"I'm a raven."

I forgot to mention in my previous post one of my favorite things about Moonrise Kingdom, which was the liberal use of Benjamin Britten's works in the soundtrack. Movie nerds will recognize the theme from his Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra as the Rondeau from Henry Purcell's Abdelazar, which was adapted (quite effectively, for solo violin) for a key scene in The Lesser Adaptation of Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

"I'm a raven."

The amateur production of Britten's Noye's Fludde, staged in a local church and replete with children dressed as animals, is, like the Khaki Scouts, its own kind of child-adult collusion in overenthusiasm. Suzy is a failed raven just as Sam is a failed Khaki Scout, failed on social grounds rather than out of incompetence. It is a "play" that is taken utterly seriously, especially by the grown-ups (like the one who demotes Suzy from her raven role). Play taken too seriously, or serious enterprises (like child care) rendered all too game-like (as when the best scout of all, Scoutmaster Ward, manages to lose first Sam, then the rest of the troop), continually threaten happiness. The only possible resistance is yet another system, an alternative game, a union between Sam's wilderness skills and Suzy's fantasy world, the game of their private Moonrise Kingdom.

Thus when all the other social systems of discipline converge, they do so at the church, in the midst of Noye's Fludde, in order to escape the actual flooding outside.

Britten is a serious, even difficult composer who has, when you think about it, written a great deal for children—both child audiences and child performers. He's especially known as a composer of liturgical music in a tradition famous for its boy choristers. I couldn't help noticing a movement from his Simple Symphony when it appeared in the film—a movement tellingly titled "Playful Pizzicato"—I'd played it as a child, after all. Using childish sounds—"playful" pizzicato (plucked strings), glockenspiels, high-pitched child voices, and at times almost comical bombast (including in the didactic Young Person's Guide)—Britten proffers Middle English texts and challenging harmonies. Thus, within the world of the film, his music marks the oscillations between "too easy" and "too hard" that marks every educational pursuit, every system for cultivating the self.

Anderson's own oeuvre, so often described in the terms of miniatures and toys (and including an animated adaptation of a children's book, Roald Dahl's 1970 Fantastic Mister Fox) aspires to similar comminglings. In Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson focalizes childhood as a site of real difficulty, one whose difficulties are not discontinuous with those of adulthood, and indeed, one whose difficulties are most adult when they reside in the domain of play.

Suzy lugs a suitcase of stolen library books through the wilderness, imaginative resources for building a private universe. Her fictions are bulwarks against the flood.

I recently heard the following piped into a supermarket (no audio link because the song is really pretty terrible):

Cause she's so hiiiiiii-eeee-iiiigh,
High above me,
She's so lovely.
She's so hiiiiiii-eeee-iiiigh,
Like Cleopatra,
Joan of Arc or Aphrodite.

And I thought, you know dude, I think you may be onto something. Joan of Arc probably wouldn't give you the time of day.

Look, I just have to put this out there after hearing this song piped into a few too many establishments this weekend. Adele's single "Someone Like You" is the worst. torch. song. ever.



Oh, it's pretty well constructed as a song. But the total abjection expressed in the pleading, self-abasing lyrics is just embarrassing. Come on, lyric I, have a little self-respect! Be less passive-aggressive! And get yourself a couple of backup singers going "sha-la-la" in the background! Contrast this with Amy Winehouse's textured, grown-up treatment of the same:



So much better. Public spaces of Atlanta, you are welcome to play Amy Winehouse as much as you like.

And now, back to Very Important Research.

I'm just going to throw this out there for no good reason. It bugs me that the whole entire internet seems not to have identified the brilliant quotation at the end of Janelle Monáe's track "Wondaland." One dude even thinks it's from the Randall Thompson "Alleluia." Absurd. It is obviously a variation on the refrain from "Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones." Come on, internets; I expect better.

This has been a PSA.

Am I the meanest teacher? Maybe. I think I'm about to get a really terrible song stuck in my students' heads. But it's for Learning!

The timbre of sincerity

Just to be clear: Lady Gaga is about (primarily visual) spectacle, not about music per se. That's not to say that her spectacle is necessarily immersive in the sense in which we classically think about spectacle. (By "we" I mean people who sit around thinking about panoramas and wax museums and are very fond of the work of Alison Griffiths and Vanessa Schwartz and spend rainy weekend afternoons leafing through The Arcades Project, which is to say all of us.) Her videos are not made for IMAX; they're made for YouTube. They are miniatures in their bigness.

To me the canonical Lady Gaga video remains "Bad Romance." I haven't even heard her new single; there's no video yet, so what's the point?



Notwithstanding the primacy of the visual in Lady Gaga, there's something that continues to fascinate me about the sound of "Bad Romance." I'm sure the observation has been made better elsewhere, but I'm still trying to figure it out. There is something about Gaga's vocal timbre that sometimes conveys irony, sometimes sincerity. Compare "love, love, love" at 0:55, 1:12, 2:16, and especially 2:32 to "I don't want to be friends" at 3:50 and especially at 4:05.

"Love, love, love" is gritty, a little nasal. It doesn't care. The air is contained; it's high in the throat; it's whatever air Gaga happens to have sitting around in her upper respiratory system. Nothing's being pushed. The quality of the sound tells us that "love, love, love" means something like a casual if ruthless desire.

In contrast, "I don't want to be friends" is open-throated. There is diaphragm involved, projection, technique. It is what they call "belting." It's a little Broadway, a stylized sincerity augmented by the reintroduction of the "unadorned" Gaga close-up.

"I don't want to be friends" is the video's emotional climax, the sticky moment of investment and utter, fixed attention in an otherwise brittle, aggressive performance. Compare. The video starts with Gaga covered in a metal façade, and ends with her character, accessorized by matching flamethrower and cigarette, absently reclining next to a charred corpse. Most of the time the Lady Gaga character isn't "all there," whether her eyes are hidden behind a variety of shades or masks or popping wide open in a head-lolling stupor.

In contrast, "I don't want to be friends"--that belting of air from the bottom of the lungs--physically performs focused, self-possessed, fully conscious desire. It constitutes a break, and it's a break that you hear. The thorough integration of vocal texture with narrative is part of what makes this video brilliant.

It took a highly creative extended reading by Jack Halberstam to get me at all interested in the "Telephone" video. But "Bad Romance" belts its artful construction very loudly.


Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Howard Eiland, and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Print.

Griffiths, Alison. Shivers down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Print.

---. Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology & Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Print.

Schwartz, Vanessa R. Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-De-Siècle Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Print.

Singing in English class

I've posted before on a general reluctance to sing, which is to say I'm aware of it. My theory is that people think there's a group of people who are "singers," who are allowed to sing because their voices have been approved (by somebody) as not dangerous to the natural order of the universe. Everyone else is "audience."

I have a parallel theory, that everyone actually wants to sing and hopes that someone, somewhere, will let them into the group of approved singers, because singing is really damn fun. This is the desire that drives karaoke, American Idol, and the like. The trials of shame are worth it if perhaps one day you'll be allowed to sing without shame. Sometimes you'll see friends casually sitting around singing, or somebody singing in her car with the window rolled down. It's as though they're getting away with something.

For my Didactic Modernism class on Tuesday morning, I made my students sing. I wasn't sure I was really going to do it, up until that very morning.

Nearly first thing, I asked them to sing a major scale, which they did, being good sports. Then I had them sing the scale in parallel thirds, which they again did. Finally, I taught them to sing the first four measures of this song (the whole song only being eight measures anyway), in four-part harmony. The bass situation was a little pathetic, especially since I categorically cannot sing bass, and we sounded terrible, but I gave them to understand that sounding like angels wasn't really the point. Wonderful students that they are, they gave it a shot, and we muddled through pretty well.

The point was this. By making my students sing scales, and then learn from scratch a piece of music they'd never sung before, I put them in the position of beginners, including those who happened to have a lot of musical training. Perhaps they were feeling mildly insulted and not a little frustrated. Perhaps they felt that, as advanced English majors, they knew what they were supposed to be doing in an English class, and this was not it.

Modernist poetry, I argued, will do this to you. You think you know how to read, but it makes you start over; it puts you in the position of someone who has to go back to fundamentals and learn from the ground up. It addresses you as "ephebe." It tries to teach you the A B C of Reading. Hence "didactic modernism." As Julie Andrews would say: "When you read, you begin with A, B, C; when you sing you begin with do, re, mi."

Modernist poetry, I argued, is most difficult precisely when it seems simplest. So we spent some time looking at a snippet from Tender Buttons, and then a bit more time reading that often-read Williams poem, "This Is Just to Say."

I had one more ulterior motive with the singing, which was to set a tone for the class. They've all sung in front of one another; nothing they wish to say about Pound's Cantos could possibly be more risky. (This was of course a brilliant segue into my draconian course policies.)

I can't tell yet whether it was just a funny first-day gimmick or something that will produce a difference in the way the course operates--actually, there's no way I can ever tell. But if my students were traumatized they've hidden it well, and they were terrific discussing I. A. Richards on Thursday, so I'm calling it a success.

I made my students sing.

That was the aforementioned unorthodox exercise. More anon.

"WHHHHY?": still cute, now with different video

I feel like my earlier reading of Cee Lo's "Fuck You" is very much backed up by the developmental narrative (from childhood through adolescence to the present) of the new video:



It gets extra cuteness points for the mother slapping the boy when he lip-synchs the "fuck you" refrain, the video's only coy acknowledgment of the incongruity that's runs throughout the song--the childishness on one hand, the adult profanity on the other. The deferral of the bridge-tantrum to near the end of the song gives the lie to the progress narrative suggested by the succession of years and the announcement, via title, that Cee Lo is now a "ladykiller" (a word whose aggression is, in context, infantile).

There's a lot more to say about the new video.

It's chilling to see a small girl alluded to as a "gold-digger," for instance.

The video is also very pointed about the lip-synching, since Cee Lo always sings the lead and various actors mouth it. This also conduces to the gender-bending that Kevin mentions, particularly with the (very funny) trio of female backup vocalists mouthing what are audibly male backup vocals.

No time for a dissection tonight, but I assume the internets will be picking this one up and running with it.

Puerile desire and the cuteness of "WHHHHY?"

[Welcome, readers from 33 1/3!]

There are a lot of f-bombs in this post. Just saying.

Puerility is a powerful mode for a number of the authors I study, so you can imagine my delight when the internets deposited the following gem before me:



We learn that there is going to be no claim to dignity from the very first line, even before the endlessly catchy refrain:

I see you driving 'round town with the girl I love, and I'm like, "Fuck you!"

"I'm like" lets us know before we even arrive that this will be no haughty drama; no grand passion; no cold, dignified rage. It acknowledges at once the immaturity of responding to heartbreak with "Fuck you!" The song subtly clues us into the conjectural status of the "gold-digger" theory of rejection as well: "I guess the change in my pocket wasn't enough." Translation: you must have rejected me because you're a venal, flat stereotype of a woman. Cee Lo indulges in the most simplistic of interpretations, the one that makes a rejection into something other than a real rejection. There's a vicious pleasure and satisfaction in facile interpretations (viz. cable news), and Cee Lo both embraces that pleasure and acknowledges it for what it is: puerility.

As Kevin points out, the song's "fuck you" is universal ("fuck you and fuck her too"--which is to say, fuck everybody). The song's first sentence lets us think the addressee is a competitor for a woman's affections, but it quickly slips back and forth between addressing the competitor and addressing the woman herself. Eventually the universe of the song expands to include an appeal to "Mamma," whereupon the singer is once again denied and handed off to "Dad," in a deft Freudian disciplinary gesture.



The song invokes a queer triangulation of desire (of the woman, of the competitor), but despite the proliferation of f-bombs, in the end it is not an adult song at all but a childish immersion in polymorphous desire. This is why it makes perfect sense that a key metaphor revolves around more or less awesome video game consoles ("Xbox" versus "Atari"), why it "ain't fair" seems like a valid complaint, and why the bridge devolves into explicit (and hilarious) whining, an actual tantrum. By the end of this bridge all pretense that the gold-digger theory could have actually been valid has been abandoned in favor of the open, raw howl of "WHHHHY?" He doesn't know why. It's all a free-flowing libidinal soup now.



The clever lyric video supports the polymorphous libido of the song by refusing distinctions between reasonable and unreasonable, important and unimportant, figure and ground. Every last word of the song is printed before our eyes, in time, including backup vocals and non-words like "OOO, OOO, OOOO" and "UH." (Follow the bouncing ball?)



This is perhaps the best use of puerility I've seen in a while, and like some of Mark Twain's funniest rants, it's characterized by an unusual energy, a full-fledgedness that's hilarious, in part, because it's so very cute--an impotent, multidirectional, adorable rage. This is how the song manages to be intense and light at the same time, angry and hilarious--like some of Twain's less sporting pot-shots at the literary lights of a previous generation. It's indulgent, childishly so, and that's what makes it appealing.

As with Twain, there's a dark dimension to this humor as well. First, it depends on our willingness to take childish anguish lightly, and to laugh at what is intensely, if incoherently, felt. And second, puerility (that is, the tantrum of the male child) here becomes the humorous grounds for perpetuating a deeply misogynistic narrative. She isn't really a gold-digger, no, but Cee Lo gets to say she is, over and over, and we'll laugh at it, because puerility excuses it. Female desire is reduced to a cipher for our amusement. There's no resolving this, I don't think. Humor always has its undertow.

[Update as of 9/1/2010.]

I know this is absolutely pathological, but I'm a little bothered that the apostrophe in front of "round" is pointed in the wrong direction. Someone didn't override smart quotes?

Also, it strikes me as ingenious that the video emulates film stock, but I'm not sure why.

On cuteness:
Ngai, Sianne. "The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde." Critical Inquiry 31.4 (Summer 2004): 811-47. Print.

Apropos of yesterday's sequence of stills: I can't believe I still haven't posted on Janelle Monáe. I mean, she has a disc titled Metropolis, for heaven's sake. I'm still hoping the much better Kevin Dettmar will post on her soon (and can I dream of a Jack Halberstam post?). Still, I have some thoughts to work out on her, and will do it one of these days.

Emoting close-ups

Burning passion, bad romance

Okay, does anyone not think this is a shout-out to Dreyer and Falconetti?

Once again, I should reiterate that I don't play piano and never have.

But at some point in high school I borrowed one of my mother's music books and learned to more or less plunk out Beethoven's "Für Elise," that old standby of piano pedagogy. (I was significantly less good at it than this seven-year-old.) I was pretty terrible at reading music for two hands then (I still am, but less so now) and, then as now, had no piano technique.

I've recently been trying to remember how to play it. Katherine doesn't seem to have the music in her house, and I don't want to play it so badly as to track it down in the music library. Instead I've been trying to remember, and it has been a lesson in the strangeness of memory.

So far all I can remember is the opening sequence and a little bit of the B section. I remember how the rest of it sounds, but not how to play it. I started with nothing; I couldn't remember a thing except for where to place my right hand for the first note. Slowly it comes back.

I don't at all remember how the music looks on the page; consequently I can't reconstruct any of the fingerings logically.

I also have no visual memory of where the right hand goes; it is necessary that I not look at my right hand. That memory is in the muscles.

Conversely, I must look at the left hand. The left hand does some hopping around, and when I learned the piece I didn't have the technique to memorize that kind of motion. I always looked at the left hand when I learned the piece, and I must look at the left hand to remember.

It's funny, because I didn't remember what my left hand was supposed to look like at first. I started to remember by making some jabs at the keyboard and listening, trying to remember the right sound and the right movements and, finally, the right visual cues. It's the visual cues that make playing the left hand a sure thing.

It's different with the right hand. Staring at it does nothing (and anyway I couldn't play the left-handed part while looking at my right hand). Sometimes I make a lot of mistakes and sometimes I don't. There's nothing solid for me to rely on to prevent mistakes. If there's music in front of me I can remind myself to be sure to play that accidental, or concentrate on the sequence I'm about to play. Without music, without any visual sense of where my fingers are supposed to go, I can only prevent mistakes one way: suspending intention and dwelling in a physical memory. I have to trust my frankly unreliable fingers to remember on my behalf.

What else do my fingers know that I don't? I ask this by touch-typing on a computer keyboard, of course.

On guilty pleasures

Kevin Dettmar recently asked his readers about their "guilty pleasures." He was talking about pop music, but sadly, I don't really have any pop music guilty pleasures, unless you count Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance," which I for one do not. (Genius, people!)

I do have some guilty blog pleasures, though.

They are Regretsy and Unhappy Hipsters.

Regretsy, aptly self-described as "where DIY meets WTF," mocks poorly wrought and/or ill conceived items on the popular DIY site Etsy.com.

Unhappy Hipsters makes fun of the restrained elegance of those beautiful, unaffordable-by-normal-people homes in magazines like Dwell.

The author of Unhappy Hipsters has a hilarious knack for reading sinister motives into Scandinavian furniture. Regretsy is both vulgar and mean-spirited (I really mean it; do not show this blog to your kids), but the unapologetic intensity of April Winchell's mockery is likewise brilliant in its way, even subversive.

I have genuine misgivings about both of these blogs (Regretsy in particular). But I also like them.

Kevin points out the weird moralism in the very idea of a guilty pleasure, and I think he's right to suspect that there's an intellectual cop-out happening when we pre-ironize our own "low" tastes by disclaiming them as "guilty pleasures." We ought to be able to take a good hard look at our own aesthetic pleasures and say why we like things that we're supposed to know better than to like (because they're too predictable, too boilerplate, etc.).

Kevin gives a great example of this in his discussion of the "military Telephone" video. Kevin contrasts the first half of the video, which manifests what seems to be sincere pleasure in the pop song (with its incredibly clumsy scansion!) with what he calls "the self-consciously 'camp,' second-rate Village People section of the video." It's the earlier, sincere section of the video that's subversive, not the pre-ironized latter section. Unrestrained pleasure is a little frightening.

The other smart discussion of guilty pleasure that leaps to mind is Anne Cheng's "Beauty and Ideal Citizenship," the first chapter of The Melancholy of Race. The guilty pleasure that she names (and which I entirely share) is the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Flower Drum Song (1961), and the ostensible reasons for guilt lie in the film's problematic racial politics. Look at the cheesy fake Chinese lettering on the DVD cover, the stereotyping of Chinatown, the casting of all sorts of Asian Americans in the rôles of Chinese Americans (including Japanese Americans as both the male lead and the ingenue), etc., etc. Look at how none of the many Asian Americans cast in the film ever really became a star. What does liking Flower Drum Song say about my politics?

But I think it's where politics intertwines with aesthetics that the guilt comes in. We don't make a habit of apologizing for liking What Maisie Knew, even when we acknowledge that there's an incredibly racist element in it. Somehow James's command of his craft makes it possible to acknowledge, and even condemn, the racism, but also to bracket it. There's a racist element in Uncle Tom's Cabin, too, but we're more likely to apologize for it because it's sentimental--and Stowe's racism is just a cover for our aesthetic embarrassment. Flower Drum Song is problematic, but it's when we add in Oscar Hammerstein's dubious talents as a librettist and the funny 60's dancing that we have ourselves a guilty pleasure. How deeply taste matters.

Cheng sees the forbidden character of Linda Low (Nancy Kwan) as the greatest locus of pleasure in Flower Drum Song. Linda is the definition of a guilty pleasure--beautiful, self-involved, transgressively successful at being both Chinese and American (her "You Be the Rock, I'll Be the Roll" number with Patrick Adiarte's Wang San is perhaps my favorite), in every way politically troubling, transgressively aware of the ways in which she performs gender, she "enjoys being a girl" and dances for her own pleasure in front of a three-way mirror. Flower Drum Song is a parable about rejecting the guilty pleasure, about letting go of Linda Low.

And yet, as Cheng points out, the film can't let go of Linda Low; it has to reject her in the narrative, but she's still the center of the spectacle. When visual pleasure meets narrative cinema, visual pleasure wins. That's why it's Nancy Kwan (in an absurd hat) on the DVD cover, not Miyoshi Umeki. The guilty pleasure that is Linda Low is at the heart of the guilty pleasure that is Flower Drum Song. Which makes Flower Drum Song also a parable about rejecting Flower Drum Song.

Perhaps what's so great about Regretsy and Unhappy Hipsters is that they take the paradigm wherein one is too self-aware to ever endorse anything fully and just go the whole hog with it. Unhappy Hipsters makes fun of the disaffected, joyless, too-cool-for-clutter aesthetic of modernist architecture (and make no mistake, I love this architecture, and very much suspect that the author of Unhappy Hipsters does too). It makes something presumed ironic into something deeply sentimental. Regretsy makes fun of earnestness with its own passionate earnestness. They're politically compromised but aesthetically committed, and it's not the compromise but the commitment that's challenging.

Like many people, I had some formal musical training (violin) when I was pretty young and left off serious study about mid-college. I don't consider myself a musician.

Now I find myself with sudden access to a piano. I do not play piano; I never have. I have, however, tried to pick out music on pianos many times. It's the sort of thing I find irresistible: there is the music, there is the keyboard. See what you can realize just by taking a stab at it.

It's startling to me to notice what is and is not difficult about it to me now, in contrast to earlier periods in my life. Reading bass clef seems more natural than it once did. Reading two lines together seems easier. It seems less necessary to look at the keyboard than it once did. On the other hand, I'm far more aware of my lack of fingering technique, and the limitations it imposes, than before. And I can feel the effects of typing a dissertation in my hands.

It seems the relationship between my brain and my hands has changed without my noticing. Hello, my fingers; we meet again.

Counting to four

Recently Hillary showed me this video of Feist singing “1, 2, 3, 4” for Sesame Street.



I found the video very funny, and particularly enjoyed the way Feist’s dancing mimics the movement of the muppets – head upturned, mouth wide open, body being flung from side to side. The clusters of muppets seem to drag her around the set, as if she’s a muppet herself. As Hillary pointed out, this version is more appealing than the original.

The lyrics aren’t especially clever; it’s obvious that it was a pre-existing song being adapted to fit an educational theme. It’s charming nonetheless, especially the earnestness with which the merits of the number four are announced: it’s “one less than five, and one more than three.” I mean, who can argue with that?

The song blithely suggests that there’s something natural about counting up to your favorite number (in homage?). In fact, what’s amusing about the song is the absurd specificity of the activity being lauded, not just counting (as high as you can), but counting to four.

I suppose it could be argued that all the counting represents a set-theoretic construction of the number four (i.e. as a set of four elements). The singer then points to a three-dimensional Arabic numeral 4, singing “I see four here,” and correlates it to the four penguins she’s just counted (one, two, three, four) by pointing to them and singing “I see four there.”

Of course, any pedagogical achievement in that line is undermined by the next two: “My favorite number/ Nothing can compare.” Contra the lyrics, usually natural numbers don’t inspire affect (“my favorite,” and the gesture of laying the hand over the heart). Instead they are the abstractions by which certain kinds of comparisons become possible (to wit: four monsters, four penguins, four chickens, "one less than five and one more than three").

But in general, counting over and over again is usually read as a symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder. Émile Zola suffered from this particular obsession, and experienced deep shame that, while publicly committed to a scientific program, he privately performed over and over these rituals of order that were essentially superstitious.

Part of what’s appealing about the Feist video is the unironic joy in counting to four. But I wonder if that appeal doesn't have more to do with its absurdity -- an absurdity specifically associated with children's (perceived) cognitive limitations -- than with any actual desire to get toddlers pumped about counting to four. And perhaps a bit of the pleasure comes from the juxtaposition of those perceived childish limitations (counting, not as high as one can, but to four, and not because it's useful but because four is your favorite) with our own adult sophistication -- our recognition of the tune from a different context, etc.

Of course, I still like the video. And is anyone else detecting a subtle shout-out to Lyn Hejinian here? Like plump birds along the shore? Yes?

* * * * *

In other news, I sincerely hope that Poe studies have not really come to this.

(Of course they haven't; it's just that the NYT would rather report on this than on anything actually literary.)