Physicality

This one goes out to my ex, and as such is full of un-spent vitriol. You have been warned.

Today I was thinking how important physical activity is to me. I believe in evolution – which means I believe that at our most basic we are physical animals. Sure, we can think and talk and use words and communicate in a variety of mediums about ideas that move beyond simply searching for food and physical gratification. Sure, our self-awareness gives us the ability to move beyond instinct and train ourselves to do new and wonderful things. But maybe, if we weren’t self-aware, we wouldn’t need to do any of those things to begin with. Maybe we’d just be. Maybe we’d just know. Maybe we’ve been separated from our basic instincts and this causes us existential angst of stupid proportions.

I’ve gotten a little off-topic. My point was that while we have the ability to communicate at a completely cerebral, non-physical level, I believe that our existence is based in the physical – we wouldn’t b e here without bodies. There’s a reason we shake hands, and it’s not just to show that you have no weapon, it’s more basic than even that – it’s to reach out and touch someone, to “get a feel” for them. I believe we still communicate at a deeper level physically that we ever will with words. Words can lie, or not mean the right thing, and though one might point to surrealist poetry as proof that words can do amazing things (yes, they can) and express things not otherwise possible, most of us have very little control over them at that level. Perhaps one day we’ll all walk around and know the kind of words to say what we really mean, and every sentence that flows from our mouths will be poetry, but for right now we’re stuck at a very basic level of verbal/sign and written communication, and that communication doesn’t tell you much about a person. No one knows someone else quite as well as their lover or their sparring partner. There’s a certain aspect of knowing yourself, too, that comes with any sort of physical activity. We don’t just learn how to move, we learn how we as individuals move. We learn what we can do, how much we can take, all the time improving and working. When you’re physical with someone else, you and that person change and grow together, all the time learning about each other and the kind of person you are.

That’s why I don’t like girls that don’t work out or at least do something physical. Sorry, but if you’re an overweight couch potato or lead a sedentary lifestyle, I can’t really ever know you, through and through, like I could someone who enjoys a good jog. I probably sound like an asshole and anyone overweight or out of shape is going to read this and say “fuck you!” and point out that they’ve chosen to focus on something other than the physical world. Problem is, we all still live in the physical world, whether we chose to acknowledge it or not. I’m not judging – I don’t care if you don’t want to do anything physical, and I’m not going to say you’re doing it wrong. We may even be good friends. But it’s important to me to do those things, and if you can’t understand that or just don’t care, then I definitely don’t want to be in a relationship with you. We can be friends, sure, but I’ll only ever know you up to a certain point.

And yes, you’d be right to point out the irony of me communicating how important it is to be physical using words. But if words didn’t exist, if we weren’t conscious beings, I wouldn’t have to. I’m not denouncing words and language, and communicating with words is important, but at least as important is the physical communication of playing, wrestling, sparring, or just doing something together like riding a bike, going for a run, throwing a Frisbee, playing basketball, going rock-climbing, etc., etc. It’s flipping important, at least it is to me, and if you aren’t going to make an effort to at least see that, instead of telling me that physicality isn’t important to you, then go fuck yourself.

You probably think I’m an asshole now. Come on, be honest.

Thursday

(note: because of the mystery surrounding Abel Tesfaye and the persona he sings as,  I often use the terms “narrator/singer” and Tesfaye interchangeably)

The Weekend, for those who don’t know, is an R&B project that has released two free mixtapes, House of Balloons and Thursday. What distinguishes The Weeknd from traditional R&B has mostly been attributed to command of mood – the songs sound dirty, grimy, all grit and sex and bad drugs burning through your veins. The tracks are both musically and lyrically lacking in wholesome. Behind all this is a previously unnamed and still-mysterious persona: he’s glamorous, confident, sexy, addictive, self-destructive, selfish, egotistic, definitely dangerous, maybe even evil, surprisingly self-aware yet unable to stop himself from indulging in every vice imaginable.

Critics and hipsters (is there a difference?) loved House of Balloons, whether they attributed that love to exploitative voyeurism or the songs’ fantastic command of mood. Lyrically, there’s nothing here that’s poetic, but it’s not the lyrics themselves that people are listening to – it’s the attitude. This shit wouldn’t be on every hipster’s playlist if frontman Abel Tesfaye didn’t take the drugs and sex so far it becomes downright creepy. Like patrons of horror cinema, listeners want to be scared at how far down this road the music is taking them. Even with the revelation of the man behind the music, there’s still little known about who he is or where he came from. So the question lingers: is this another Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy or is this the real thing?

There are a number of things on Thursday that critics have pointed out, the biggest one being that these songs are long, often unnecessarily so. Most of the tracks on here are five minutes or over. There’s a definite lack of focus and of control in the songwriting here, and that sense of control was one of the things that made House of Balloons such a hit. But anyone who points to this as a failing point in the album isn’t paying attention to the real story here. In a world where the persona and the artist are indistinguishable, Tesfaye ’s created exactly the kind of album that you’d expect someone who was really living the would make– if this shit ain’t real, it’s a hell of an accomplishment. The storyline here isn’t so much in the songs themselves, but of the progression – album to album – of the  person/character who’s singing them.

Let’s take a look at the lyrical content. If you met the persona behind House of Balloons on the street and asked him who he was, he’d probably tell you he was the shit. He might seem a little controlling, a little self-absorbed, he’d probably be high, but ultimately he’d tell you he loved his life – xo till we overdose, baby. Thursday¸ on first listen, might sound like more of the same, but when it comes down to it, there’s really only two tracks- the first two- that have the same confident, in-control feel that House of Balloons had in spades. “The Zone” finds Tesfaye once again getting lucky, but now he’s not even enjoying it, as evidenced by lines like, “I’ll be making love to her through you,” and, “I can’t feel a damn thing”. “The Birds” (both part 1 & 2) finds Tesfaye asking “Don’t make me make you fall in love with a nigger like me” –  bragging about his ability to manipulate, yet at the same time you get the sense he doesn’t really want to go through with this. Even on House of Balloons, cracks were beginning to show; the breakdown was on its way. Little lines like “the only girls that we fuck with seems to have 20 different pills in them” and songs like “Coming Down” suggested that the singer/narrator might not be the unshakable rock he’d said he was. On Thursday, he’s starting to lose it, but the lifestyle he’s chosen forces him to keep going, even if his head’s not in the game and he’s not enjoying it any more – and go harder. There doesn’t seem to be any way to quit the life.

If Tesfaye is the human element who wants to break free but can’t, his backing tracks are the lifestyle that won’t let him go. First thing I noticed on this mixtape is that his voice is much lower in the mix. That voice- one of the first things that drew me to House of Balloons as someone who doesn’t listen to R&B – was so deep down it felt like it was drowning. I had to strain to hear it sometimes, and I can’t make out some of the lyrics. It’s a production move that, usually, shows less confidence in the singer’s ability. It happens when an artist for whatever reason is slipping, losing it – the kind of washed-up rock star who shows up high and has to be auto-tuned or layered and layered in order to even cut the track. Two – while the music is much the same, it shares the same meandering, unfocused feeling. It sounds, as someone said, like “druggie” music. What kind of person makes songs like this? he ego-tripping or just too tired? My guess is this- here’s a man who’s not extracting any more pleasure from what once got him so high. He’s addicted to the life, but it’s just not the same. But there’s nothing else to turn to. So the sex gets more fucked up, the drugs and the pain get more intense, and Tesfaye buries himself in a haze.

Unlike House of Balloons, Thursday is an obstacle course of tracks where you come out the other side feeling beaten, muddled and confused. It’s not be the easiest thing to listen to. But not only is this exactly the kind of album you should expect from someone who spits the truth (hey, everyone’s an archetype) it also accomplishes something more – it puts the listener is exactly the same mindset as the narrator/persona in this story – on the surface, still breaking hearts, but below that, trying to keep it up, slipping, hairline cracks widening. When he suffers, so does the music.  He’s worn down, and strung out, and tripping on his own power, unable to keep it together, stumbling, tripping –

And then, the moment of truth. Finally, that music that wouldn’t let up does – there’s even an intro where the musical grit and grime are stripped away and a simple guitar and canjon takes its place – and in comes the saving grace of “Rolling Stone,” where Tesfaye finally cuts the shit and breaks down, singing, “I don’t care about nobody else, cause I’ve been on the streets for too long, too long, too long…” The outro on “Rolling Stone” signals the return to the status quo with “Heaven or Las Vegas” – you can imagine Testafaye gritting his teeth and plunging back into the life, extra-hard this time to make up for his moment of weakness.

It’s exactly the kind of album someone in the situation Tesfaye ’s persona is would make. And that’s what makes Thursday great- for all intents and purposes, he is the persona behind his album- someone who’s losing it, doing too many drugs to kill too much pain- and that drama underscores everything about Thursday, both in the overlong, drugged out songs and the lyrical content itself. But there’s something more to this that suggests Tesfaye is doing this all on purpose: the structure of the album. The structure of the album puts the listener in his shoes and through his steps – from confident and manipulative to downright miserable – through subjecting him or her to a string of songs that not only show the state of mind of their creator but also wear on the listener, creating a shared experience.  By the time “Rolling Stone” comes, you feel downright exhausted by all of this, as he must. No, it’s not exactly fun to listen to, and it may not be a good album. But it’s perfect storytelling, in a way I haven’t experienced before, and I’m loving it.

So, is he an amazing storyteller or just too real for his own good? If the title Echoes of Silence means anything, I’m guessing his inability to change will be the end of him. Guess we’ll just have to see. It’s out now on www.theweekndxo.com

Only The Good Die Young: Donnie Darko and The Suburbs

Kiss me with your mouth open.

I’ve watched Donnie Darko a number of times (5,011), but it wasn’t I talked about it with my girlfriend that I considered it a film about the suburbs.  I was having an argument with one of my friends about whether The Chumscrubber is an inferior and derivative film with an unnecessary and incomprehensible framing device (it is), and I asked her for her opinion, which was basically, “I can’t relate to any of those whiny films you like about how miserable the suburbs are.” *

Now, I know. I know. To call Donnie Darko a whiny film about the suburbs is to miss the point entirely. Donnie Darko is a multilayered film about a number of things. On the surface it’s both a sci-fi story about time travel and a period piece about the 80s. On a deeper level it’s about an intelligent, angsty, extremely sensitive, very awkward, kind of disturbed kid named Donnie who seeks truth, finds love, and when confronted with his own death, accepts it with a measure of grace that makes you sad to have lost him.

But in another sense, she’s right. It IS a film about the suburbs, in the sense that without the suburbs, it and movies like it wouldn’t exist. To explain, first let me lay out something very important: how Donnie Darko divides people into two categories. There are little examples of this all over, but let’s take two polar opposites: Donnie and Ms. Farmer. Donnie has virtually no self-control. He sleepwalks, burns down buildings, and pretty much lets every passing whim and desire flow through him unimpeded. He may be scared shitless at the same time (like when he asks Gretchen to “go with” him), but he can’t stop his behavior, and doesn’t really show a desire to.

If his life depended on not mouthing off – say he lived in a military dictatorship, or a gang-controlled area of town – he’d be dead. Even in the movie, he comes close to getting knifed a couple of times. Although he’s a troubled kid, he’s very openly honestly troubled, healthily troubled the movie suggests. And it’s only in a setting like the suburbs that we’re allowed the luxury of wearing our hearts on our sleeve to the extent that Donnie does. Avoidance of awkward situations, careful social maneuvers, biting one’s tongue — these things aren’t conducive to learning. Movies often amplify real-life situations in order to highlight certain subtleties. Frank’s appearance ups Donnie’s somewhat reckless behavior, but also introduces him to Gretchen and shows him that his gut instinct about Jim Cunningham is right. And at the end of his time, he chooses death in order to save those he loves, and does it without hesitation and with a conscience so clear and at peace that he laughs. It’s a very sad laugh, of course – what other kind of laugh could it be? – but at the end, he’s at peace.

I don’t really even want to talk about Ms. Farmer, she irritates me so much, but for the sake of comparison I will. Ms. Farmer is an anxious, frail woman who is so uncertain of herself that she needs rules and regulations (both in school and in her ultra-conservative home life).She shows mad-woman shivers of joy when banning a book she knows nothing about and telling Donnie he’ll get a zero for the day if he doesn’t put an X on the lifeline. She finds refuge in the video guru Jim Cunningham, and when he’s shown to be a fraud and a hypocrite she refuses to believe it. Her own desires? What are they? Does anyone know? I doubt she does, though if her living vicariously through Sparkle Motion is any indication, it was somewhat more glamorous. At the end she’s a ridiculous mess of a breakdown, clinging on to Sparkle Motion and Jim Cunningham – be miniscule, unimportant things to anyone with a bit of perspective.

So the suburbs allows two kinds of people: those who are so scared and unsure of themselves that they want to live life out such a plush padded room of safety and never do anything that might hurt them (unless of course it’s socially acceptable) and end up miserable and bored and having their priorities all backwards. And then it allows for people who’d never make it in the real world, who are kind and open and honest even when it hurts, to maybe live long enough to survive themselves – to reach a state of peace and grace and understanding that the rest of us never will.

Truly brave are those who live this life anyway.

*The films in question are American Beauty, Garden State, Edward Scissorhands, Donnie Darko, etc. In her defense, there were so many movies made with the same clichéd representation of the suburbs that they can be categorized on the whole as being whiny self-pandering crap, like Thumbsucker, which, though I enjoyed, was also extremely formulaic. Angst of these dimensions is a luxury.

Basically, my argument is that luxuries of this kind are necessary if we’re ever going to reach what is basically enlightenment. The suburbs necessarily exist within a society divided into upper, middle, and lower classes. Those who have the luxuries of free time who aren’t concerned with self-preservation are able to reach something like enlightenment (though few do, most are still recovering from a life lived concerned with self-preservation and still hold on to every bit of stability they can). But that knowledge doesn’t trickle down, possibly because knowledge of this kind can’t be taught but must be learned for oneself, but certainly because everyone around is still concerned with self-preservation. So we’re kind of stuck, as far as reaching enlightenment as a society goes, which is an essential problem. Do we destroy classes? Wouldn’t that not allow anyone to reach enlightenment? Would we need to? Maybe enlightenment is only necessary if mental pain is unbearable. Often I feel that mental anguish is a product of a society increasingly removed from simple realities and simple pleasures.

Sigh… anyway it is a good film.

I Am All These Things, and Yet -

Her mother was born in Italy,

Her father China, or Singapore,

Brother lost at eight –

The story wears down

mountains.

Sip coffee, think about the next sip

of coffee.

She is watching the garbage men

Like she has not seen them before,

Like someone who has read the same book over and over

because everything new

is exhausting.

She is not beautiful,

Not in the traditional sense. Not lush and pulsing

with life. She is pale stallions writhing in pain at the finish line,

The chance of a falling match striking a vein of coal.

A burning building -

Put down the matches. It is the fear of taking it

Too far that stops us from becoming what we are.

We are at a café in Brazil. Her face is smeared

with dirt and oil, her hair tangled

and her white dress just barely

holding on. She is

A used paperback novel that is always in your bookbag

whose pages you finger

But don’t read.

***

She has led me away.

We have fled in the night.

We have left our hotel without paying

and intend never to return.

We stand

Naked in the rain forest.

Guitars. Concrete. She hesitates.

Someone a long time ago told her

To be careful with someone like me,

and the words swallowed

scarred her all the way down.

The wound is thunder in a rain of sparks.

I know I am not supposed to be here.

Sirens are going off inside, little ambulances

Running around getting swallowed by blackness.

Her eyes are on fire

Her skin is actually burning

She is going to die. I am a telephone pole. I wish birds,

think silver. I dive through pools of mercury,

work wood, shove hands

into sand and come up empty. I’ve killed maybe,

hurt often, but pretend otherwise

and this red lie is

a trickle of water

a hollow around which

a cave is built.

BACK AT THE CAFE

I don’t know what she’s thinking

Staring out at me behind green eyes.

A finger inside the hem of my sleeve

Skin against skin.

Feel how rough I am. Feel how the years have worked through me

like a worm through an apple. Tell me I’m ugly and fuck me

like long division. The buildings sway in time.

I’m blind and bleeding in traffic,

I’m naked in the middle of the street,

I’m walking out on coals

To meet you.

Pull your hands through my jaw,

Outline each strand of your hair,

Photograph your face,

Fix the film onto a screen and shine a light through it.

Now we’re downtown. Now

we’re in the top of your apartment building

with the lights on.

Now we’re getting ready to go out.

Now we’re undressing,

Now the curtain blows.

Now the neighbors

Now the good bread

Now we’re in our underwear

With the windows open

 

Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs: Youth, the 90s and Re-examining Adulthood

My generation grew up in the 90s. It was a time of relative calm – the false idyll of the fifties was shattered by the hippie 60s, the disco and harder drugs of the 70s had come and gone, and the eighties- hair metal and punk and really bad pop– had been exploded by grunge, which in turn was swallowed by N*SYNC, Britney Spears and The Backstreet Boys and Jewel and Christina Aguilera and Ricky Martin and Korn and Kimp Bizkit and Kid Rock and Deftones and System of a Down… But I digress. For whatever reason, perhaps because there was such a large middle class (which was perhaps because of easy credit) most of us grew up in the suburbs, which is still a relatively new thing in American society. And we were all exposed to the movies set in the suburbs – Donnie Darko, The Chumscrubber, American Beauty, Edward Scissorhands . Most of these movies had nothing good to say about the suburbs, and neither did the kids who grew up in them. For the most part, at the time, we viewed the suburbs as boring, bleached of purpose or character or consequence. So it’s strange to hear an album that casts the suburbs, in retrospect, in a positive light.

That “in retrospect” is important: most of the album is sung in the past tense, looking back nostalgically at a place and a time in life as well as a time in history. These three things are inseparable within the context of the album. It’s not just the suburbs, but youth and adolescence and the 90s that fill Win and Regine with longing. It was a time that was crumbling even as we lived it, and it no longer exists in the same way for kids in the suburbs now. It’d be interesting to hear their opinions on this album though. Would they understand it? I’m not sure.

So what was good about the suburbs? Well, if you took advantage of it, there was limitless freedom. At no point in our lives did we have more free time and more open space to roam. Sure, now we can go to bars, and clubs, and wherever. But we don’t end up at different people’s house after school, we don’t have endless summers to roam bayous and fields and go to the pool and work crappy summer jobs and ride around in cars and smoke weed and get drunk and make out for the first time… you could scare yourself a little but you couldn’t end up broke and on the street (not that things couldn’t go horribly wrong). Time was the biggest thing – we had all the time in the world to waste, and as Win says in the closing lines of the album, “I’d love to waste it again.” We could focus on things that mattered, on finding out who we were and what we wanted. It was a time of self-discovery and angst and everything felt very important.

And yes, we hated it. We were depressed and angry and bored out of our goddamn minds.  But wasn’t that fun? And more importantly, why can’t life now be a little more like that? Who finishes discovering themselves? Do you feel like you’re limping through life half put-together, that your personality and everything you care about is on hold just so you can make it through the day? Maybe not if you figured out what you wanted early on and followed your dreams. For the rest of us, I think it’d be good to think about what exactly was so good about youth in the suburbs and what really can translate into adulthood. What do we need more of? If we don’t define what adulthood is for ourselves, we’ll be defined by our parents’ generation (and quite honestly whatever their definition is isn’t really working for them. I don’t think adulthood has been examined and considered in way too long).

5:34

The basement (which is really not a basement, but the lower level of a windowless office building turned into a duplex) is filled with lamps at random intervals. Green lamps, blue lamps, table lamps, floor lamps, lamps with twirly energy-saving bulbs that look kind of like ice cream and poop all at once. Jack sits at a wooden table in the basement that is not a basement with a cup of coffee. His girlfriend, Megan, lays on the bed that is not quite in the middle of the room, masturbating like a porpoise. Megan is a nymphomaniac. The windowless, semi-soundproof bottom floor suits her fine. Jack has large circles under his eyes and looks like he is beginning to bruise. The windowless bottom floor does not suit him quite as fine. The sheets rustle and the bed aches and groans and protests and goes moldy and faints and feints, but Megan is silent. That’s because Megan is actually still asleep, Jack notes. Her eyes are glazed and her breathing is surprisingly slow.  Jack gets up, taking his coffee cup with him, up the stairs, out the front door and around to the freight elevator. There are three signs that say “no passengers on the freight elevator” on the freight elevator. Jack ignores them and jams one index finger on the button inside the elevator that’s obviously meant for passengers. The elevator whirs and groans and grabs its junk and hoists itself skywards.

The air on the roof isn’t clean, but it’s air. The roof is painted white, like most roofs that are painted at all. The wind blows Jack’s porcupine hair back and he squints against the wind and the night. It’s not quite sunrise. There’s just a little bulge of light on the watery edge of the earth. Jack walks to the edge of the building, which has no lip, and stares over. He lets his coffee cup fall.

The coffee mostly falls upward like peanuts in a rollercoaster, but there’s still some left when it shatters against the concrete, and it gives the sound of the impact an undertone that is not quite water. Coffee streaked with shards of ceramic splays out and lays on the ground, a hit-and-run victim, eyes wide like a fish.  Jack lays down, cradling the edge of the roof, and goes to sleep.