The Author is Called Upon to Explain:

Identifying the muses of Dirty/Clean’s ulter nation album and video project.

“Women of the world, take over
‘Cause if you don’t
The world
Will come
To an end
And it won’t take long.”
– Jim O’Rourke (from “Women of the World,” off the LP Eureka)

In the following interview, Josh Egeland questions Josh England on the subject of the latest Dirty/Clean album (ulter nation), and the music videos that have been produced in support of it. The interview took place Saturday, August 12th, over coffee and muffins. Questions asked and answers given were transcribed as closely as possible, with punctuation and parenthetical notations added for editorial purposes.

* * *

Josh Egeland (je) interviews Josh England (JE) on the topic of Dirty/Clean’s ulter nation project.

je: So I guess we can start by reviewing the videos.

JE: Okay.

je: How would you respond to allegations of plagiarism, pillaging, or creative appropriation?

JE: That’s your leading question?

je: I think it’s a fair one.

JE: Well, when you put it that way, I guess the videos are kind of plagiaristic. They do pillage from films far greater than the music on the record, and therefore represent a form of creative appropriation. So I guess I would respond by pleading guilty.

je: So you don’t personally perceive a problem?

JE: I can understand why it might be perceived as ethically problematic by some… but no, I don’t have a problem with it. Have you been to the movies much lately?

je: Can’t say that I have…

JE: …It doesn’t appear that we’re missing much. I’ve seen a lot of contemporary film-makers not struggling hard enough to discover the possibilities their predecessors had explored decades prior. Which wouldn’t be an issue, if they’d only discover possibilities of their own. But there just doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of possibility to take in at the box office… it’s all so pre-determined now, especially the CGI stuff. The way I see it, the movies I’m “quoting” in these videos—possibly the more well-known ones, even–they’re not as widely recognized or embraced by the upcoming generation as they were by my generation, and the generations before mine. I suppose, in a way, there’s a relief to be had in the notion that younger generations can discard the cultural baggage of their ancestors; in another way, it seems to reflect a broader trend of major attention deficits. I’m not delusional enough to convince myself that, by featuring these clips in my obscure little music videos, I’ll bring about some big revival of cinephilia. But I guess I see this less as pillaging, and more as showcasing: highlighting the possibilities of a craft, which currently appears addicted to its own degradation.

je: But there are still good movies being made, no?

JE: Absolutely! But as with any number of pursuits in our advanced technological age, the butter seems to be spread out rather thinly. It’s like this remark of Brian Eno’s, from an interview with some British magazine earlier this year: the problem isn’t that there aren’t good records being made anymore, but rather, there’s too much good music out there, and no honest distribution system in place to facilitate a genuine zeitgeist (as opposed to a strategized one). But with movies, I think we’re far worse off. It’s like we went from a generation of film brats, all scrambling to fill the director’s seat, to a generation that doesn’t appear to have any real perspective on the historical weight of the craft itself.

je: And you think you’re in some kind of position to address this perceived oversight?

JE: I don’t pretend to be an expert on the matter, no. But I’ve spent more hours digesting movies than most people spend digesting food in their lifetime. Maybe that’s what seems to be missing… true love of the craft, as opposed to love of one’s own style; there’s a lot of that going around now. Did you see La La Land?

je: Yes.

JE: Case in point.

je: It wasn’t a great movie, I’ll give you that. But the intention behind it seemed noble.

JE: And that’s the problem. There’s nothing more detrimental to a good movie than a self-imposed aura of nobility.

je: But how is what you’re doing here any different? I detect a hint of self-righteous nobility in your complaint…

JE: I’m not trying to reproduce the feel of a bygone era by running off a photocopy and filling it in with new faces.

je: But you did cover a rather early OMD song on this latest Dirty/Clean record, didn’t you?

JE: That was a very personal… a very important song to me. Not just as a musician, but as a person. If you listen, there’s nothing really stylized in what we did. Our cover is straightforward and fairly removed: I made a very deliberate, very mindful decision to not come across like I was cashing in on a classic. I hope I succeeded; I mean, if it had been successful, I would’ve been embarrassed… Which is in part why it’s tacked on at the tail end of the record. At one time, it wasn’t even going to be on the record.

Official music video for “Souvenir”—a cover of the 1981 Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark single—directed by Jennifer Taylor.

je: So if you don’t view your project in line with stylistic homage, what category would you place it in? Or is there a category you feel comfortable with?

JE: I personally view our video experiment more in line with DJ culture, and other sorts of post-modern music and video production. When you think back on it, and despite its detractors, the early days of MTV saw the rise of several different approaches: straight-faced, lip-synced performance clips; “literal” music videos; and those experimental, sometimes disengaged montages of found footage. Have you seen Devo’s music video for their early song, “Mongoloid”?

je: I think so. It’s kind of literal, isn’t it?

JE: It is—but it’s also made of found footage, so it’s pretty abstract. And that’s what makes it work, as a video. It’s the surrealism behind it: the message beneath the surface. If something “found” can coincide so directly with the message in the song, then the message can’t be all that original in the first place, can it? It’s a concession of redundancy. It’s about not pretending that what you have to say is entirely original, but accepting that it’s been said before; and its strength lies in its repetition.

je: Let’s move on and talk about your selection process, in putting these videos together. How do you decide what clips are going to accompany each song?

JE: Mostly by intuition, which is how most of the songs were written. In fact, a lot of the films quoted throughout these videos provided fairly specific inspiration for the songs.

je: I imagine you’re referring to “Red Desert,” “Eclipse,” and “I.D. d’une Femme”?

JE: All of them, really. But yes—those all carry film titles in their name, so the influence of those movies could have been more prominent.

je: I can’t help but notice that the women in these films are showcased more prominently than the male protagonists, in looking at your videos. Was that deliberate?

JE: Yes and no.

je: [expectant pause]

JE: Well, to the filmmakers’ credit—all of whom, in reference to the clips selected, were men—women were showcased rather prominently in their movies. I mean, god: Monica Vitti and Antonioni… can you think of a more visually co-dependent relationship in the history of movies, between muse and director?

je: [pensive pause] Robert Altman and Shelley Duvall; Fassbinder and Schygulla; Godard and Anna Karina—and later, Anne Wiazemsky; John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands; Lynch and Laura Dern…

David Lynch and his long-time muse, Laura Dern, appearing side-by-side in Twin Peaks: The Return. 2017 © Showtime Networks.

JE: Godard and Cassavetes both cast their wives, which is a different dynamic altogether. Altman utilized Duvall in supporting roles, often—strong ones, no doubt. And Fassbinder used an entire theater troupe’s worth of women actors, more or less as frequently as he used Hanna Schygulla; she just got paid more. Lynch has a fairly fetishistic, late-era Buñuel thing going on these days… Have you seen how he’s cast Chrysta Bell in the new Twin Peaks?

je: There is a bit of the proverbial dirty old man in him…

JE: But at least he’s upfront and transparent about it: like the Mael brothers. I’ll take that over these broad gestures of pseudo-feminist empowerment vis-a-vis male writers looking to get laid, which is what we appear to be seeing a lot of these days.

je: Let’s get back to Antonioni.

JE: Certainly. What was the question again?

je: Was it a deliberate choice, for you to showcase Monica Vitti more prominently than, say, Marcello Mastroianni or Gabriele Ferzetti?

JE: It was a deliberate choice insofar as my eye instinctively gravitated towards the scenes with Vitti, Moreau, Maria Schneider, and Daniela Silverio dominating the frame. When you watch those films—the alienation trilogy, The Passenger, and Identification of a Woman—you’re basically just waiting for the women to come back into the picture, whenever they’re not in the scene. It’s actually the entire premise in Identification of a Woman, just as it is in L’Avventura. Only Mastroianni and Jack Nicholson come anywhere close to competing with the women for our attention, as viewers. And they still fall short some of the time, in my opinion.

je: But Jack Nicholson is the protagonist in The Passenger, and Mastroianni and Moreau play the leads in La Notte. I mean, isn’t Monica Vitti only in that one party scene?

JE: Yes—the one that Pauline Kael lambasted, in multiple reviews. Have you read her take?

je: I think so…

JE: If I’m recalling correctly, she referred to Vitti’s performance as a failed parody of a Hollywood glamour girl.

je: Ouch. I take it you disagree?

JE: I don’t know that I disagree, so much as I never gave it much thought from that angle. I mean, Monica Vitti is so captivating as a performer… maybe what Kael responded to so negatively in her performances was the way that she routinely sabotages, or at least calls into question, Antonioni’s over-reaching authorship of those movies. I’ve never quite been able to determine whether she just wasn’t a very good actor, and couldn’t execute her character the way it was written, or if she was a really amazing actor, trafficking in deliberate obtuseness. I think that’s part of what makes those movies so intriguing to this day; because there are other ways in which they have not aged well.

je: I take it you’re referring to that one scene in L’Eclisse…

JE: That’s certainly a prime example! And in a perverse sort of way, it’s a testament to the unstated brilliance of Vitti’s performance: you can’t quite tell whether she is personally oblivious to the culturally abhorrent implications of donning blackface, or if she’s doing a really spot-on parody of an oblivious, bougie white woman. Either way, the scene itself is lamentable, and it probably spoils an otherwise great movie for many viewers.

je: While we’re on the subject of racial representation, how would you respond if someone criticized your project as Euro-centric?

JE: I suppose I’d have to say that it is. But isn’t it sort of obvious? I mean, the CD packaging has more Italian text on the cover than it has English. But like I’ve already written and spoken about in previous interviews, that component of the project pertains very specifically to my experiences growing up in Europe, and not experiencing my homeland until many years later. I’m fairly certain that if I had reached out farther than what I’m familiar with, geographically speaking, it would’ve seemed about as forced and incoherent as one of Monica Vitti’s malapropisms.

Official music video for “Red Desert,” showcasing more of the muses who provided inspiration for the songs on ulter nation. (More muses featured in the videos for “Eclipse” and “Into the Night (Pt. I)”).

je: Let’s talk about the most recent music video, for “Red Desert.”

JE: Sure thing. What do you want to know?

je: For starters, I notice that your credits in the video description highlight all the women in the video, but you neglect to make mention of the men. And it does seem to me that Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy [in Tarkovsky’s Stalker] and Richard Harris [in Antonioni’s Red Desert] share quite a bit of screen time with the women in your video.

JE: True, but that’s beside the point. “Red Desert” is one video for which I would definitively answer “yes” to your previous question—about how deliberate my “casting” of these women might have been.

je: What are you trying to convey through this gesture?

JE: I’m not sure that I’m really trying to convey anything in particular. The video is less a statement than a summoning.

je: Not sure I follow you…

JE: It’s most obvious in the Marianne Faithfull clips from that odd little Kenneth Anger movie, Lucifer Rising. And the scenes with Monkey, Stalker’s daughter in the Tarkovsky film.

je: You’re referring to the supernatural, then?

JE: Not just the supernatural in general, but the supernatural power of women in particular, throughout the annals of history. While working on the songs for ulter nation, I was reading a lot—which I find to be very helpful, creatively—and I was struck by this chapter Marianne Faithfull has published about her experiences with Kenneth Anger. It was for her second autobiography, called Dreaming My Dreams. Have you read it?

je: I believe so.

JE: It’s a great read. I think I like it even better than the first one. There’s this chapter where she recounts the full story of how she was living on this wall in Soho, strung out on heroin, and Kenneth Anger showed up and invited her to fly with him to Egypt to play [mythical figure] Lilith in one of his experimental movies. She did the part, but then realized, as she was crawling through a Muslim graveyard with Max Factor blood dripping off of her, that maybe it wasn’t such a great idea. She paints a more broadly desecrating picture of Kenneth in that first biography, but enough time seems to have passed by the time she revisits the story in her second book… she seems a little less one-sided on the matter. But she still seems affected by the fact that he placed some lame little curse on her, after she published that first tell-all.

je: She has had an awfully challenging few decades since then…

JE: Yeah, but she’s survived, hasn’t she? I mean, tomorrow isn’t a given thing, and the reaper will eventually pay us all a visit. But getting back to my initial point, I think Marianne Faithfull is a testament to the resiliency of humankind—and of women, specifically. I wanted to highlight that in the video for “Red Desert.” It’s a song that takes, as inspiration, my perception of women as having been trapped, all throughout history, in a man-made machine fueled by this primal fear of what might happen if they were unleashed. Like in Red Desert, where this incredibly engaging woman lives out a perfectly unnecessary, meaningless existence—in a landscape that’s been depleted of natural resources and coated in smog. Looking back, I think a lot of really great critics, like Pauline Kael, voiced their anger and disdain for this movie out of an incredulity that such a premise could ever come to fruition. It may be one of the first truly convincing, fully-realized dystopian films… a sort of antidote to Buñuel’s utopian vision of Robinson Crusoe.

Monica Vitti rules the screen in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964). © renewed 2010, Criterion Collection.

je: [pause] Yeah, I can’t think of anything made prior to it that is comparable, at least in that regard. There’s a lot of dystopian motifs at play in the works of German Expressionists, but few are convincing from the standpoint of realism. And in looking at the clips you used in the music video, it does seem as though Antonioni’s film carries a pretty startling visual resonance—considering our current cultural and ecological circumstances.

JE: It totally resonates today. Because here we are thinking, “how much worse will things get, if, or when the effects of climate change become irreversible and totally relentless?” The movie itself came out around the same time the worldwide ecological movement started gaining momentum. You know, those years following the ravages of World War II, when the costs of environmental disregard started showing. But it seems to me there was a lot of complacency at the time—even within the movement. Which isn’t to say people didn’t really care about the environment, only that folks couldn’t easily appreciate the full ramifications of what all was at stake. Not as easily as we can now.

je: But aren’t ecological issues universal? I mean, they affect men just as eminently as…

JE: …women, and children; and cats, dogs; bees and plants. Of course they do. But we seem to be perched at a point in history where progressive politics—if they actually are going to persevere, and don’t just crumble in on themselves—will face a self-imposed choice between identity politics and environmental politics. And I sense an inherent danger at this intersection: that by quarantining social issues in order to focus on the “bigger picture,” we may still lose the war, and our social problems will only have gotten worse.

je: …Having lost the battle and the war simultaneously.

JE: Exactly. I mean, if we can’t all even brings ourselves peaceably live together on this planet, why try to save it?

je: And conversely, if we can’t bring ourselves to save the planet, why bother living peaceably together?

JE: They’re mutually dependent clauses. I think that’s something Antonioni implied, intentionally or inadvertently, in the text of Red Desert. The implications of the dilemma are totally discomfiting, and I can appreciate why someone like Pauline Kael would be miffed by a premise this bleak. When you consider the potential for nurturing and painting the environment you want to live in through artistic expression, it’s as if Antonioni did the exact opposite, while at the same time displaying a sort of willingness to put up with this uninhabitable world he created. Like Monica Vitti, he leaves us wondering about the degree of intended irony in his performance, as director. But deep down, I believe he was rooting for humanity. I think if he had been a total cynic, he would have just filmed buildings and left the people out altogether.

je: I believe Fassbinder made the same argument, in response to those allegations of misogyny: that a true misogynist wouldn’t even feature women in their movie.

JE: Yeah… looking back on that one, it’s an over-simplified retort, but it still rings true. I mean, I think the most popular form of misogyny these days is of the “I want women to exist, but only as pregnancy vessels” variety; you know, the whole Handmaid’s Tale, Mike Pence sort of thing.

je: There’s also a troubled history within the gay community…

JE: Yes. Men seem to be a recurring problem in this picture, don’t they? I mean, there have been truly militant, men-hating women throughout history…

je: You mean Valerie Solanas?

JE: Yeah, that whole SCUM Manifesto clique. But historically, most of the world’s sexist rancor seems to come from the other side of the gender spectrum—the side with the most inherited economic power.

je: An interesting point, but I fear we’re getting side-tracked. Let’s get back to that bit about summoning…

JE: Okay, shoot.

je: What do you see as the relationship between Monkey, Marianne, Julianne Moore, Monica Vitti, and Jane Bowles (as played by Debra Winger)?

JE: Apart from the fact that they all acted as my muses during this project, I think they are all women whose presence on-screen seems to summon an other-ness, an untapped energy—something beyond everyday, superficial gestures of power.

je: Please explain.

JE: Take Marianne, for instance. I mean, she was at (or near) her very lowest in that Kenneth Anger film. But she steals the movie, when you look at it today. All the other expressions of mystical occultism in the picture seem pretty hokey now, but she was an outsider from the start, and she carries that with her throughout her scenes. Even as a homeless woman strung out on heroin, she was able to project something way more powerful than all the other kitschy, ponderous gestures of magic in Anger’s movies. When she sobered up and started putting out these wonderful records, I think it became apparent just how under-estimated she had been, creatively speaking, in her formative years. Back when Kenneth Anger could be held up as this great, subversive film-maker, but Marianne could only be seen as a rich, spoiled junkie. I mean, that was hardly ever the public’s perception of Mick, and he had far more auspicious beginnings…

Mick and Marianne, cotton candy in hand; photographed in the late 1960s by Jonathan Stone (date and location unknown).

je: And then there was the whole “Sister Morphine” debacle…

JE: Yeah. But they worked that one out eventually: I think there were some pretty pragmatic implications at play in her exclusion from the original songwriting credit—something to do with the Stones’ publishing arrangement. But the outcome didn’t reflect the nuances at play. She wasn’t really perceived to be a creative contributor to the Stones by most people, at the time.

je: So by featuring only her scenes from Lucifer Rising in the “Red Desert” video, are you attempting to restore some kind of artistic merit to her legacy?

JE: I don’t know that I would go that far… I mean, hasn’t she already done that for herself, several times over? She’s that rare sort of artist, whose records just seem to get better as years go by.

je: Good one.

JE: The pun wasn’t intentional. Horses and High Heels and Give My Love to London are truly amazing records.

je: And Before the Poison. And Kissin’ Time…

JE: And Vagabond Ways: her reading of “Tower of Song”…

je: We’re getting side-tracked again.

JE: Rightly so.

je: Let’s talk about the other women in the video—Jane Bowles and Julianne Moore, for instance.

JE: Sure. Jane Bowles was this amazingly ahead-of-her-time fiction writer, whose work was largely eclipsed at the time by the popularity of her husband’s writing.

je: Paul Bowles.

JE: Yes. He hit it pretty big with The Sheltering Sky, but Jane had published her novel, Two Serious Ladies, some years prior. And Two Serious Ladies is arguably a much smarter novel, and maybe more prescient, in terms of literary evolution. It’s this wonderful, counter-hedonistic tale of two women vacationing together in Panama: they basically go searching for squalor, and then wind up in all these unnecessarily dangerous situations.

Jane Bowles, photographed for Vogue magazine in 1946.

je: I’ve read it. It’s a very different sort of book, I’ll give you that.

JE: I think it’s one of John Waters’ favorites.

je: That would make sense.

JE: As for Julianne Moore, the scenes featured in our video are from a movie she did with Todd Haynes in the ’90s, called Safe.

je: A deeply unsettling movie-going experience, if ever there was one.

JE: It’s a challenging movie, to be sure. But it’s brilliantly subversive.

je: As I recall, you never really find out what caused her character’s illness, or whether it was psycho-somatically induced.

JE: Exactly. Like Picnic at Hanging Rock; or those really abstract noirs, like Laura. But it’s also subversive in its portrayal gender dynamics, and its dismantling of character stereotypes. For instance, there’s this therapist at the desert resort she goes to, played by Peter Friedman. When you first discover that he has HIV/AIDS, you’re naturally compelled to sympathize with him, as a character. I mean, Safe came out just two years after Jonathan Demme taught movie-goers that individuals living with AIDS are still people: at the time, that was a pretty radical idea to be conveyed through mainstream channels.

je: Through Tom Hanks, no less!

JE: Exactly! Even though he’d done Bosom Buddies and Bachelor Party, he’d earned a pretty straight-laced, non-delinquent reputation by the time of Philadelphia. And that performance set in motion a shift in public perception, in viewing people who live with HIV/AIDS. Hanks’s performance provoked viewers to sympathize, but in a really pitiful way; which I guess is the first step towards developing empathy for the plight of others, but it barely scratches the surface.

je: I think the proximity in time, between Demme’s film and the epidemic that wiped out the gay community in so many American cities, played a pretty significant role in the movie’s sentimentalized codes.

JE: I can only imagine how fresh those wounds must have been… But I also think there were some apparent detriments in the selection of Hanks, and in his subsequent characterization of Andrew Beckett. It wound up a little stilted in the direction of talking down to your audience. It also seems, in some ways, to echo that terrible phrase, “the deserving poor:” Hanks was seen by many at the time as “the deserving homo.” But this openly queer filmmaker [Todd Haynes] came along just two years later, subverting a fairly recently developed audience expectation with the character of Peter, who has the same illness but isn’t entirely sympathetic. Suddenly, the audience has to confront this culturally normalized, cognitive fallacy: the ridiculous idea that people living with illnesses—and specifically, individuals living with HIV/AIDS—are by default pitiful and apologetic.

Julianne Moore as Carol White, the confined protagonist of Todd Haynes’s early masterwork, Safe (1995). © Sony Pictures Classics.

je: Wouldn’t you say that Moore’s character comes across as pitiful at times?

JE: For sure! But it’s what you read into it; what you project, as a viewer. If you study her performance, which is a tour de force, you’ll notice she doesn’t really do a whole lot, in terms of positive character reinforcement. She’s just this slow-moving negative space, incapable of finding fulfillment within the shitty environment she’s entrapped by. And Peter winds up being this sort of oppressive male figure—flying in the face of what we’ve been conditioned to expect; especially when you consider that the author is a gay man.

je: What about Monkey, the daughter in Stalker?

JE: Like Marianne Faithfull in Lucifer Rising, she’s the real star of that movie, if you ask me.

je: Not a convincing assessment, if one were to judge by screen time. She appears in just a fraction of the movie’s three-hour running length.

JE: Screen time isn’t entirely relevant when considering who’s the star of a picture. Who do you see as the star in Blade Runner?

je: Harrison Ford[?]

JE: See, that’s where you’re wrong. It’s Rutger Hauer’s movie: Harrison Ford’s detective is only there—and I mean this narratively as well as interpretively—to lead you to Roy Batty. Who is, like Julianne and Monica’s characters, an entrapped outsider.

Official music video for “Into the Night (Pt. II),” featuring the entrapped outsider of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982): Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer).

je: As far as I can recall, however, Monkey isn’t much of an “entrapped” figure in Stalker.

JE: It is implied that she’s living with a physical disability. In this way, she’s entrapped by the limitations of her movement. Which she later succeeds in compensating for—or overcompensating for—through telepathy. I mean, if you really break it down, the girl who plays Monkey in Stalker makes the entire movie: visuals aside, I find the journey with the three men kind of tedious at times—which I’m sure was intentional on Tarkovsky’s part. But as far as entertainment goes, the movie succeeds because it saves the payoff for that very last scene. And Monkey is the payoff.

je: You certainly get a lot of mileage out of that scene in your video.

JE: It’s just an incredible piece of finished film, and I couldn’t pull myself away from it in the editing stage. And Natasha Abramova totally sells it: the magic of the scene; the mystery.

je: She looks kind of bored.

JE: Well, as with your reading of Julianne Moore, that’s just a projection. She doesn’t have to project a specific thought or idea in the scene, because all the scene seems to require is her presence—her aura. Like Marina Abramović, or Joan Crawford, Abramova’s presence is so far greater than the limitations of the medium. I think a lot of men who are filmmakers scramble to bottle this essence within the vessel of their movie—not always malevolently, mind you—but so often we’re left wanting more than what they were able, or willing to capture.

Marina Abramović, being present (from her 2010 installation, The Artist Is Present).

je: So it sounds like this focus on women may have been more intentional than you led me to believe at first.

JE: Could be, I don’t know. Does it really matter?

je: In a sense, I think it does. I mean, don’t you think that restoring women’s perspectives within the arts is a job best done…

JE: By women? If we’re going to state the obvious, this entire project amounts to nothing more than a fledgling attempt at expressing my view of the world we live in.

je: Glad to hear you’re not posing as a provocateur. That would’ve been embarrassing for us both.

JE: If I’m trying to prove a point through this project, it’s how the history of women in film–which is chronically troubled by cases of women being sexualized and abused; having to adopt men’s names, just to get the writing credit they’d earned as a woman; not getting to express their creative vision with the same sort of unrestricted leeway granted their male counterparts—is frequently a history of confinement. Which echoes the history of womankind. There’ve been all these great performances, and films made by women throughout history; but we’re left wondering just how [emph. added] much more illuminating these works could’ve been if the power deferential in our society weren’t so unevenly distributed along gender lines.

je: Isn’t that a fairly broad statement, artistically speaking?

JE: It’s broad, because there’s a broader truth in it. But there is another, more specific truth that I’m trying to comprehend in all this: and that’s the growing absence of subversiveness in the arts. That seems, to me, a bona fide cultural problem right now.

je: How so?

JE: Well, for starters, it’s made for a pretty lame and increasingly confined reality, as of late. Nobody seems to be making any real waves, unless they engage in acts of brutal violence, or sacrifice themselves at the reality television altar.

je: Have you considered that may just be the cost of contemporary comfort? I mean, with all the wealth and the luxury we’ve acquired in our society, there seems to be less and less of a call for subversiveness.

JE: That is a factor, no doubt about it. But it doesn’t seem to entirely account for the bigger problem, either. After all, income inequality is at an all-time high; increasingly consolidated corporations continue to own and buy up everything in sight. There’s plenty for people to be upset about in the socio-political arena, yet all of it—the instigators, the responders, the counter-attacks—seems trapped in this disorienting veneer of reality television. And all of our movies seem to be paraphrasing some kind of past, whether actual or non-existent: they’re either nostalgia pieces or superhero remakes, a lot of them taking place during the time of the “greatest generation.” And I’m not saying it’s all bad by default, but it’s getting kinda old; and the redundancy only serves to draw one’s attention to how much money they always feel compelled to spend, the second and third time around…

je: But doesn’t social unrest often breed nostalgia and escapism, as an alternative to dealing head-on with the real issues?

JE: For sure! And comfort is the antithesis of anarchy. But I think the level of complacency we’re seeing is basically a direct extension of our technological comfort, as opposed to reflecting our essential creature comforts. Which is fairly new, in evolutionary terms. I mean, I imagine there must be a lot of people out there who, if they were forced to choose between clothing or shelter, and having a smartphone—they’d take the phone.

je: That might provide the basis for an interesting study…

JE: It would, but I don’t think people really want to know the answer. We’re all afraid to admit how much we’ve been afflicted by technological addiction; and it’s been rapidly changing the way we all think, feel, and communicate with each other. It’s also changed the way we view one another—either strengthening or challenging our perceptions of each other. For instance, there was that moment of shock, when the breakdown of voters in the 2016 election came out, and we learned that a majority of white women voted for this disgusting, misogynistic caricature that we now have to live with for four years.

je: That was rather alarming.

JE: It was… But then I was equally alarmed by how quickly people turned around and criticized women for a tragedy that’s been playing itself out for centuries now: the tragedy of people being told not to be themselves, over and over, to the point where they start following the negative instruction. And it’s all kinds of people: women, gay people, trans-gendered people, people of color… In a way, I think mainstream progressivism is frequently culpable of a similar offense—only from the more informed end of the spectrum, and in a more constructive fashion: they often tell people how to speak, how to act. Which isn’t the best approach, either.

je: A rose by another name?

JE: Not really. I mean, there’s no comparing the fascistic, idiotic, and reactionary rhetoric of the present-day right wing, to the Lean Cuisine progressivism of the present-day left. But taking into account the advanced technology we’ve been armed and mobilized with, it’s become that much easier to convince millions of people to fall in line: to stop thinking for themselves and to silence their own subversive thoughts—which is even less arduous, for the powers that be, than forcing them into silence. It’s like that thing Pasolini said in one of those late interviews, around the time he made Salò: that bit about politicians displaying a tolerance as vast as it is false.

je: Like that picture—the one with 45 waving the rainbow flag…

JE: Exactly! And look how many gay men fell for it. I mean, it’s sad and disappointing, but it’s also a reminder of the overarching human problem at play here. I mean, identity politics are so prominent and so profoundly important right now, and there’s no reason to downplay them. But there’s also the broader consideration that human minds are being bought and sold every day by algorithms and advertisements: and most of the time, we’re totally oblivious to it.

je: Like all the people whose votes were bought by savvy researchers at Cambridge Analytica.

JE: …Or the consumers who only want to see movies or buy records—that is, if they still spend money on music—when they have a certain rating on Rotten Tomatoes, or have earned a certain baseline of shares and likes from their friends on social media. Which is so weird to me, because there’s this unprecedented access to the widest array of media on the internet, and yet the majority of consumers appear to be stuck inside the same handful of pre-determined pathways; whether it’s the Huffington Post, Breitbart, Vice, Marc Maron, or the guy with the big glasses who reviews music on YouTube. Not that I have a problem with Marc Maron; he seems like a really nice guy.

Still from Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 film, Koyaanisqatsi. © renewed 2012, Criterion Collection.

je: But wouldn’t you say there’s a more eclectic range of content and feedback on the internet, than there used to be in print?

JE: In quantifiable terms, yes. But you wouldn’t guess it by glancing through the first dozen or so search results. We’ve gone from one extreme to the other—from not having enough options to having too many options. And as a society, we’ve failed to establish any kind of real balance in our information hierarchy. It’s the prophecy of Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy, fulfilled: a “life out of balance.” We can all see how it’s resulted in a lot of lowest common denominator communication—along with millions of people rehashing the same ideas over and over, not recognizing how they’ve been outmoded or disproven on any number of prior occasions. It all seems so tedious. I can only hope the previously foreseen possibilities of a one-way internet model appear less enticing to those who developed it, now that the worst of these possibilities are being actualized on a minute-by-minute basis.

je: What would you say are the positive possibilities that aren’t being actualized, artistically speaking?

JE: Honestly, I think the best we can hope for within the Berners-Lee system—as opposed to the Ted Nelson system, which would’ve been two-way, and would’ve preserved context—is post-modernist pastiche. It’s the only school of contemporary art that’s ironic enough to match the confused, constrictive implications of the World Wide Web. I mean, post-modernists used to get criticized in a lot of art circles—maybe they still do—for closing themselves off to more “genuine” modes of communication, and behaving as though irony were the only viable tone of creative communication. Then there were filmmakers, like Lynch and Almodóvar, who started pushing the limits of post-modernism in their movies—channeling this fairly surreal, but not-totally-insincere sort of melodrama that nearly took the medium to a new level, artistically speaking. I mean, we still have yet to live up to the possibilities revealed by Godard and Kieslowski; even Ophuls. But considering the state of the arts in 2017—not to mention the state of arts criticism—I’d settle for a revival of post-modernist irony at this point. Hell: I’d settle for just about any clearly stated artistic theory in the popular arts, at this point!

je: Let’s remember: Moonlight did win the Best Picture Academy Award this year.

JE: Yeah, that really was a beautiful thing… even though it probably wouldn’t have happened had 45 not been elected, which is a confoundingly sad thought. But you’re right: we must find hope somewhere.

je: Indeed. And besides, there’s nothing left to post-modernize.

JE: Touché.

* * *

Natasha Abramova plays Monkey, Stalker’s daughter in Tarkovsky’s acclaimed 1979 masterpiece. © renewed 2017, Criterion Collection.

ulter nation by Dirty/Clean is available to stream and purchase on BandCamp.

Goin’ down, down…

“Well I been workin’ in a coal mine
Goin’ down, down
Working in a coal mine
Whew! About to slip down…”

There’s a memorable bridge in Allen Toussaint’s hit song, “Working in a Coal Mine” (first recorded by Lee Dorsey in 1966, but cleverly reiterated by the avant-punk Devo during their New Traditionalists phase): “how long can this go on?” Setting aside the uncanny relevance of the song’s labor-specific subject matter, this bridge—which operates as a segue into an endless loop of the song’s other two lyrics—may well be the defining phrase of 2017.

I’ve been publishing a series of essays (written while all of this insanity unfolds in real time) with the intent of trying to make sense of the insensible, and of enhancing my perspective with the insights—some timeless; some timely—provided by our shared experience of the arts. It’s become abundantly clear to me, and to many others with whom I’ve discussed the matter, that engaging in dialogue with others on current events frequently leaves us stranded and frustrated amid a disparate range of willfully self-directed interpretations. On the left, center-left, and center-right, we find a fairly willful adherence to some form of factual certainty and coherence (though even this can vary quite a bit, depending on the topic); on the right and far-right, and in certain fringes of the far-left, there remains a recurring, willful defiance of factual certainty, and an open embrace of the incoherent (who knew that flat-Earthers, Holocaust deniers, Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists, vaccination skeptics, and 9/11 truthers would become so… normalized? Or perhaps, stealing their line of attack, we are meant to believe they are the hoax: mere figments of Alex Jones’s disturbingly profitable imagination–or a series of engineered holograms posing as panelists on Fox News*). The doom-laden phrase, “triumph of the will,” has rarely seemed so relevant.

And as our respective news feeds continue to proliferate themselves—with our curated diets of information sources acting as an imperfect filter—we find the same streams of angry, embittered comments, flowing like a river of wasted time and effort beneath the bridge of each newly disturbing headline. An archetypal troll from the opposing side of the political fence will invariably pop up on any given news news site to rectify the perceived injustice committed by rival commentators; a clone of social consciousness will swiftly rise to the occasion on the other side, basking in the private glow of self-righteous fact-and-privilege-checking, and occasionally sharing their moment of triumph with their entourage of fellow liberal Facebook friends (“look at me! I was right… again!”) Undoubtedly, there is some social benefit to be attained by taking down trolls on social media. But as someone with no real taste for the sport—and a lack of adequate patience to keep up with the furious, sleepless pace of said trolls—I question whether this perceived benefit can ever outweigh the inherent shortcoming to this game: namely, the failure to affect any notable change in the offending party’s stance or conviction of their own rightness. More often than not, such exchanges leave both parties confident in their own private victory. To steal a lyric from Errol Morris: Every 1’s a winner, baby—that’s the truth!

Short of re-calibrating my own parameters for social media interaction (not to mention, reallocating valuable time in each given day, which could be used to research the issues most pressing to my community and call a Senator or Representative, in a more organized effort to bring about a concrete change for the better), I’ve settled upon my existing blog format as the ideal venue to explore these issues from a different angle. Since writing about films, books, music, and other media has always come more naturally to me, perhaps it’s best I operate within this scope—using arts as a lens through which these disorienting issues, events, and catastrophes might achieve a newfound clarity; after all, isn’t that what the arts were intended for?

* * *

Robert M. Pirsig’s best-selling “Inquiry into Values,” first published in 1974. Pirsig passed away in April of this year.

A literary hero of mine, the late Robert Pirsig, wrote in his well-loved manual (Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) about the surgical knife that all of us—meaning, all thinking human beings—wield to divide and conquer various fields of knowledge. At great length, he expounds upon the assorted hazards and perks associated with slicing apart issues into identifiable components—with some incisions leading to a heightened or improved sense of awareness and understanding, and others leading to greater misinterpretation and chaos. One faulty incision I’ve found myself culpable of (on occasion) entails the somewhat naive division of “good” from “bad,” cut along the same lines used to objectively divide “fact followers” from “fact deniers” (or, worse yet: “alternative fact followers”). It’s the same mistake I see many commenters perpetrating in their counter-attacks to those pesky right-wing trolls: in less time than it takes for someone to even decipher the nuances of another’s perspective, the gauntlet of character aspersions has been thrown down, and ignorance has quietly been conflated with an innate “badness.”

It’s a tricky incision to navigate, to be sure. After all, ignorance is “bad”—insofar as it frequently provides a foundation for malicious, combative, even assaultive behaviors (not to mention bad life choices). But if one returns to the definition of the word itself, one will be reminded that ignorance is a mere “lack of knowledge or education,” and does not invariably imply malice. Because contrary to the view held by some (if not many), simply presenting factual information does not constitute a fully-formed act of education (though it’s certainly a starting point): explanation, moderation, and clarification are essential follow-up steps—steps, I might add, for which comment threads, memes, and sardonic commentary have consistently proven themselves structurally prohibitive. After all, how many times have we found ourselves questioning facts that contradict our pre-existing cognitive bias, or pointing to isolated incidents as vindication of our own fears? Perhaps Randy Newman said it best in a recent interview for BBC Radio 2, in which he observed of the many folks who voted for 45: “there are people who are older, looking for something to blame for hurting when they get up.” And whereas willful ignorance remains a perceived offense (in my private opinion), it is, nevertheless, a testament to the strength of the human will; and therefore our duty—as humans—to recall how all of us fall prey to misguided impulses on occasion.

But while I’ve brought myself to the stage where I can accept the fundamental error in this analytical incision, the foremost question on the tip of my tongue remains: “how long can this go on?” For it is clear we are at a tipping point, as a species, and the cliff we’ve perched ourselves on presents a longer fall than many of us are prepared to embrace (the fall of unmanageable climate change factors, a brewing civil war, and an all-too-near nuclear holocaust). A situation this urgent and precarious is unlikely to be resolved by memes, Twitter wars, and desktop social justice warriors. Quite simply, something’s got to give or go—and for the majority of the country (thankfully), that something is our current administration. If/Once 45 is gone, however, what next? To paraphrase a classic Stevie Nicks/Fleetwood Mac song, will we know how to pick up the pieces and go home? And where is home? For thousands of Americans who became victims of hate crimes following the election of 45, millions of minorities whose basic civil rights have been stripped and/or called into question, and the thousands of immigrants arrested and/or deported (many forced to leave with their naturalized, U.S.-born children), it is unclear whether the United States really is a home. If all it took was an ex-wrestling con man with a bad haircut and “billions of billions“ in foreign debts to scratch away the surface of social politesse we’ve so steadily clung to over the past five-plus decades, perhaps we were doomed from the start.

* * *

Just the other night, I revisited Billy Wilder’s classic Hollywood satire, Sunset Boulevard (1950). It’s a film I’ve known and loved since I was a teenager, but it has been years since I last screened it, and I found myself reading the movie in a very different light. Having just finished Kenneth Anger’s infamous tell-all Hollywood Babylon, I carried with me an increased appreciation for the proliferation of in-jokes and allusions to old Hollywood lore; I also carried an aftertaste of Anger’s cynicism. For as brilliant and frequently hilarious as Wilder’s film remains, there is a bleakness permeating the picture that corresponds both to Anger’s witchcraft-laced brand of queer mysticism, and our own country’s present-day aura of despair.

It would be difficult to watch the fateful narrative unfold and not draw parallels to our current administration: and if that lamenting, narcissistic ingenue of days gone by (Norma Desmond, unforgettably personified by Gloria Swanson) reads as a stand-in for 45, then Max—her chauffeur, doorman, and former director (played by the legendary silent filmmaker Erich Von Stroheim)—fittingly represents the monster who created him (Steve Bannon—who, ironically, got his start in the movies). And Joe? Well, he’s the aspiring go-getter who become inextricably entangled in the White House web: the young staffer who stumbled upon a seemingly golden job opportunity, had his doubts from the start, but was ensnared by the allure of climbing the ladder and joining the ranks of those who are winning so much they’re “sick of winning.” But there are several key differences between the scenario of Wilder’s film and our present-day circumstances—foremost of which is the simple fact that Norma Desmond actually worked for her position. Though propped up by the pampering adulation and decadent luxuries of Hollywood in the “roaring twenties,” Norma represents a beacon of hard-earned popular appeal: having starred in an untold number of pictures and climbed her way up through the sycophantic studio system, Ms. Desmond reflects the corruption of the social and economic structures that made such a life appealing in the first place. On the flip-side, our 45th president remains—and will forever be seen as—a reflection of his own over-inflated ego, and the unearned/un-achieved laurels he must rest upon in perpetuity to stoke its dying embers.

A camera-starved Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) descends the staircase at the end of Wilder’s 1950 Hollywood masterpiece—the only means by which the police can lure her out of her dressing room to face criminal charges. (Foreshadowing for the Mueller trial?)

If Norma Desmond is a first generation diva, having sweated her way to the top of the pop culture food chain (only to fall hard and fast upon entering her “golden years”), 45 is a third-generation wannabe—who is unlikely to fall very far, having the advantage of nothing to live up to (along with the simple socio-economic advantage of having a penis). Some Americans seemed to question how, at the apex of his candidacy, 45’s supporters found themselves willing and ready to overlook the appallingly direct and vulgar vernacular of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape that was dredged up; maybe they failed to recognize that 45 demonstrated no base-line of decency to hold himself accountable against in the first place. [How low can you go?/How loose is your goose?] Whereas Norma Desmond’s maniacal striving for renewed relevance and appreciation is perceived by the viewer as a testament to the ageist and misogynistic structure of the “star system,” 45’s perpetual striving for “big boy” status can only be read as fall-out from his failure to accomplish anything of note in his lifetime—which, in turn, is a testament to his unwillingness/inability to put forth even a modicum of effort. High-rises, casinos, cheap wines, steaks, and for-profit universities have abounded—his family name proudly emblazoned upon them; but something tells me, deep down, 45 is acutely aware of how vacuous and unremarkable they all are. Having failed to turn a real profit in any of these pursuits (apart from his campaign fundraising, for which he need only stand behind a podium and soak up the adulation of all his misinformed minions), 45 cannot fail to recognize what a miscarriage of potential his existence represents.

Having inherited large sums of cash and real estate from his more soundly ambitious (albeit no less unethical) father, independent analysis has shown time and again how 45 would have achieved greater success by not playing his shaky hand in the real estate market at all, and simply investing his inheritance in the stock market (setting aside the exaggerated “Occupy Democrats” claim, which fails to take into account the 8 years of mediocre business management between accepting his inheritance and embarking on his own, frequently miscalculated real estate ventures. Leave it to the left to manufacture superfluous critiques, when there’s already a plethora of legitimate terrain to pick apart). Which further highlights the mediocrity (at best) of his business abilities, and the incompetence (at worst) of his combined life’s effort. And whereas many ardent critics are quick to write him off as an oblivious idiot, my own interpretation rests upon the assumption that 45 carries a hyper-awareness of his own inadequacy. Hence the insistence on responding to every criticism with a roll call of his token accomplishments; a forced proclamation of “you see? I’m a big boy after all! I can do things… Big things!” In essence, it’s a “lady doth protest too much” condition—crossed with the propulsion for higher ratings and a natural inclination to feed the reality show of his own being. And this is where the similarities to Norma Desmond might be seen in greatest relief: for when all is said and done, both of these unlikely villains are stuck in a show of someone else’s design. Both dedicated their lives to living out a vainglorious dream, with the belief that it was of their own making; both now find themselves in their latter days, looking back on their lives and realizing that all they had to offer was a dramatic gesture—and the dream wasn’t even their own. And if Norma was a stunted screenwriter, and Hitler a frustrated visual artist, perhaps 45 is actually a big rig driver who missed his life’s calling(?)

Whatever the case may be, the Maxes of 45’s administration continue to fan the flames of this socio-political dumpster fire they’ve created, and the Joe Gillises of the White House remain trapped in a corrupted system that will leave no honest effort unpunished. But the show must go on; and here comes 45 again—gliding down a golden escalator, demanding his close-up. [How long can this go on?] In revisiting Wilder’s masterpiece, it dawned on me that the most relatable character (from a general audience perspective, at least) is Betty Schaeffer (played by Nancy Olsen)—the Paramount script reader who calls Joe’s learned sycophantic behavior into question. “Don’t you hate yourself sometimes?” she pointedly asks. “Constantly,” he replies. And just as Joe’s self-loathing echoes the self-loathing of Norma/45 and Max/Bannon, their collective self-hatred is paralleled by the general public’s disdain for a country that is sacrificing its remaining points of pride with every passing news cycle.

It is worth noting, in examining the similarities between Wilder’s scenario and ours, that Sunset Boulevard ends in bloodshed—and the movie itself is an ouroboros-shaped ghost story, eventually collapsing into its own murky waters. In his best-selling book, A Generation of Sociopaths (which I have yet to read), Bruce Cannon Gibney tackles the 21st century American crisis by placing the blame squarely on the mismanagement of the post-WWII “economic miracle” by spoiled-cum-sociopathic Baby Boomers. I’ll give Gibney the benefit of the doubt that his finished text isn’t as reductionary as his chosen title, but I can’t help but cringe at the finger-pointing inherent to such an analysis. Undoubtedly, 45 represents the very worst of the Boomer generation: stubborn, self-aggrandized, misinformed, and hyper-critical of everyone around him—since he cannot face up to the criticisms leveled against him by others. But to attribute the sins of some bad apples to the orchard of an entire generation seems to me yet another part of our current problem.

There will be blood… Joe Gillis (William Holden) floats in a swimming pool at the start/end of Sunset Boulevard; a victim of his own complicity in Norma’s self-centered delusion.

From where I stand on the matter, every time an individual derives some entertainment from witnessing the unfolding disaster of 45’s administration, the shit show lives to die another day. Every time a bigoted troll or a self-righteous justice warrior engages in a Twitter feud or a comment thread argument, the flames of the dumpster fire rise higher. Every time a snarky analyst finds an easy linchpin for the crisis at-hand (whether by blaming a ratings-driven news network, or an entire generation), the intrinsic complexity of the variables at play is either muddied or diluted. And unless one looks the full catastrophe straight in the eyes, without flinching or cracking a smile, the reality TV apparatus will continue unabated—and it is quite possible that 45 will eventually achieve the career vindication he has sought for so many years: not through any sort of constructive accomplishment, but through the total disintegration of the fabric that once united this country—a nation that can no longer see past the fear of its own neighbor, or the disdain for those poor fools who fell foul of an increasingly irrelevant educational system (to the extent they no longer perceive it to have any real merit).

The Germanic notion of schadenfreude has historically enabled those with a wicked sense of humor to derive a perverse sort of satisfaction from the demise of others. In our current situation, such a concept cannot be deferred to for intellectual respite. For the demise at hand is our own.

“No one ever leaves a star. That’s what makes one a star.”
– Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950)

*I do hope the satirical nature of this observation comes across clearly for the reader. Anymore, it’s difficult to ascertain how anything will be interpreted—no matter how clearly spelled out it may be.