreadful to be a bachelor, to become an old man struggling to keep one's dignity while begging for an invitation whenever one wants to spend an evening in company, having to carry one's meal home in one's hand, unable to expect anyone with a lazy sense of calm confidence, able only with difficulty and vexation to give a gift to someone, having to say good night at the front door, never being able to run up a stairway beside one's wife, to lie ill and have only the solace of the view from one's window when one can sit up, to have only side doors in one's room leading into other people's living rooms, to feel estranged from one’s family, with whom one can keep on close terms only by marriage, first by the marriage of one's parents, then, when the effect of that has worn off, by one's own, having to admire other people's children and not even being allowed to go on saying: “I have none myself,” never to feel oneself grow older since there is no family growing up around one, modeling oneself in appearance and behavior on one or two bachelors remembered from our youth.

16 November

From an old notebook: “Now, in the evening, after having studied since six o'clock in the morning, I noticed that my left hand had already for some time been sympathetically clasping my right hand by the fingers.”

19 November

This evening I was again filled with anxiously restrained abilities.

3 December

My recent reading of Mörike's autobiography to my sisters began well enough but improved as I went on, and finally, my fingertips together, it conquered inner obstacles with my voice's unceasing calm, provided a constantly expanding panorama for my voice, and finally the whole room round about me dared admit nothing but my voice. Until my parents, returning from business, rang.

Before falling asleep felt on my body the weight of the fists on my light arms.

9 December

Stauffer-Bern: “The sweetness of creation begets illusions about its real value."

13 December

Because of fatigue did not write and lay now on the sofa in the warm room and now on the one in the cold room, with sick legs and disgusting dreams. A dog lay on my body, one paw near my face. I woke up because of it but was still afraid for a little while to open my eyes and look at it.

It is almost a custom for a comedian to marry a serious actress and a serious actor a comedienne, and in general to take along with them only married women or relatives. The way once, at midnight, the piano player, probably a bachelor, slipped out of the door with his music.

Young Pipes when singing. As sole gesture, he rolls his right forearm back and forth at the joint, he opens his hands a little and then draws them together again. Sweat covers his face, especially his upper lip, as though with splinters of glass. A buttonless dickey has been hurriedly tucked into the vest under his straight black coat.

The warm shadow in the soft red of Mrs. Klug's mouth when she sings.

Jewish streets in Paris, rue Rosier, side street of rue de Rivoli.

If a disorganized education having only that minimum coherence indispensable for the merest uncertain existence is suddenly challenged to a task limited in time, therefore necessarily arduous, to self-development, to articulate speech, then the response can only be a bitterness in which are mingled arrogance over achievements which could be attained only by calling upon all one's untrained powers, a last glance at the knowledge that escapes in surprise and that is so very fluctuating because it was suspected rather than certain, and, finally, hate and admiration for the environment.

Before falling asleep yesterday I had an image of a drawing in which a group of people were isolated like a mountain in the air. The technique of the drawing seemed to me completely new and, once discovered, easily executed. It is certain that Sunday can never be of more use to me than a weekday because its special organization throws all my habits into confusion and I need the additional free time to adjust myself halfway to this special day.

The moment I were set free from the office I would yield at once to my desire to write an autobiography. I would have to have some such decisive change before me as a preliminary goal when I began to write in order to be able to give direction to the mass of events. But I cannot imagine any other inspiriting change than this, which is itself so terribly improbable. Then, however, the writing of the autobiography would be a great joy because it would move along as easily as the writing down of dreams, yet it would have an entirely different effect, a great one, which would always influence me and would be accessible as well to the understanding and feeling of everyone else.

18 December

I hate Werfel, not because I envy him, but I envy him too. He is healthy, young and rich, everything that I am not. Besides, gifted with a sense of music, he has done very good work early and easily, he has the happiest life behind him and before him, I work with weights I cannot get rid of, and I am entirely shut off from music.

26 December

List of things which today are easy to imagine as ancient: the crippled beggars on the way to promenades and picnic places, the unilluminated atmosphere at night, the crossed girders of the bridge.

5 January

For two days I have noticed, whenever I choose to, an inner coolness and indifference. Yesterday evening, during my walk, every little street sound, every eye turned towards me, every picture in a showcase, was more important to me than myself.

Excuses for Max Brod

I am now half delighted that I am actually studying at last, and for that reason will not come to our cafe this week. I would very much like to be there, because I never study after 7 o’clock; but if I do take a little change of this kind, it disturbs my studies all day the next day. And I daren’t waste any time. So it’s better for me to read my Kugelgen in the evening, a splendid occupation for a little mind and for sleep when it comes. Love to you

Franz

Now, dear fellow, I shan’t be able to go out anywhere for a bit. The Dean has been so irresponsible as to fix my finals a little earlier and as I was ashamed to be more cautious than he, I’ve made no protest. All my love,

Franz

Dear Max

Forgive me for yesterday evening, please! I shall come to your place at five o’clock. My excuse will be a little comic, so you are quite sure to believe it.

Franz

My dear Max

I am a completely useless person, really, but nothing can be done about it. Yesterday afternoon I sent you a letter by special messenger: “Here in the tobacconist’s in the Graben I beg you to forgive me for not being able to come tonight. I have a headache, my teeth are falling out, my razor is blunt, I am an unpleasant object to look at. - Your F.”

And now in the evening I go and lie down on my sofa and reflect that I have made my excuses anyhow, and that there is again a little order in the world, but as I am thinking it over, I suddenly remember that I wrote Wladislaw street instead of Schalen street.

Now, please, I beg of you, be annoyed about it, and don’t speak to me any more because of it. I am utterly on the downward path, and - I can see far enough for that - I can’t help going to the dogs. Also I should love to cut myself, but as that is impossible, there is only one thing I can rejoice about, and that is that I have no pity on myself, and so I have at last become egoistic to that extent. We should celebrate achieving this height - you and I, I mean; just as a future enemy, you should celebrate it.

It is late. I should like you to know that I wished you a very good night tonight.

Your Franz

My Max

I am in such a bad way that I think I can only get over it by not speaking to anyone for a week, or as long as may be necessary. From the fact that you won’t try to answer this postcard in any way, I shall see that you are fond of me.

Your Franz

"Walked Out On A Line" - Okkervil River (mp3)

"Mermaid" - Okkervil River (mp3)

"Calling And Not Calling My Ex" - Okkervil River (mp3)

I do not envy particular married couples, I simply envy all married couples together; and even when I do envy one couple only, it is the happiness of married life in general, in all its infinite variety, that I envy - the happiness to be found in any one marriage, even in the likeliest case, would probably plunge me into despair.

I don’t believe people exist whose inner plight resembles mine.

FIRME ROJAS

by MOLLY LAMBERT

This is a passion project that I started working on while making the Kenny Powers mixes. I was digging for Mexican rock stuff for Volume 5 of my Eastbound & Down mixtape series, and a lot of Mexican American rap kept coming up. I really wanted KP v. 5 to be primarily rock to match 3/4 of the other KP mixes, but I downloaded a ton of rap songs just in case I changed my mind. KP 5 did end up being mostly rock and some techno (Tribal Monterrey!) but I kept adding more things to the rap playlist.

I love rap, and I love microgenres, so naturally I love the microgenre that is Latina Rap. There's a really great radio show in LA called Pocos Pero Locos, and that's where I was first exposed to Latin Hip Hop. Now obviously every microgenre is gigantic, and this is by no means meant to be a definitive survey of Latina female rappers. At a certain point I stopped adding new songs (although I never stopped finding them) because I had been working on it for so long already and otherwise it might have been endless.

The songs I picked mostly fall under the heading of Girl Gangsta Rap, an even smaller genre within the genre. It reminds me at times of 60s girl groups, with which it shares themes like car culture, gang violence, sex, love and heartbreak. I also love it because it is essentially feminist. These artists are cool, tough, fully sexually realized, funny, sweet, sometimes achingly sad (Amanda Perez!), and occasionally dangerous killers.

And I like that a lot of sounds like it was recorded on home computers, because I like jankiness as a musical quality and I enjoy things that sound good on shitty car stereos. I love musicians who just have to make music, who have things inside that they just need to get out. They can't help but express themselves to us, and even when the delivery is not technically perfect the pure intensity of feeling still comes across.

It might come across even more because of the technical imperfections. Imperfectness is really a matter of subjective opinion. I don't want to overintellectualize it too much (too late) but as it gets warmer I hope you will listen to Firme Rojas in your whip/on your porch/in the park with a michelada and think fondly of your friend DJ FUCK YALL. 

Regarding cultural appropriation: It is equally as far-fetched for me to personally identify with SoCal girl gangsters as it is for me to identify with Southern cock-rockers, and yet I identify equally strongly with both. I grew up in Los Angeles, where a lot of these artists are from, and I love West Coast Rap and West Coast funk style beats. The idea that you ever would/should only listen to music made by people whose cultural identity is exactly the same as yours is what keeps idiots assuming that a caucasian woman like myself would only listen to Joni Mitchell and Joanna Newsom and Robyn. 

No real rapper only listens to rap. Big Boi and 2Pac love Kate Bush! Music is music. People who love music, like me, want to hear everything there is out there. There are no more "I listen to everything but rap and country" people left, because the mp3 economy and widely free access to all kinds of music has rendered that stance and all similar genre-excluding stances irrelevant. I was once limited by the amount of money I could spend on records, and now I am only limited by my patience, which is infinite. 

DJ FUCK YALL PRESENTS: FIRME ROJAS

dedicated to K-Swift and Magnolia Shorty 

Naybahood Queen - JV

Love Confession - Miss Lady Pinks ft. Amanda Love

Take You To School - Miss Beautiful 

I Just Wanna Fuck - Celocita

Ms. Sancha Live Dot Com - Ms. Sancha 

Can't You See - Esa Wicked Chula

Classy Soldier - Classy Ladys Entertainment

Up In The Hood - Underground Maniatikas

Love Me Not - Lady Teardrop ft. Nene Baby

cursory web research suggests Ms. Sancha may be Diamonique's alter ego 

Get It If You A Rida - Ms. Sancha

We Ride Like Soldiers - Doll E Girl & Lady Synful

We Stroll - Sleepy Loka

You Want Whores - Baby Wicked

Mexicana - Diamonique

Top Knotch Biatch - Miss Beautiful

Gettin Luchi - JV

Mas Vale Sola - Ms. Krazie & Sleepy Loka

Sorry For My Wrongs - Doll E Girl

Ride On My Enemies - Ms. Sancha

Snitch - Coketa

Te Quiero - Mz Gatiz

Dem Ladies - Mz Kasper

Most Hated - Davina

Why - Amanda Perez 

You Never Mattered - Mz Krazie

Somebody Please - OG Traviesa

Oh How It Hurts - Baby Wicked

Nobody Can Love Me Like You - Coneja Loka

G String - JV

California Gangsters - Sleepy Loka 

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She last wrote in these pages about Dennis Hopper and The Hot Spot. She twitters here and tumbls here.

Can't Be Tamed: A Manifesto

by MOLLY LAMBERT 

for Kathleen Hanna, Kim Deal, and Kim Gordon

Here are some rules about how to be a girl in a boys' club. This works for any world you're in or want to be in. Pretty much everything in the world is still a boys' club.

Befriend The Other Woman: Always. Seriously. Even if she sucks (expansion on "if she sucks" follows below). Otherwise you will be "jokingly" put into competition with her constantly, and you will be encouraged and generally provoked by some dudes to do this for their entertainment to take focus off the fact that they are in homosocial competition with each other. Befriend her and press your boobs against the glass ceiling together (copyright Kristen Schaal). She is not the enemy. She is never your enemy. The enemy is always any guys who are creating situations that limit the number of females allowed. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down. 

What If She Sucks?: Well, there could be a lot of reasons for this. But if she's being a real scary bitch to you, it's probably just because she's threatened you are going to take her spot as "the girl that is cool enough to hang out with the guys." Defuse this by being really super friendly no matter what in order to demonstrate the above: you are not enemies because you have a common enemy and the enemy is exclusionism. This gets easier the more girls there are. One to one situations are especially harsh, because Black Swan. But it's not usually that hard because most girls don't suck.

What If She Actually Sucks? This does happen. It's not unfeminist to admit that some women are assholes, just don't make it your focal point or judge any other situations according to how the all time worst one went down (this is a good rule in general). Some people just actually suck. Definition of sucks: steals, lies, or otherwise tries to ruin your life in an undeniable way. Feel bad for her and then back…the fuck…away…

What If She's Cool But I Still Feel Competitive? Sometimes cool funny girls are initially cunty to other cool funny girls because they are afraid the presence of another cool funny girl will dilute or diminish their own coolness or funniness. But it won't. It just makes you both even cooler and funnier. Forgive yourself for feeling insecure and think about the way you feel around your best friend. Generally the more intimidating you initially find another person the deeper your eventual love will end up being. 

Why Do Dudes Think You're In Competition With The Other Girls? Because if you're in competition with the men, you might be better than they are. And a lot of them can't handle this, and even more weirdly it's like it doesn't even really occur to them. They just automatically compare you to other girls and not other men, even though you obviously compare yourself against everybody in your field, not just the women.

Why exactly they can't handle this is something that I understand but can't really sympathize with for obvious reasons. The sinister underlying idea is that men are always going to be naturally better at everything than women. That the best man will always be better than the best woman, and that women should expect and accept this.

The truth is that most kinds of talent aren't gendered. Sometimes women will be the best at things and other times men will. The implicit fear is that women are going to take spots formerly reserved for men. THIS IS SO STUPID. The most talented people take the top spots. There are no gender quotas. Tina Fey coexists peacefully with Will Ferrell and Danny McBride. They are just all the best at their specific talent (comedy).

Ferrell isn't threatened by Fey because game recognize game. And clearly I'm really aiming for this to catch on, but it's not emasculating if you like it. And a lot of dudes like it. And a lot of other dudes secretly like it but are afraid of what their dude friends will think. Not caring about what other people think is attractive to oh, everybody.

What If I Love Being The Only Girl In The Boys Club? Megan Fox Syndrome, aka Wendy from Peter Pan. It is the delusion that you can become an official part of the boys' club if you are its strictest enforcer, its most useful prole. That if you follow the rules exactly you can become the Official Woman. If you refuse other women admission you are denying that other women are talented, which makes you just as bad as any boys' club for thinking there would only be one talented girl at a time.

You will never actually be part of the boys' club, because you are a woman. You are Ray Liotta in Goodfellas. You are not Italian, therefore you are never going to get made. And you don't want to be a part of the boys' club, because it is dedicated to preserving its own privilege at your expense. Why wouldn't you want to know and endorse the work of other women who share your interests? How insecure are you?

Drive It Like You Stole It: Be the best. That is, assuming that you are the best. Be the best you can possibly be, whatever that means to you. Absolutely do not step down in order to not threaten people. Don't apologize. If you genuinely fucked up fine, you are allowed to apologize once but then stop apologizing. Think about how much you hear women apologizing for themselves for no reason, or being self-deprecating or self-abnegating out of habit. What the fuck are you apologizing for? For being too good?

Complain And Explain: If somebody says or does something fucked up, call them out on it. Don't pretend like fucked up things never get said because you are afraid of getting exiled from the kingdom of being Angie Dickinson in the Rat Pack. It makes people uncomfortable to get called out on their bullshit, and they get weird and defensive (John Mayer), especially since they know they were bullshitting to begin with.

But it's a function of not thinking about how fucked up it feels when fucked up things get said and nobody else thinks it's fucked up, because they just don't knowwwww. They're not always trying to be assholes, they just literally sometimes do not get it. It is better to engage than to roll your eyes. Some guys will keep trolling you until the very last second. You can almost always get them to admit that they're just trying to push your buttons and don't really believe the thing they are arguing in favor of.

Guys will feel REALLY BAD when they get called out, and usually react by either getting really loud and angry and defensive, or really sad and quiet and weird. This might make you feel bad or like a bully but don't. Some conversations are uncomfortable but also necessary. They are so uncomfortable because they are so necessary. Discomfort is not death. You will be fine after, I promise. And then you will feel fucking great, because trying to protect other people from reality is for morons and chumps.

Non-normative guys who still secretly consider themselves the most macho guy in their friend group get totally freaked out when confronted by real actual bros, because it forces them to face the ultimate self-truth that they actually hate bros and they actually do respect women. They're just still embarrassed that they're indoor kids who are not good at sports, because athleticism is to men what beauty is to women. 

What If I Complain And Get Laughed At And Dismissed? Well this might happen 99% of the time, because that is how men are socialized to react to being uncomfortable. The other option is that they get quiet and squirrelly and weird and constipated about talking. It sucks to have to call people out. But it is important, because that is the only way anything is ever going to change. Women have done everything in their power to conform to the existing power structures (even though those structures generally run and ruin our lives). Straight white men are the ones who have to change. They have to.

You know in Shampoo when Warren Beatty says that when he does women's hair all they ever do is complain about all the horrible bullshit men put them through? All I ever witness is straight men showing me how miserable they are with the expectations placed on them as men, how much they hate trying to live up to this impossible standard and how unhappy they still are if they manage to succeed. They have a hard time acknowledging there are other modes of being because they are fucking terrified to deviate from the known, even though the known is horrible and hurts them.

"Masculinity" is as damaging to men as "Femininity" is to women. Neither is something to aspire to. Women who understand this are called feminists. Men who understand this aren't called anything yet, but maybe they can just be called feminists too. 

Lowered Expectations, The Double Edged Sword: When men demonstrate or betray surprise that you know a lot about something or have mastered a skill that they care about, it unfortunately just shows that some guys still don't expect women to care about anything. Except being pretty and shopping and having thoughts that are somehow completely unlike male thoughts in any way. They think we don't like dumb obsessive information hoarding. They think our brains are wired differently. They are wrong. Sasha Baron-Cohen's brother is wrong (man u so fucking wrong Simon). 

The flip side of exceptionalism for anyone from an oppressed group is the realization that you are only considered exceptional because the system is sooooooo fuckkkkkked uppppppppp. The idea that it's fair and you just worked your way in because you're so hyper-talented is a useful seeming illusion that stops benefiting you the moment it fucks over somebody else. When men are like "wow you're so cool, you're not like most girls" it always begs the question oh my god what do you think girls are like?

Some people will never want to talk about the way things are or how and why they got that way. if you end up exiled or excluded from the boys' club for not towing the party line, start your own fucking club. I'll come! I'll bring a lovely bottle of orange soda.

Allies And Enemies Some guys will hate you for being superior to them at the thing they care most about being good at. They are Paul Kinseys. This generally looks like it sounds, and involves sputtering. Cool guys will respect you and your hustle without being personally or professionally threatened. The coolest guys (Ken Cosgroves) will be secure in themselves enough to respect you specifically because of your hustle. 

Most cool girls are totally fucked up because they are used to guys telling them they are "cool" or "funny" or "smart" and they assume it's a euphemism for "not hot" because they already feel like dudes with boobs. But that's okay because a hundred percent of cool guys are fucked up too and secretly feel like girls with dicks. Straight men are sooooooooo pink inside. They just can't tell you or anyone, because they have been socialized expressly not to. But I just told you you, and now everybody knows.

The idea that men will be turned off by ambition or success is just another part of the big lie. It is meant to scare you and keep you from questioning the system. The only men who are turned off by ambition and success are men that are insecure about their own talents and success or lack thereof. You don't really want to know those guys anyway, because they suck and they will constantly attempt to undermine you, and even if you are secure enough in yourself not to care it's still really fucking annoying.

Everyone feels like the worst awkward looking junior high version of themselves at times and has conflicted feelings about whatever demographic they usually date. The best thing you can do is team up to fight all the lame assholes of both genders. 

If You Are A Straight Guy Who Figured Out Girls And Gays Are The Most Fun:

- Of course you can join, but you have to shut up. I mean, you can talk, obviously. But you have to realize and recognize that traditional male privilege becomes your liability in these situations. The same thing that puts you at the top of the pecking order in most social situations (glass elevator) puts you at the bottom of this one. Get used to bottoming. Realize it can be the best. Think about how intense it is to be a woman.

- If anybody makes fun of straight dudes and the lame bonehead things they sometimes do, you are not allowed to get defensive and say that you never do any of those things. Relax, we're aren't talking about you. We're just talking about privilege denying dudes in general, and admitting that they exist is not the same as being one. The best first step to demonstrating that you are not one is to admit that they exist. 

How About When You're The Privileged Person In The Situation? Golden rule. Don't deny that the privilege exists or that while some people might have it, certainly you are not one of those people because blah blah blah. Nope. Don't do that. Admit that the world is unfair, that there are ideologies and systems in place that benefit some people and hurt others, often one at the expense of the other.

Accept that while you didn't create and don't directly control these systems, you have definitely benefited from them at one time or another. Equality isn't about fucking anyone over. It's about learning how not to do that. Listen to what other people have to say. Do not mistake your personal lived experiences for universal truths or cite them as if they were such. Genuinely listen. Pay attention. Listen. 

Things That Might Happen While You Are In The Boys' Club:

- it will be suggested that you are only considered talented because you are a woman, implying that even if you are talented, you are just "talented for a woman." Untalented men jealous of your skills will cling to this even when it becomes clear how blatantly untrue it is.

It involves the idea that being beaten by somebody who is "lesser" is emasculating and humiliating. But that women should be happy, even excited to be beaten by men in all situations, because women's egos are always discounted as being secondary to men's. 

- Whatever you look like, it will be used against you. If you're attractive it will be used to suggest that men are just pretending to care about what you think in order to try to fuck you. If you're unattractive, it will be used to discount you as a human being entirely, on the grounds that a woman who is not physically attractive to heterosexual men is a completely useless entity, no matter how smart or talented she is. 

- You may be praised in a way that is so backhanded and/or condescending you're not really sure if it still counts as praise.

- The conversations will all be oriented around straight men and their desires. 

- Boys' clubs exist to protect and preserve the right that some people believe they have to make no allowance for anyone else. That is privilege.

- If you dig too deep with some people it will come out that they genuinely do believe that women are less interested in things than men are. That women who have interests are outliers or unusual cases, This is part of a larger heterosexual male narcissism wherein it is assumed that all of women's interests are related to men: that if a woman is a record nerd, it is because she learned about it from a guy or she hopes to meet men through it rather than because she just genuinely enjoys music. 

This is obviously total bullshit. Women have interests because they have their own interests, because they are human beings. They are interested in things. And you can have those independent interests and still want to fuck Mick Jagger, and it doesn't discount the authenticity of your fandom for the music of The Rolling Stones. It's not like men don't equally want to fuck Mick Jagger. That's the whole point of Mick Jagger.

Women don't just like things because some dude turned them onto it. You like things because you turn yourself onto things, because you like finding out what you like. 

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing here.

"Rich Kids Blues" - Lykke Li (mp3)

"Youth Knows No Pain" - Lykke Li (mp3)

"Silent My Song" - Lykke Li (mp3)

Someone To Walk With Him Before Dinner

by SAMUEL BECKETT

The following recollection of James Joyce is collected from James Knowlson's interviews with Samuel Beckett, which can be found in a volume you can purchase here.

I was introduced to Joyce by Tom MacGreevy. He was very friendly – immediately, to the best of my recollection. I remember coming back very exhausted to the École Normale and as usual, the door was closed and I climbed over the railings. I remember that: coming back from my first meeting with Joyce. I remember walking back. And from then on we saw each other quite often.

I can still remember his telephone number. He was living near the Ecole Militaire. I used to come down sometimes in the morning from the Ecole Normale to the concierge and he used to say Monsieur Joyce a telephone et il vous demande de vous mettre en rapport avec lui. And I remember the concierge, he was a southerner. he used to say Segur quatre-vingt-quinze vingt. And it was always to do with going for a walk or going for dinner. I remember a memorable walk on the Ile des Cygnes with Joyce. And then he'd start his 'tippling.' And we'd have an appointment with Nora at Fouquet's.

beckett at greystone's, 1960sI was very flattered when Joyce dropped the 'Mister.' Everybody was 'Mister'. There were no Christian names, no first names. The nearest you would get to friendly name was to drop the 'Mister'. I was never 'Sam'. I was always Beckett at the best. We'd drink in any old pub or cafe. I dno't remember which.

He was very friendly. He dictated some pages of Finnegan's Wake to me at one stage. That was later on when he was living in that flat. And during the dictation, someone knocked at the door and I said something. I had to interrupt the dictation. But it had nothing to do with the text. And when I read it back with the phrase 'Come in' in it, he said, 'Let it stand.'

with thomas mcgreevey, 1934He was at the National University, of course, and I was at Trinity – but we both took degrees in French and Italian. So that was common ground. It was at his suggestion that I wrote "Dante... Bruno . Vico . . Joyce" because of my Italian. And I spent a lot of time reading Bruno and Vico in the magnificent library, the Bibliotheque of the Ecole Normale. We must have had some talk about the 'Eternal Return', that sort of thing. He liked the essay. But his only comment was that there wasn't enough about Bruno; he found Bruno rather neglected. Bruno and Vico were new figures for me. I hadn't read them. I'd worked on Dante, of course. And we did talk about Dante. But I knew very little of them. I knew more or less what they were about. I remember I read a biography of one of them. I can't remember which.

beckett's letter to cape townI remember going to see Joyce in the hospital. He was lying on the bed, putting drops in his operated eye. I don't remember having read to him though. I used to go there in the evening sometimes, when he had dinner at home. It was at the later stage when he was living in the little impasse off the long street. There wasn't a lot of conversation between us. I was a young man, very devoted to him, and he liked me. And he used to call on me if he needed something. For instance, someone to walk with him before dinner.

on the set of 'Film' in New York, 1964He was a great exploiter. Not perhaps an exploiter of his friends. In the Adrienne Monnier book, it's told how he did the translation of 'Anna Livia Plurabelle', Peron and I. And Joyce liked it. But he organised a committe of five, which used to meet in Paul Leon's house to revise it, including Adrienne Monnier (who was quite unqualified) so that he could talk about his septante, those five and Peron and myself. Why he wanted to talk about his septante devoted to him I don't know. I remember at Adrienne Monnier's a reading of our fragment of 'Anna Livia Plurabelle', Peron's and mine, as corrected, so-called, by the Joyce clan. But there was a reading of this with Joyce in Adrienne's bookshop, a public reading. I remember being there and Joyce was there, Soupault read it, I think.

in ireland after the war And I brought him home drunk one night, but I won't go into that. He drank a lot but in the evenings only. I remember a party. He was a great man for anniversaries. Every year he would celebrate his father's anniversary, "Father forsaken, forgive thy son." On that occasion, he would give me a note, in francs. I don't know how many francs it would be. A note. To give to some poor down-and-out in memory of his father. Towards the end of the year, in December, the date of his father's birth was celebrated and commemorated every year and I was given on several occasions, when I was available, this note to give to some down-and-out in memory of his father. "New life is breathed upon the glass," etc.

directing longtime collaborator Billie WhitelawIt's a poem of Joyce's. It's part of a longer poem but I remember the verse, "A child is born. An old man gone." When his father died, he was very upset.

I played the piano once at the Joyces'. I forget what I played. But he, when he had enough taken, at these 'at home' parties, receptions at home, with various friends, he would sit down at the piano and, accompanying himself, sing, with his marvellous remains of a tenor voice:

Bid adieu, adieu, adieu
Bid adieu to girlish days.

I remember myself accompanying Giorgio. When he was living with Helen. I remember accompanying him – in what? Ah yes. [He sings part of Schubert's Lieder, An die Musik]. Oh, by the way, I found the name of the street where Joyce lived when I first met him in Paris. Yes, it's a little street off the rue de Grenelle; this goes from the Latin Quarter to the Avenue Bosquet near the Ecole Militaire. It goes through the.... And just before it comes to the end of the Rue de Grenelle near the Avenue Bosquet, before it 'debouches' on the Avenue Bosquet, there' a little street on the right hand side. It was an impasse in those days. It still exists but it's a square. The Square Robiac. I remember it as an impasse. You go in to the right off the Rue de Grenelle. It was very short. And the right-hand side was the house where Joyce had his flat.

beckett with eva-katharina schultzI admired Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man. There was something about it. The end – when he is so self-sufficient in the end. He got pompous about his vocation and his function in life. That was the improved version; he reworked it.

with henri hayden in the early 60sIt was Maurice Nadeau who said it was an influence ab contrario. I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, in control of one's material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, subtracting rather than adding. When I first met Joyce, I didn't intend to be a writer. That only came later when I found out that I was no good at all at teaching. When I found I simply couldn't teach. But I do remember speaking about Joyce's heroic achievement. I had a great admiration for him. That's what it was: epic, heroic, what he achieved. I realized that I couldn't go down that same road.

Samuel Beckett died in December of 1989. You can find Whittaker Chambers' obituary for James Joyce here.

with martin held, 1969"Rope" - Foo Fighters (mp3)

"Keep The Car Running (live)" - Foo Fighters (mp3)

"Tiny Dancer (live)" - Foo Fighters (mp3)

with his cousins in 1959Why can't you write the way people want?

- Frank Beckett, in a letter to his brother

on the set of 'Godot' in Berlin, 1975

Where White People Come Together With Other White People

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Big Chill

dir. Lawrence Kasdan

105 minutes

The cinema of the the world we were born into holds a strange fascination, unless you were born the year American Beauty came out. When The Big Chill arrived in theaters in autumn of 1983, director John Sayles was made very angry, since the film seemed to be basically a revamp of his Return of the Secaucus 7. Why anyone would claim the idea of a reunion of college friends as their own invention is beyond me; and thanks to various technological vagaries, we are now never parted from those we supposed we loved.

Alex (Kevin Costner) is the kind of adult that was never around when I was a kid. Suicidal, angsty, even angry, and totally irresponsible. He took a hard-earned education/drug binge from the University of Michigan and did not turn it into very much – his scientific career flamed out, he tried manual labor, and he was eventually forced to depend on the kindness of his friend Harold (Kevin Kline). Harold did the opposite of Alex: he focused on a sporting goods business in South Carolina and purchased a lovely house for himself and his college sweetheart Sarah (Glenn Close). Five years before I was born, Sarah slept with Alex, probably as some sort of karmic punishment for her husband's success. He forgave her.

Still wanting to help the man who had fucked his wife, Harold let him in a company secret: he was about to sell his sporting goods company to a larger chain (say, Dick's, or the Sports Authority, if either existed in the early 80s). With the expectation of this money in hand, Alex and his girlfriend (Meg Tilly) purchased a cabin nearby his college friends, where he could try to be happy, since it is what they required of him. Not so graciously, he slit his wrists rather than succumb to this act of charity.

That is where The Big Chill begins, and its opening montage is the first of 16,000 in recorded history set to "I Heard It Through the Grapevine." Alex's friends across the country hear of his passing and come to mourn him, and have a party with their fellow Michigan alums at Kline and Close's mansion. The funeral itself is never the act of mourning, what follows is.

My college advisor went everywhere with her Alaskan malamute, whom I called Sandy. (For some reason she never told me the creature's name. This was probably wise, since it might have come when I called.) She blithely informed me that I would never believe what all the people I knew at school would become, and she was right, because I can't believe it. Neither can the graduates of the University of Michigan.

Student protests over some teensy tuition increases made waves across Europe recently. It was a laugh for Americans, because we cannot imagine anything as content as an American college student. The University of Michigan in the 1960s, according to Lawrence Kasdan, was a very hopeful and idealistic liberal sort of place, and everyone in The Big Chill is extremely upset about how jaded, adult, and in some cases, parental, they have become.

Meg (Mary Kay Place) thought she would use a degree in law to help the accused; instead she finds them as disgusting as her last twenty of years of unsuccessful dating. In a Tina Fey-esque take on middle age, she requires a child more than a successful career now that she is in possession of the latter. Michael (Jeff Goldblum) abandoned his ideals to become a reporter for People. His time spent teaching the youth of Harlem was so revolting he jumped into a more commercial life without a second thought.

None of the people I knew at college were like this. They were the children of the adults in The Big Chill, and they had to lay in the bed their parents made. Now AARP-age, the men and women Kasdan imagined are dedicated to ensuring that their grandchildren will have no bed to lay in at all. The cavalier attitude towards insider trading, the amorality, narcissism, and lack of concern for others is evidenced by that generation's love of entitlements. It may be the thing they really do love, because money is the only thing they feel they truly deserve.

As the never married singles in the group, Goldblum's Michael and William Hurt's Nick are particularly perfect representations of this sort of callousness, and they have the two most entertaining parts in the movie. (The Big Chill had the best casting of any comedy until Flirting With Disaster.) Karen (JoBeth Williams) is especially radiant as the only other married member of this clique. She married her husband Richard because she knew he wasn't the sort of man who would cheat on her, and despite three beautiful children, she is unhappy. Richard, meanwhile, is astounded by the entire group: "They're nothing like you described all these years!"

In the film's best scene, Richard – the only stranger at the party – tells Nick why their friend Alex killed himself. Not surprisingly, Dick is an advertising executive. He informs them that "there's some asshole at work you have to kowtow to, and you find yourself doing things you thought you'd never do. But you try and minimize that stuff; be the best person you can be. But you set your priorities. And that's the way life is. I wonder if your friend Alex knew that. One thing's for sure, he couldn't live with it. I know I shouldn't talk, you guys knew him. But the thing is... no one ever said it would be fun. At least... no one ever said it to me." Waaaaah.

William Hurt tries very hard to steal The Big Chill as Nick, a drug-addled psychologist who for some reason became impotent in Vietnam. Like Frasier, he hosted a psychology talk show on Pacific northwest radio and advised people on their problems until he became so overcome with guilt he absconded from the gig. When he is pulled over in his Porsche by a local South Carolina cop and abuses the cop verbally, Kline turns on his friend, telling him that the cop had prevented robberies at his store and was a good man. The implication is clear: they're on our side now.

Pauline Kael called The Big Chill shallow, overcontrolled and contrived. She saw the characters as spoiled and perhaps more than a little unlikeable, but my generation holds the opposite view. The attitudes of the characters of The Big Chill are perilously relevant, because they haven't really dated at all. They just grew older and became more self-righteous – they lecture us from op-ed pages, they lost their money to Bernard Madoff, they took out an ad complaining that the Grammys didn't pay enough attention to Justin Bieber. They inherited the world.

There is actually something quite wonderful about these people, of having friends who know you even after so many years have passed. It is not that this generation was full of those who didn't know how to do the right thing, or idealists who couldn't live up to the sacred cows of their youth. Kael said that The Big Chill would be "hated by anyone who believes himself to have been a revolutionary or a deeply committed radical during his student demonstration days." The entitled attitude that the men and women of The Big Chill demonstrate is a natural consequence of those days, not a contradiction of them. When we expect to receive something, and do not it receive it, we think of something else to expect.

What the people you know will turn into is the eternal open question. The world that the University of Michigan ejaculated these hopeful young people into does not resemble ours today. Then the fullness of America's service economy in no way foretold economic collapse, whereas we have paid for the sins of our predecessors. If a company is bankrupt, it can no longer compensate its employees; if a person is morally bankrupt, he might want to think of killing himself before depending on the kindness of others. It's the right thing to do.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in New York. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about the HBO series Big Love. You can find an archive of his writing here.

"You Can't Always Get What You Want (Soulwax remix)" - The Rolling Stones (mp3)

"You Can't Always Get What You Want" - Locomotives (mp3)

"Waiting for the Day" - George Michael (mp3)

Crystal Visions

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Music is a drug. Science has officially demonstrated that music produces the same effects in the brain as powerful euphoric (psychosexual) experiences. The way drugs have an emotional effect on you (why do you think people take drugs?) you are using music as a substance to produce certain emotional effects. That is why you listen to some songs a million times and others once. Individual experiences are subjective. 

In YouTube comments people end up telling you the memory of their most vivid experience of the song. That's why people love pop music in movies so much (done well), because we have all had moments that happened to be perfectly soundtracked. It is another fourth wall. Do you point out how well the music is soundtracking the experience, or does pointing it out automatically stop the existence of the moment?

In the ideal experience you can't point it out because they're inseparable. It's not something you can really set up on purpose. It has to be accidental. The urge to combine all pleasurable experiences is strong, that's why George Costanza wants to eat a sandwich and watch sports during sex. But too much purposeful attempting is an impediment to true enjoyment, the way it can be hard to have fun on your birthday.  

In college Tess and I would occasionally go on drives. Providence is so small it literally sometimes feels like you live in your own mind. The point was never where we went, it was hanging out in the car together, which is why that Dayton/Faris Volkswagen Pink Moon ad blew everyone's mind ("HEY THAT IS WHAT I AM LIKE TOO!") and cornerstone of the enduring appeal of On The Road (uh...in theaters soon?) and Westerns (you're out on horses together someplace. Westerns and War Movies are male romances).

One time we were driving back from the Legal Seafood by the airport, probably really high (jk @probably), heading towards downtown Providence on the highway as the sun was setting. I don't know which came on first, Mr. Blue Sky by ELO or the fireworks (Patriots?) In my memory they occurred simultaneously, but that is because that's how it felt. We both just turned to each other like O___O O___O and felt like plastic bags.

Tess and I have always been obsessed with found poetry. In high school we would talk forever about why the way certain headlines were phrased was so funny. We were especially obsessed with British teen magazines because of their regional slang and lack of shying away from stories about graphic sexual trauma ("I Have Two Wombs!")

I remember reading an interview with The Spice Girls in Seventeen where they asked Baby Spice if she was a virgin and she giggled demurely and said "I might be!" and then a British one where she graphically recounted losing her virginity to a much older man when she was thirteen. American magazines were trying to protect us from full grown child woman Baby Spice's sexuality, and I felt really baffled as to why.

Every time I hear "With Or Without You" I think about when Tess and I would sit on her bed together listening to it in the dark. Theoretically it was about the love we had for some imaginary boys we didn't know yet, but it was just as much about the love we had for each other. It was the desire to meet somebody of the opposite sex that we could feel the same kind of connection with that we automatically always felt with one another. If this sounds so incredibly gay, I mean it is. Straight female friendships don't have the same kind of enforced homosexuality panic as straight male friendships. 

Tess and I are both obsessed with Tony Soprano because we identify with him so deeply, although I identify slightly more with Christopher Moltisanti. Tess finds Tony Soprano attractive, but I do not. I think Don Draper is attractive, but Tess thinks his legs are too short (I have literally no idea what she is talking about). She likes Pete Campbell. I think she's nuts. There are no universal metrics of measurement for anything. Taste is subjective. That's why people define themselves through it.

The Sopranos also always got into how we listen to songs to remind us of how we felt when we heard them at specific times. Tony's obsession with seventies rock spoke to his nostalgia for youthful times when he was brutal and all powerful, not yet locked in by any commitments or responsibilities, with his whole awesome life ahead of him. 

We were obsessed with Fleetwood Mac's The Dance and spent a lot of time speculating about what exactly Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were thinking about during that performance of "Landslide" and whether Lindsey's wife got mad at him afterwards for basically having a taped emotional affair with his ex-girlfriend on a stage. 

Tess and I forward the best spam e-mails we get; realty scams, letters from Nigerian princes, lotto alerts, some pure gibberish. Sometimes inside the text, lurking between the ridiculous typos and half-translations, there is a phrase that catches something. It is always all the more astonishing for being lodged inside of so much junk.

The best are often the e-mails from mail order brides. They prey on the deep human need for connection with sentences like "I'm tall and nice looking girl i saw your profile today, then i decided to drop you some words just to say hello and how was today, i will like to known more about you, and also i will like to tell you about me, please i will be very happy." There's something so touching about it. Hello and how was today.

Sometimes YouTube comments get trolled, but a lot of them are a sort of virtual oasis. A global pangea, an internet commune, a place where people share genuine feelings and thoughts and memories without anyone being a snotty dismissive asshole. People all over the world sharing the experience of listening to a specific song (I told you I'm an optimist). It is the isolating experience that becomes a connective one. 

Selected YouTube Comments From The Above Video For "Dreams"

Race should never play a card in music. But because I'm black I get a lot of weird ass looks for this being something I blast my system to. This song calms me in ways many can not imagine. Stevie Nicks is the shit and I will contest to any person who thinks different. Rock out Stevie, rock out.

Give me an mp3 with 5,000 songs of the 60s, 70s and 80s on it, a pocket full of batteries, my 66 babyblue Pontiac Beaumont, and a back seat and trunk filled with Cold Cokes and Icy Brewskis, and point me to the nearest highway. With a repertoire of great tunes like this one, I will cruise until the tires fall off and then just pull over into a little grove of trees and watch the sunset one last time as my life of pain and sorrow drifts off into a sleep of forever...what a way to go.

Great song!!! Thank you for this great video. Lee .... Santa Barbara , I love life and hope maybe one day you will know that you are a true friend. "Stevie Nicks" 'Rocks" No matter how old I get my heart will forever remain young!  "Sand" Only a call away..... VA Angels

2 very hot women...and 3 guys who got laid like crazy during that decade. WoW.

I remember being small in my car falling asleep as my parents drove home from a long road trip to this song

Why is there even a dislike button on this song??

i used to watch my sister getting ready to go out partying whilst she played rumors over and over again and this song stuck out the most, one of my favourite songs ever

Songs are a snap shot of certain points in our lives. The emotions, moods, etc that are so strongly tied to our most memorable song (even those that are just favorites or well liked) will ALWAYS take us there. And nothing can ever take that away-never! I 54 yrs old, I use this as a tool (sometimes as a drug) to get me there. I am glad I am a human. 'nuff said

man this song makes me smile when I Hear it because it makes me think of life and that we all have to die at one point in time and this song makes those facts not scary....all I know is that i wont forget this song and that when im old il still be hearing this song and it will still make me feel how it makes me feel now.

My voice of singing will never be as great as i wish for it to be, but my father has something wrong with him the doctors cant give him meds for and he is slowly dieing but he told me he would like me to sing this song in the talent show and im learning this song just for him (:

Is there anything more beautiful than the sound of Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, and Lindsey Buckingham singing harmonies together?

i remember hearing this as a lil kid on sundays when my mom would be cleaning the house early morning. lol. AWESOME SONG!

the only reason i heard this song just now was cus a girl told me it was nice. i agree with her now. this is nice

I love this song so much she is the best of all i know that thunder happens when is raining love that when it happens

o i miss my dad his old music we enjoyed together

that's song are amazing! i never tired of listen!

This song is super dreamy. If this song was a girl I would be all over it.

I'm 12 and even I agree today's music isn't as good as anything made from the 60s to the nineties

awesome song, Guys are such dicks.

For as many women that get their hearts broken by men, there are still plenty of guys that get their hearts broken by women, I happen to know quite a few myself. 

I'm getting her face tattooed on my chest

I miss that: a great song that is simple, tells a story, but that can magically contain one's perception of an aspect of life translated it into melody and lyrics. I do think that people who compose and write music are touched in a divine way.

Ok so I can remember the summer of 1978, I had just turned five, I was at my friend Monica's house...I pressed a button on her parents stereo and this song came on

cocaine's a hell of a drug

Hard to believe this woman is anywhere near 60 years old: time goes by like THAT.

hey stevie i agree on how u feel about the tech of the world i wish threre some way to be more of a freindly hand shake to say hello i dont need this texs its not good for us to know whats important to poeple and just be real face to face and say hi i love u steevie 

It was 1977? Sometime back around then.....Living at South Shore...Lake Tahoe. Yep! Fleetwood Mac and a big ol' doobie......Work hard, play hard....Great music that transports me back to some friggin' far-out times..........Instantly...

its amazing how she wrote this song within an hour. This song chose her to share through out the world!

My dad got to dance with Stevie Nicks while he was security at one of her concerts......That lucky bastard! RIP dad..........xoxoxo

Such haunting song too. Dark, sexy, kind of sticks to you after sex on a rainy summer night. When it's over, it leaves you lonely, but interested and wanting more.

Stevie Nicks is pretty as hell in these photos. I would hop on it with out one seconds hesitation if I had the chance.

magic

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She twitters here and tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about how to be a woman in a boys' club.

"As Long As You Follow" - Fleetwood Mac (mp3)

"Landslide (live)" - Stevie Nicks & the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (mp3)

"Dreams" - Fleetwood Mac (mp3)

"I'm So Afraid (live in 1997)" - Fleetwood Mac (mp3)

"Stop Dragging My Heart Around" - Stevie Nicks & Tom Petty (mp3)

"Rooms on Fire" - Stevie Nicks (mp3)

Youth Doom Fantasies

by RYAN LINKOF

Kaboom

dir. Gregg Araki

86 minutes

The lead characters in Kaboom drive a Nissan Cube. No element of the film sums up where the director Gregg Araki went wrong more than that. Like those singularly-offensive automobiles – hideously overdesigned and strangely proportioned – the film is all flash and polish, lacking any basic structural integrity. The choice of automobile also speaks to how far Araki has come in the evolution of his filmmaking. Whereas the doomed teenagers of his earlier films drove barely-operative vintage cars, with skulls dangling from the rearview mirror and Thrill Kill Cult stickers pasted on the bumper, his new breed of supposedly-troubled teens are driving their slick cars off the dealer’s lot.

I have been (and part of me still wants to be) a fanatical devotee of Araki’s films. Watching The Doom Generation on VHS in my grandparents’ guestroom – terrified that they would walk in – is still one of the most memorable cinematic experiences I have ever had. I love his early films, and I know that they have informed much of my humor and aesthetic sensibility. Rose McGowan’s preposterously bitchy speed-freak was an ideal typical representation of disaffected young adulthood when I was a teenager: I wanted so badly to be her. The dark eroticism, pop nihilism, and bizarre crudities of his films defined a moment in queer cinema history, and for that I will also give Araki the benefit of the doubt.

This film is kind of like a hybrid of Nowhere and a Top Shop window display. I am not one who demands that my indie films eschew commodity culture, but I guess I didn’t expect, or really want, the film to be so overly-processed and glossy. For those who have seen or will see the film, to call it “commercial” might seem a bit ridiculous. Kaboom does many things that one would never see in a mainstream film. But I had heard several people describe the film as Araki’s “return to form,” which I interpreted to mean an exercise in what had made him so appealing in the early and mid-90s.

I am not one who admired Mysterious Skin as some kind of proof of the maturation of Araki’s filmmaking. 2007’s Smiley Face, which was ostensibly much more sophomoric, was ultimately more intelligent and satisfying to watch than anything that Araki had made in a decade. Kaboom, unfortunately, has too much of Mysterious Skin’s “grown up” seriousness to provide the kind of raw and exhilarating experience of his earlier films.

On the surface, Kaboom has the basic elements that I love about Araki’s early films. The story follows Smith (Thomas Dekker), a young, sexually adventurous, and predictably angsty film student in search of a profound romantic connection that seems constantly to elude him. Dekker is, I think, charming and vulnerable and subtle enough to make the heartfelt earnestness of the character not ring entirely false.

He is joined by a random assortment of friends in garish outfits, each with their own variety of piercingly vivid eye color. His best friend Stella (Haley Bennett) is a dry and droll lesbian, though Bennett is perhaps a bit too cute to pull of that role with any amount of believability. The star of the film, as far as I am concerned, is the wild-haired London (Juno Temple), who seduces Smith into a strange and (ultimately unsettling) sexual affair.

The film works best when it has no plot – the candy-colored scenes of sex, drugs, and high-caloric diner foods are fun enough to watch on their own. There is much nudity and homoerotic titillation, though the real sexual action is of a decidedly heterosexual or lesbian variety. Oddly, given Araki’s identification with queer cinema, gay men get the short end of the stick when it comes to on-camera sex.

The set design is far less clever and imaginative in this film than in Araki’s earlier films. The flamboyant color arrangements, odd wall patterns, and jarring, bold lettering announcing various authoritarian commands that typified The Doom Generation and Nowhere are altogether absent in Kaboom. Even Smith’s dorm room is an unimaginative mix of Ikea furnishings.

The actual plot is cringe-worthy, bound together by an outlandish storyline that affords the main characters as many opportunities as possible to constantly blurt out derivatives of “Something very weird is happening here!” Like Nowhere (the film in Araki’s oeuvre that Kaboom most resembles), sex and violence are mixed with creepy supernatural themes, but whereas that earlier film left much to the imagination, this one hammers the audience over the head with plot revelations that end up eliminating any traces of mystery. Kaboom might have worked better simply as a sex romp, and could have done without the pseudo-profound social commentary and overly elaborate narrative developments.

Any opportunity for good-looking people to get nude, especially if that nudity is mixed with unnecessary and cartoonish violence, is typically okay by me. But for some reason, even for a fan of all that, sex and violence just wasn’t enough to make this movie work. Maybe I am just an aging curmudgeon, looking back to a time when films were somehow more "real." The films Araki produced in the 90s were, I am convinced, quite special and unique, but perhaps it is unfair to use them as standard to which every subsequent film must be held. In the end, I guess I just expect so much more from Araki. His big attempt at reigniting the explosive energy of his early films seems only to have resulted in a disappointing fizzle.

Ryan Linkof is a contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Los Angeles, and a PhD candidate in History and Visual Culture at the University of Southern California. This is his first appearance in these pages. He tumbls here.

"Copenhagen" - Lucinda Williams (mp3)

"Born to Be Loved" - Lucinda Williams (mp3)

"Seeing Black" - Lucinda Williams (mp3)

Speak Now

by MOLLY LAMBERT

We want for Taylor Swift what we want for Betty Draper, which is for her to realize that the thing she has based her life around thus far is a fucked up lie. And that when she figures out it is a lie, her life will not end, she will just get to live in Sanctuary with the rest of us. Taylor Swift believes that heterosexual men bestow all value on people, and that for women this value is based only around marriageability, but she clearly also knows how good it feels to have a number one hit (a number one heeeeeeet). Swift won't claim her own aggression because it doesn't fit with her idea of what girls are like or should be like (pretty, docile, quiet) but she is already neither docile nor quiet. 

Swift's friend breakup with Miley Cyrus reminded me of nothing so much as Sharon Cherski and Angela Chase in its snotty prudishness. Taylor also slut-shamed Camilla Belle (who "stole" her boyfriend Joe Jonas) in a song, hilariously. "She's not a saint and she's not what you think, she's an actress. But she's better known for the things that she does on the mattress." In her own mind, there is no way that Swift could or ever will be be called a slut. But the longer she is single and the more guys she dates (especially in Hollywood) Well, girl. Why does she think being a slut is so horrible? Because slut-shaming was invented and is propagated in order to stop women from claiming their sexual power. To make them think that it is men who do all the choosing, all the hunting, and that if girls have any interest in sex it is only as deer.

But Taylor is obsessive bordering on scary. She writes vengeful anthems about romantic scorn and infatuated love songs about guys she emailed and met once in real life. What is she if not a hunter? She hunts exactly as hard as John Mayer. It is just that the system is set up for him and not her, to praise his success and laugh at her failure. The system doesn't work, so fuck it. You can't win by doing it correctly. You win by breaking the system, by transforming it, by building a better one in its place. 

Gwyneth Paltrow reminds me of Taylor in her prissiness and privilege and certainty that her privilege will never run out, although it obviously always does as you get older, particularly for women. I enjoy GOOP's midlife crisis because it humanizes her. Because Paltrow is realizing that being a wife and mother is something, but it is not enough to make you happy if you don't also have some things for just yourself.

I also bring this up for dudes who have the now extremely common househusband fantasy. I usually tell them to read The Feminine Mystique. The problem that has no name is not just a women's problem. It is a problem for anyone who defines their identity primarily through their relationships, which is also an issue for a lot of men. 

That to define yourself primarily through taking care of others is to lose track of yourself. That the desire to take care of others can sometimes get in the way of taking appropriate care of yourself. That when you diss Dre, you really do diss yourself. 

Anyone can be a sponge (BRAD PITT). That borderline is considered female and narcissism is considered male just reflects societal expectations based around gendered stereotypes. Anyone who's seen an episode of any Real Housewives can vouch for the existence of female narcissists, and everyone has had a dude friend or ten that disappears into relationships. People aren't their gender. They're individuals.

Watching Valentine's Day (shut up/it was horrible) I was struck by two things about Taylor Swift's performance: that she delivers lines exactly like Jonah Hill, and that her physicality is just like Nomi Malone's. She is tall and gawky and she flings her long blonde limbs around with all the aggression of Nomi on the floor of the Crave Club.

Taylor Swift doesn't understand yet that her constant intense desire to fall in love is mostly just the desire to fuck everything, and that she can fuck everything without automatically falling in love. And that she can fuck everything AND fall in love. 

Why do some people cling so rigidly to gender roles? Ernest Hemingway grew up wearing a pink gingham dress and a bonnet until he was six. Charles Bronson likewise had to wear his sister's hand me down dress as a child, because he was so poor. Those are two of the all time totems of classical outlaw masculinity. I'm not trying to play classical outlaw psychiatrist but there's not NOT a connection there. Ernest Hemingway's mother was the breadwinner in his family, a talented opera singer who then gave up her career to raise children. His father committed suicide. Hmmm...

So many liberal dudes consider themselves political revolutionaries but then ignore or devalue gender politics as less important than other causes. Or they talk a good game about gender politics but then do the complete opposite in their personal lives. There was a great Mad Men episode touching on this. You think subcultures are going to have better more equal power dynamics, but then they usually reproduce the same fucked up power dynamics of mainstream institutions. It happened in the civil rights movement. It happened with hippies. It happens in indie and punk. It happens in everything when men are the only ones in recognized leadership positions. I wish that it never happened, but it does. Rather than bury our heads in the sand we must choose to engage with it, to figure out why it happens and how we can work on it.

That's why it was so cool when Kurt Cobain wore a dress on Headbanger's Ball. It was genuinely radical and revolutionary. He challenged the world to call him a fag, to ask themselves why they would be threatened by a beautiful man in a dress and why he was supposed to care. A hirsute or ugly man in a dress can be dismissed as comedic, but feminine male beauty is especially threatening to traditional masculinity because it offers the question of what exactly "maleness" is, if there is really anything particular to having a dick besides just having a dick. He forced questions on an audience that didn't want to touch those questions with a ten foot pole lest it end up in their ass. 

Likewise Courtney Love took femininity to its farthest possible outcrop and exposed how horrifying all the most desirable/accepted tropes of girlhood are. How fake and impossible it is to be pretty or quiet and how much the world requires and demands it of women. That's why Kurt was so horrified when Nirvana's audiences started to be full of the same kinds of bros he hated so much when they were still Guns 'n Roses fans. And why people who grew up Hole fans inspired by these ideas were all so horrified when Courtney started fucking with her face and body. No one here gets out alive. 

Women aren't afraid of becoming men, but the undertone of misogyny is that men are afraid they'll become like women. It assumes that to feel like a woman is to feel weak, powerless, degraded. But that's not what women feel like! That's just how society treats us. Men feel weak, powerless, and/or degraded every goddamn day. Misogyny allows men to separate themselves from negative emotions and ideas by attaching them to women, to a thing that they get to think they are not and could never be. 

You have to speak up. You have to call people out. It doesn't make you are a horrible shrill fun-averse harpy bitch. It doesn't mean you hate men. You LOVE men. You just also want to be taken as seriously as they automatically are. Not taken seriously for a woman. Taken seriously as a person. A person. Not as a woman. As a human being.  

There is a belief that some people have, historically men but occasionally also Ayn Rand and Angelina Jolie, that they have a divine right to power. A lifelong pass to fuck anyone they want and fuck over anyone they feel like and never have to face real consequences. It is the thing that is scariest and most fascist about the bulk of politicians and politics in general, and why Obama is genuinely revolutionary in his feminism and aversion to macho bullshit, but also why he gets called a pussy (sigh). 

It is to pretend like you are on the board of the imaginary but universal organization that tacitly endorses male dominance and ran ENRON. To side with them because it is to side with history's winners, because it is easy and requires no inquisition of the self, no possibility that you might have to change anything or give up any perks. It is to agree with Hitler because everyone else is. If you really want to renounce fascism and oppressive institutions then you have to renounce patriarchy. There is no other way.

You are never really a liberal if you treat women differently. If you hold them to different more difficult standards than you hold men to, than you hold yourself to. You are something else. You are an emosogynist. It is nothing to be proud of. This is what is so horrible and insidious about Bill Clinton and John Edwards. It's why I hate Bill Maher so much. If you deny women the same personhood you give yourself, you are not a liberal. You are not a revolutionary. You are not an outlaw or a gangster or anything cool. You are just a misogynist in a sweater and fuck you, seriously, for real. 

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She twitters here and tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks, and YouTube.

East End Boys And West End Girls

by MOLLY LAMBERT

"Men infantilize women and women tear each other down" - Tina Fey, 30 Rock

"I think you're overthinking this" - common response to my post on Boys' Clubs

Not all groups of men are Boys' Clubs. Boys' Clubs are groups of men that are misogynist and function in misogynist ways. Misogyny is hatred of women. Anything that depicts women as lesser (and strangely, sometimes as greater). Active misogyny involves denigrating women as a group through speech and practice, sexual harassment of all kinds, and contempt/overidealization of "Women" as an idea.

Passive misogyny (emosogyny) is underestimating and/or stereotyping women based on deeply ingrained cultural stereotypes and ignorance, and then getting defensive when you are called out because you do not consider yourself sexist and you do not like being wrong. The refusal to accept that you might ever be wrong is a big part of "Masculinity." It is called sticking to your guns, and it is what got us George W. Bush. 

Janeane Garofalo in the film in the Sopranos episode "D-Girl" where Chris goes to LA

Not all men are misogynists. Not all women are feminists. Men can be the biggest feminists (Alex Carnevale) and women can be the worst misogynists. The culture hates women (Hall Pass) because plenty of men do hate women. They hate women because they don't understand them. They don't understand women because they think they are different. "Good" women are untouchable and "Bad" women are disposable. They often hate women because they are fixated on the idea of women rejecting them sexually, and they project this perceived rejection onto every woman they meet. They think women and men are separate categories of human being. Separate is never equal. Misogynists run most of Hollywood. No lie. I'm not making this shit up. I wish I were! 

One of the best running jokes on The Sopranos was that every time Christopher Moltisanti went to Hollywood he would be horrified by how much worse it was than the Mafia. For some reason, he thought it would be different in a different Boys' Club (lol Chris, so did we). Hollywood, Wall Street, the music business. It's all pretty fucked.

Christopher was always the most sympathetic member of the crew, because he was aware of how sensitive he actually was (although he was constantly trying to repress this awareness). He attempted to channel this sensitivity into writing screenplays, which infuriated Tony because expressing your feelings is a betrayal of Omertà.

Because of the culture he grew up in Christopher never considered that he didn't actually have to join the Mafia at all. He believed he had no choice. He found it hard to kill somebody for the first time in the first season because everybody finds it hard to kill somebody the first time. It only becomes easier through repetition, and even then it never gets completely easy to murder other people, unless you are a sociopath.

Most people are not sociopaths, but "Masculinity" involves aspiring to be one. But most men are not gangsters. Not all men are capable of murder (and sometimes women are). Everyone has violent impulses, which is why women who have Postpartum often describe intense negative fantasies about hurting or killing their newborn babies.

"Excuse me, I'm a vice president! You fucking asshole!" - future Joan Holloway D-Girl 

It is not a tremendous reach to imagine that the kind of corrosive misogyny that dominates the Hollywood studio and agency Boys' Club atmospheres would reproduce itself in other extremely male-dominated corporate climates, particularly ones that run testosterone heavy. I respect aggression on the court, but not off the court (I respect Ron Artest much more than Kobe Bryant). Women are taught and told to suppress their anger and drive. Men are taught to rely too much on it. Intelligent women learn to channel that anger and drive (to do the black swan). Intelligent men learn to channel their anger into their work and leave it out of their relationship with/to women. 

Men who buy "Masculinity" believe there's a connection between channeling anger into your work and channeling it into the rest of your life. They don't understand compartmentalization. Jack Nicholson got trapped in being "Jack Nicholson" all the time and is having serious regrets at age 73. Robert DeNiro is by all accounts a very mild-mannered guy who channels his libido into his acting, into "Robert DeNiro."  

Kanye West is dealing with this on the public stage. All artists do, but now so does everyone who "exists" on the internet. You create/project the idealized image you want to see onscreen. Other people believe in this image, and you may start to believe that you are the same person offscreen. But make no mistake, it is different onscreen. Men who want to be Don Draper are buying the big lie that there is a Don Draper (that there is a James Bond). There is no Don Draper. There is only Dick Whitman. 

We all turn into Kirk Douglas at the Oscars eventually. That's the way love goes. :(

Let's use The Oscars as a microcosm of other rooms: The Kodak Theater auditorium was filled with a predominately white audience. White privilege is invisible, as is whiteness. White people tend to look at the room without immediately noticing that it is predominately white. They do not notice that it is white because a predominately white room seems "normal." Minorities appeared onscreen a few times, extremely briefly. An auditorium that accurately reflected the racial makeup of Los Angeles, the city where the Oscars take place, would be at least half Hispanic and also much more Asian and Black. That would seem "weird" in the context of the Oscars auditorium as we are used to it looking as of now, but it seems way fucking weirder that the room is still so incredibly white in 2011 particularly given the actual racial diversity of LA.

On November 16, 1972 Alfred Hitchcock was invited to a luncheon honoring Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel at director George Cukor’s house. From left, standing: Robert Mulligan, William Wyler, Cukor, Robert Wise, unknown, and Louis Malle. Seated: Billy Wilder, George Stevens, Buñuel, Hitchcock and Rouben Mamoulian.

The Best Director category was all men. Last year when Kathryn Bigelow was nominated and won, the other four nominees were still men. If there were two women nominated for Best Director, it would seem unusual. If there were three women and two men nominated, it would seem more unusual still. If there were five women nominated for Best Director, I don't know, the world would tip off its axis and spin into outer space.

Auteur Theory: all film directors must be Caucasian boy geniuses with father issues

That five white male directors is still automatically accepted as "normal" by both men and women is an example of how cultural stereotypes lead us to believe that unfair things must actually be fair, simply by virtue of tradition and continued existence. 

one of these guys has a serious drug problem but all five have a serious hair problem

"What if white men are just the best directors?" (- a troll) I am not saying those five guys are not all great directors, because I think they all are. I'm just saying the idea that five heterosexual white men in any room with a closed door, is suspicious in 2011. You can extend it to any field, to any room, to any socially exclusive club or profession. The Supreme Court. The Friars Club. The New York Times Book Review.

and you girls get the big important job of copying things on the new xerox machine!

"What if straight white men just happen to be the best directors/ surgeons/ judges/ chefs/ CEOs/ programmers/ musicians/ comedians/ DJs/ authors?" Sure there will always be some who are supernaturally talented, but always? All the time? Girl PLEASE. Most straight white men would not like to think too much about their privilege, because they would not like to think that they didn't deserve anything they have achieved, and they bring up their own weaknesses as proof. That is privilege denying. Unfortunately they are still in charge of a lot of shit that the rest of us want to do.

the world loves a tall handsome white guy but it also hates absolutely anything else

Straight white men have a special status in our culture that no other group has. And everyone else belongs to one of those other groups, and you're damn right we're aware of the privileges straight white men automatically receive in our society. The best straight white guys: Kurt Cobain, John Lennon, James Franco, use this privilege as a platform to ask why we are listening to them more than we listen to anyone else. 

Chris & Ade, a rare accurate depiction of the friendship between two people in love

Privilege is the absence of equality. The mainstream misogynist culture attacked Yoko Ono because John Lennon dared to suggest that she was an artist on the same level as himself, equally as important as he was in the world. That her ideas were just as if not more valuable than his. That his consciousness and practice were being expanded through collaborating with her, similar to (and building on) the way it had been expanded through his songwriting and friendship with Paul McCartney. Mainstream culture privileges bromance over romance because it privileges men over women. 

from the video for Bad Girl, part of David Fincher's indomitable Madonna trilogy

In the "Men Can Be Feminists" department, the films that were nominated this year were unusually feminist except perhaps Incpetion. Christopher Nolan cannot write women but also can't write human beings realistically. We can't discount Nolan entirely because of Ellen Page. In the "Hollywood Is Still Super Misogynist" department, despite making an incredibly high grossing film (Twilight) Catherine Hardwicke was not allowed a look at The Fighter script. She was told a man needed to direct it.

Black Swan was an aggressively feminist mainstream artwork (much like MIA's MAYA). "Women" and "Mainstream" are seen as incompatible by the misogynists that run Hollywood because the culture of "Women" is not mainstream, it is always secondary to the mainstream culture which is geared towards "Men." Television seems slightly more accepting of women than film because TV is the woman to film's man. The internet is accepting of women because the internet is a great space for queering media. 

Judd Apatow, after getting over his defensive anger at being accused of sexism, did the best thing possible by hiring Kristen Wiig to write Bridesmaids and producing a TV show with Lena Dunham. The next Woody Allen will not look anything like Woody Allen. She will probably look like Lena Dunham or Mindy Kaling or Liz Meriwether.

Black Swan got denigrated most often as Camp because Camp, like Women and Ballet movies, is not something to be taken as seriously as men and Westerns. That's why it's great that the Coen Brothers made True Grit a feminist Western, as if to demonstrate that the concepts of Feminist and Western are no more incompatible than the ideas of Feminism and Men. Raising Arizona is a feminist Western about fatherhood. 

The idea that any two ideas must be incompatible is the whole problem. That any dichotomy must be "vs." rather than "and." Binary oppositions are straw men. They are rarely actually in opposition. "I am large, I contain multitudes." Men AND Women. Good AND Bad. Virgin AND Whore. Loud AND Quiet. Peace AND Violence. Logic AND Feeling. Serious AND Funny. Eastern AND Western. High AND Low. New York AND Los Angeles. 

Molly Lambert is the Vice President of This Recording. Get your own goddamn coffee. She last wrote in these pages about Taylor Swift and Ernest Hemingway. You can find How To Be A Woman In Any Boys Club here and Speak Now here. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"My Drive Thru" - N.E.R.D. ft. Santigold & Julian Casablancas (mp3)

"Under Cover of Darkness" - The Strokes (mp3)

"You're So Right" - The Strokes (mp3)

Telephone Wires

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Why is a sunset with telephone lines blocking it sometimes more beautiful than a straight sunset? The natural overlapping with the manmade is more beautiful than just the manmade or the natural on its own. The intrusion of the manmade on nature amplifies both as long as one doesn't overwhelm the other. Is it like androgyny?

Is it the darkness of the telephone lines in silhouette against the sky? Because it transforms something that is there all day and night into something else different and specifically beautiful, but only for a very brief and emphatic time? How much of its beauty is bound up in its briefness? Isn't that what is so beautiful about flowers?

What is it about contrast that is greater than sameness? It's not just beauty versus ugliness, because I don't believe the telephone wires to be ugly, and the sunset can be so beautiful as to become ugly in its maudlinism. They are beautiful in completely different ways, ways that necessarily exclude. Each thing cannot be the other. 

Writing is spending that creates more money in your wallet. The wallet has the illusion of only ever having five dollars in it, so you are always afraid to spend your last five dollars, but then when you do another five dollars magically appears the next day.

Sometimes a ten or twenty appears. Occasionally you spend it unwisely and feel stupid afterwards. But when the next bill appears it is a brand new opportunity to decide what to do with it and no decision that you made before the current one matters at all.  

If you don't spend the five dollars, it disappears at the end of the night. The five dollars you get the next day is an entirely different five dollars but it looks identical to the one from the day before. There is no accumulated interest, but the more often you spend the five dollars the more likely it is that a twenty might show up sometime.

We think of artistic processes as male sexual processes. You ejaculate on the canvas (Jackson Pollack to Dash Snow). You write a book and then you bind and print it, the end. And then if you want to write another book the whole process starts over again from the beginning. But what if art is a female sexual process? If there is no refractory period? What if orgasm just leads to more orgasm? More spending? More paintings, more poems, more posts on a website? Every day there is five dollars and a sunset. 

Hamlet is about a very common twentysomething desire: the desire to not make any permanent decisions. It is an extension of the desire to not get any older, which kicks in right around 25 and manifests as a darkened train tunnel projecting to the grave. There will be a lot of times at which you have to decide something and there will be no way to avoid making a choice. If you kill your stepdad, you can't un-kill him. 

The decision to not make a decision is ironically enough, totally still a decision. It just means your choice will be made for you, which is even more stressful and worse than choosing. If you live in one place, you don't live in another place. If you're a doctor, you can't be a lawyer. If you marry one guy you can't be married to some other guy. Self-absorbed young men such as Hamlet tend to think this tendency against wanting to make serious decisions is specific to them but it is how everyone feels.

That was the real moment of clarity in Knocked Up: when Leslie Mann asked her husband Paul Rudd why it hadn't occurred to him that she might also want to see Spiderman, might also want a night alone away from their kids to play fantasy baseball with her group of friends, might also want to drive to Vegas without telling anybody and do mushrooms with Seth Rogen and see Cirque Du Soleil. Why hadn't it though? 

Hamlet is really about how hard it is to make any decision, important decisions but also unimportant decisions (what to eat?) There are plenty of smaller decisions which then add up in momentum or especially lack thereof to being important decisions. How hard it is to close doors behind you and how hard it can be to keep them closed. How passivity is very much a kind of choice that creates consequences for your life. 

That there is no way to be so passive as to never make a serious decision about your life, because not making decisions or blinding yourself to the ongoing existence of this decision making process in your life still adds up to a kind of choice, often the most miserable. We do not always want to try, because to try is to open up the possibility that we will fail. But not trying makes failure guaranteed in advance.

We remember times that we took action but we also remember times we restrained ourselves or were restrained by forces greater than ourselves. We especially remember things we wanted to do but didn't, because restraining yourself from doing things you want to do but shouldn't hardly kills the desire to do them. We remember the point of decision, whatever decision we made or was made for us. We picture alternate worlds. 

The black swan cousin of "remember when" is "what if?" What if it had gone differently? What if I hadn't? What if I had? We never think of how we could have lost at times we won, only how we could have won at times we lost. We are frustrated by circumstances outside our control, but we hate to think that we control our own circumstances. 

As life keeps going on and on you are forced to acknowledge that each individual decision is not made in a vacuum. That they add up to something; your character, the way others think of you, which are not the same thing. They seem to diverge further as you get older, even as you become more firm about declaring and owning your persona, your affects and effects, whatever little island you have built for yourself. 

When you take stock of your life there are plot holes galore. You find it hard to believe that you acted as if the future was endless, as if bullets only go up in the air. But that is the illusory image of youth; nihilism, just as the illusion of adulthood is stability.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. You can find How To Be A Woman In Any Boys Club here, Speak Now here, and East End Boys and West End Girls here. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"Every Day Is Yours To Win" - R.E.M. (mp3)

"Mine Smell Like Honey" - R.E.M. (mp3)

"Alligator Aviator Autopilot Antimatter" - R.E.M. (mp3)

Hamlet Extreme

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Los Angeles is a city of extremes. I will not argue with you that Beverly Hills is one of the worst places on earth (see also: Fifth Avenue, Dubai) and that conspicuous displays of the worst extremes of capitalism make me want to go back to college and curl up in a ball on a common room couch (I kind of want to do this anyway). And I am definitely not arguing that the extremity of poverty and crime in some other parts of LA is part of its charm, because certainly I don't think it's very charming to those residents. Just that Los Angeles is very extreme, in a number of ways. And it tends towards entropy. 

And so when articles turn up online claiming that LA has the rudest people in the country I shrug, because I know that it's not really true. I mean it's definitely kind of true. All the clichés about agents and producers are true. All the Beverly Hills housewives are just as vain and tucked and terrifying as they seem on TV. But that is a tiny portion of Los Angeles, and one of the greatest things about Los Angeles is that no one part represents any other part. Every house is a different architectural style.

There is nothing worse than bad art but there is nothing better than good art. Bad art is the most embarrassing thing to witness, good art among the most sublime. It is only because art has this ability to arouse embarrassment in you that it can also arouse admiration. A mediocre artwork inspires no true feeling in its audience.

I often become obsessed with a bad song on the radio and then spend a lot of time trying to discern what makes me consider it bad; why it is capable of creating such strong feeling in me, why I have such a clear feeling about the direction of its quality.  

Sometimes really terrible songs that get played a lot in the public sphere eventually gain meaning because you associate them so strongly with certain places or time periods. So your feelings about the song are really about a personal experience of a song, which can elevate a bad song to sentimental or a good song to indelible. 

One of those OK Cupid internal metric blog posts demonstrated that people whose appearance was divisive inspired more fervent messaging than people who were merely attractive or unattractive. One person's dream is another's worst nightmare. This makes sense in terms of a larger argument about extremes. If you are predisposed to liking something, you will be drawn to the most extreme version of it. 

Extremity is dangerous, and danger is linked closely to excitement. Anything some people feel strongly negative about is going to be a fetish for someone else, often a fetish for the person who feels strongly negative about it. Fantasy is not real life.

One set of preferences is never better than another. People answer Fuck Marry Kills very differently, and all answers are equally valid. Eugenics and appearance fascism depend on the conceptual lie that there is one ideal kind of beauty, but there is no one universal ideal, just endless ideals and anti-ideals. The ideal kind of beauty is variety. 

There is literally nothing worse than bad theater (maybe bad stand-up or improv comedy) but when theater accomplishes its goals it is one of the most transcendent experiences life permits (West Side Story). Films allow audiences to have theatrical experiences without the embarrassment of watching the actors potentially fail onstage.

But it is the potential embarrassment, the possibility that something will go wrong, the "liveness" itself, that makes theater more charged than film. Watching an entertaining film, the audience will gasp or cheer together and individually find satisfaction in the collective expression of a crowd. It is especially pronounced during horror movies. 

In a live setting, a show with a live audience and a live performer, collective expression turns into cathartic group release. Any kind of coordinated simultaneous experience is theatrical; sports, concerts, church, class. You are channelling something bigger.

Shakespeare remains eternally popular because of the quality of the work, and Hamlet remains the sort of platonic ideal of an artistic expression. It is a perfect standalone text, but when it is staged correctly it conducts automatic feeling in the audience.

Reading Hamlet is conducting this feeling in yourself, but to see Hamlet staged well is to have this feeling conducted in you, to feel yourself played the way an instrument is played. If you believe in the performance, you will feel the emotions rise up in you on command and it is remarkably easy to feel like they are coming directly from God. 

There Will Be Blood is an extended meditation on this idea, and it sounds like PTA's now dead Scientology movie would have been further exploration. Paul Thomas Anderson is obsessed with charismatic performance. It turns up constantly in his work; Dirk Diggler, Tom Cruise's Frank T.J. Mackey, the phone sex in Punch-Drunk Love.

Punch-Drunk Love is about learning to channel your own internal charismatic performance, and Adam Sandler is so effective because his basic screen persona is the id attempting to escape its repression by the self. Boogie Nights is about the filming of sex, a process that transforms a real experience into a fantasy, an impossible ideal.

Christopher Nolan also gets into this in The Prestige and somewhat in Inception (*nc*p*i*n). Where does this desire come from, to orchestrate feeling in others, in strangers? How real can it be when the trick is so obviously out on the table?

If a lapdance makes you have an orgasm, does it matter that the stripper doesn't really like you at all, she just wants your money? If an illusion creates the correct reaction, does it matter how much artifice and fakery went into creating it? Does any artifice and fakery automatically become genuine the moment it provokes a genuine reaction? 

Can't artifice be genuine to begin with? The alternative assumes there is such a thing as an authentic pure object, but there is no such thing. Isn't acknowledging the importance and value of artifice a way of demonstrating that there is no such thing as true authenticity? That the only true authenticity is authenticity of feeling, and if you perform authentically it does not make it inauthentic that you are performing?

Like any magic trick, you have to buy into the illusion for it to work. If you no longer believe the preacher they will have no effect on you. If you come in predisposed to hate something, you might still hate it. But I have noticed lately a sort of public enjoyment in stoking early backlash to its furthest possible extreme and then conquering it.

That James Cameron relished detraction of Avatar, and David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin took enjoyment from getting hazed by the internet generation about making a Facebook movie with Justin Timberlake because it made it all the more impressive and satisfying when they pulled it off. There is well-earned smugness in the execution of the best sequences in both. Because they were right and we were fools to doubt them.

Because they took skeptics and converted them into believers. Because everyone loves a good trick. Because we all anticipated in advance an artwork's potential to be embarrassing and then it laughed at us with art. "I told you, I know what I'm doing."

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. You can find How To Be A Woman In Any Boys Club here, Speak Now here, and East End Boys and West End Girls here. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"I'll See You Later I Guess" - Papercuts (mp3)

"Do What You Will" - Papercuts (mp3)

"Do You Really Want To Know" - Papercuts (mp3)