Andrew Bird in the Valleys of the Young

Last weekend Kristina and I drove down to St. Louis to see Andrew Bird perform at the Pageant.  What can I say?  The man is astounding live.  Kristina was initially lukewarm on going, only buying me tickets cause it was my birthday--but if anything she loved the show even more than me.  In an Indie and Pop music world so filled with rank amateurs, either proud of their "raw" lack of talent or auto-tuned to death--in our "Post-Skills" moment wherein mere novelty is privileged over technical ability--it is so refreshing to listen to a genuine world-class musician, an actual adult, who sounds better live than any studio-tinkering ever could, and what's more makes it sound easy. 

That adulthood of Andrew Bird in particular is a core part of his appeal for me--I first discovered him once I had entered my late-20s, and I found that the music I was listening to as an undergrad didn't quite cut it anymore, e.g. hearing Jimmy Eat World sing about the passion of turning "23" really resonated when I was, well, 23, but it didn't particularly help me with whatever I was going through when I was 27, to say the least.   However, hearing Andrew Bird slur "Souverian" into "So very young/were we" is the sound of someone who really does know what it's like to feel your youth slip away--and hearing him sing mournfully "still my lover won't return to me" is to hear the sound of a man who knows what it is to pine for a lost love not merely for days, weeks, or even an entire year (*gasp!*) like some High School romance, but for veritable years.

Simply put, Andrew Bird sounded like someone who knew, just knew, and he began my process of re-orientating myself towards artists who not only recorded in their 30s, but sang about what it feels like to be in your 30s.

Of course, Andrew Bird has now entered his 40s, and the question hanging over my head as we drove down to Missouri was whether his music had kept up with his age, if he could still write songs that resonated with my rapidly increasing years, or if he had officially transitioned into legacy status, largely just touring behind the "hits."

I needn't have worried.  The penultimate track to his latest album is "Valleys of the Young."

Background: Andrew Bird got married in 2010, and he and his wife just recently had their first child--and it is that anxiety, wonder, and terror about becoming a parent at last, and thus finally, formally, leaving behind "The Valleys of the Young" for good, that is the theme of this song.  With my own impending nuptials next month and the very real possibility that I will be starting a family reasonably soon as well, this song could not have hit me at a harder moment.

Part of what makes the song so aching is how uncharacteristically straight-forward it is for Bird--for a guy who normally prefers more playful lyrics like "This is sure to misspell disaster" or "Imitosis"  or "Fake Palindromes", it is rather staggering to hear him belt this rather blunt summation of parenthood: "your friends will become strange to you/Just as you will become strange to them/You'll live across a great divide". This is a man facing fatherhood with eyes wide-open, refusing to hide behind precious lyrics. "From their cradle until our grave," he repeats, "is it selfish or is it brave," and it's a good question.

Also: Bird, who once sang "Fiery Crash" to express his superstition that if he envisions the plane crashing, the plane won't crash, does the same now with parenthood--"Now you're going on 64/Driving down 65, to the hospital/To see if your adult son will survive or not/After taking those pills in the parking lot".  I pray that this isn't prophecy for him.

I'm sure there are plenty of songs about becoming parents, but I can scarcely think of another that does it so unsentimentally yet still so passionately and movingly.  Once again, Bird has his fingers on the pulse of every age I look forward to, like so few artists even know how to do anymore.  I suspect one day I will mourn him the same way so many of my peers did Prince this past week. 

On Prince vs. the Internet

Between Bowie and Prince, 2016 has been a rough year for effeminate-masculine outré artiste-types--the Venn Diagram of those two fanbases overlaps much more than I realized.  Yet though David Bowie's death hit me far harder than I ever though it would, unlike many of my peers, I confess that Prince's passing initially left me somewhat detached.  All I could really remember of him was "1999", some lame Jay Leno monologues about "The Artist Formally Known As", and an off-hand Simpsons reference to "When Doves Cry."

And part of that, frankly, was Prince's fault: before his tragic passing, the most common complaint leveled against him was how utterly impossible it was to find his music, well, anywhere online.  YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, even dedicated fan-sites, were all scrubbed clean of even the slightest hint of his music.  He was notorious for sicking he lawyers within hours upon any website naive enough to post any form of his music, even karoke covers.

Such, to say the least, is not how people discover music nowadays.  You have to be able to stumble upon videos on YouTube, goes the argument, or playlists on streaming services, for folks to even have a chance of knowing you exist, let alone deciding if they want to hear more.  Sure, Prince was mega-popular in the '80s, but you can't coast on 30-year-old notoriety for the rest of your life, cried the critics; there is now an entire new generation of music listeners who are utterly ignorant of Prince.  And who can blame them, if they can't even accidentally hear snippets of his hits?

Prince, for however forward-thinking he may have been artistically, nevertheless became an absolute dinosaur--an archaic, analog relic of some bygone, pre-digital age, unwilling to adapt to or even understand the internet at all.

So goes the argument.

Or, did he instead understand the internet all too well?

I'm thinking for example of the famed 2012 Pitchfork article by Damon Krukowski, about how the thousands of streams his band Galaxie 500 has gotten on Spotify has netted him a grand whole dollar--that in fact selling a single t-shirt at a show generates bigger profit for him than his entire catalogue on streaming.  I'm also thinking of how Thom Yorke of Radiohead has removed all his solo work from Spotify, over similar complaints.  And how mega-sellers Adele and Taylor Swift have recently chosen not to debut their latest releases on streaming either, claiming solidarity with the struggling young musicians denied their first means of support.  There appears to be this slowly growing consensus among musicians, from the lowliest indie rocker to the biggest stadium-filler, that this whole model of getting paid jack-all for their recordings is, well, a clearly bad deal.

And I also recall that Spotify and other streaming services have been trying to negotiate paying even less out to artists, in large part because they can't afford to pay out more--it appears that this whole streaming business model is fundamentally unprofitable and unsustainable.

Which brings me back to Prince: was he simply an old dude afraid of change, or did he perceive with crystal clarity, years before everyone else caught on, the existential threat that streaming poses to musicians?  Was he shooting himself in the foot with all his anti-internet litigiousness, or did he do the cold, hard arithmetic and determine (long before Damon Krukowski) that having a tiny, die-hard cult-following pay actual money for his albums still netted him more profit than letting millions of casual fans stream his whole back catalogue for free?

For what it's worth, the day he died, I did in fact exchange real money for a greatest hits album, wherein I immediately discovered why so many of my friends mourned--his songs are just so undeniably fun!  There's something living about them, and they awake something living within you as well!  It is with a twinge of sadness that I realize it took his untimely death for me to finally give him a second thought.

But though I still think him scrubbing even his videos from YouTube was rather much, I think I now better sympathize with the logic behind it: I suspect that is wasn't so much that Prince stumbled on the home-stretch with his forward-thinking, so to speak, but that in fact his forward-thinking became so sharply honed near the end that we mistook it for blindness--that in fact we are only now catching up with him, that he well foresaw the havoc that these so-called "disruptive" new business models would wreak upon content producers, as they already have upon oh so many other fields (including mine), further stratifying the rich from the poor, the investors from the actual workers.

Prince, though popular enough that he probably still could have made a small fortune off of streaming alone, perhaps determined that he would have no part in such an exploitative system--he refused to be complicit, and so recused himself from participating altogether.

And now that he is gone, we perhaps need to carry on his work ourselves, and refuse to be complicit as well.

A Terrible Beauty Is Born

Today, Sunday April 24th, marks the exact centennial of the Easter Uprising in Ireland, the catalyst for the whole violent process that finally brought about the secession of the Republic of Ireland from the UK after seven long centuries of struggle.  It is also, incidentally, my birthday.

William Butler Yeats, Nobel laureate and Irish National poet, wrote a famous poem about it, "Easter 1916," that features the astounding couplet: "All is changed, changed utterly/A terrible beauty is born."  Did I mention I was born today, too? 

It's an odd sort of synchronicity that brings me into the Uprising's orbit--though neither Irish nor Irish-American myself, Yeats somehow became my all-time favorite poet by dint of the sheer beauty of his song.  He and this poem in particular have featured prominently in my PhD applications, in a seminar paper, Quals, Comps, my dissertation, and in various conferences, including one in Ireland itself.  It's really a remarkable poem: he spends less time detailing the actual event itself than his wonder--and to a certain extent his terror--that it happened at all.  It's a poem about how everything can change suddenly, completely, at once, when nothing seemed like it would ever change again.

And somehow, I didn't realize for years that the event this poem commemorates occurred on my birthday. 

This feels tangentially related, somehow--because a birthday, on the surface, feels like just another day, arbitrary and meaningless, no more likely to break the endless monotony of X's on the calendar than any other.

That is, until it does.  Completely.  Radically.  Earth shatteringly.  Some birthdays do nothing but add some extra cake-starch to your system...but other birthdays change all, change utterly.  We are the terrible beauty that is born.  Let me live up to it.

On Hyperbolic Small-Press Pull-Quotes

During the lunchtime chatter at a recent conference, I overheard this poet complain that not only had actor James Franco published a terrible collection of poems, not only is it far-outselling far-better works, but what really added insult to injury, was that it has garnered rave reviews from actual respected poets, with such hyperbolic pull-quotes as "dramatize[s] the fever dream of American celebrity culture" and "Franco knows it like Melville knows whaling."

Of course, such extravagance isn't just an issue with celebrity vanity-projects; for it seems like in almost every single small-press work I've ever encountered, the pull-quotes just have to make some grandiose claims like "sets a new standard in American fiction!"  or "fundamentally shifts the bedrock of everything we think we know about what literature is or can be!" or the like.

They never say anything like, "I really enjoyed reading this!" or "If you're into experimental fiction, it's right up your ally!" or "Lots of fun!"  (Ironically, it's popular genre fiction that is content to just have single-word reviews like "Thrilling," "Page-turner," or "Great!")

Not that I don't get the impulse towards small-press hyperbole--in an increasingly crowded field competing for an ever-dwindling reading public, the publisher's need to make their product stand-out reaches fever-pitch.  Yet at the same time, if everyone's works are ground-breaking, then arguably nobody's is--the words lose their value, and if there's one thing books can't afford to do, it's devalue words. 

It may be useful in moments like ours to remember that if we're playing the loud self-promotion game, that books will always lose to movies, video-games, pop-stars, who will always be louder--moreover, that the people who are still reading do so precisely because they're trying to escape the loudness.  The silence of the page in a world that can't shut-up is its very appeal.

It may also be useful to consider that our era of self-promotion is also the era of self-promotion burnout--and that in a room full of screamers the hushed one can be the most unnerving; that among short-skirts the long-dress can be the most revealing; that in a bar-fight the silent one can be the most intimidating; that the scariest monsters are the most hidden; that in a world of noise understatement can be a virtue--Mark Danielewski has described his 27-volume epic The Familiar as "the story of a 12-year-old girl who finds a kitten..."

None of this is to disparage reviewers, nor to find fault with the many bold small-presses who fight to stay afloat by any means necessary.  (It's not like they need my opinion anyways.)  This is only to wonder aloud, as so many strive to innovate a new kind of literature, what a new kind of review might look like, too.

E.T. Revisited

The moment I saw E.T. was now available on Netflix streaming, I realized I hadn't seen it since I was Elliott's age.  That fact struck me; like all kids born in the '80s, I have endlessly rewatched the touchstones of my childhood--Star Wars, Star Trek, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, etc--ad infinitum.  Yet the biggest hit of 1982, a movie which, adjusted for inflation, pulled in over a billion dollars domestically, which posted Dark Knight and Avengers and Avatar numbers on a tiny fraction of their budgets, a movie with some of the most iconic scenes in cinema--I can count on one hand the number of times I have actually watched it.

It wasn't even a case of me wondering if something from my childhood would hold up or not, I just had to watch it to figure out why I hadn't endlessly rewatched it since the '80s!

Having now rewatched it, I think I have a theory: those other films I mentioned are about adults.  They may certainly be child-like visions about how awesome adulthood must be like, but that still means that those films can still age with the audience.

E.T., however, is about children--and not just about children, but childhood as it is perceived by children.  In fact, E.T. is perhaps the most singularly accurate representation of the disorienting experience of childhood that has ever been committed to film.  It is an experience that most adults not only do not recall, but most don't wish to recall.

I'm thinking of scenes such as when we first meet Elliott, hanging around his teenage older brothers' friends, who are eating pizza and playing cards, play-acting their juvenile vision of adulthood--one imagines that if Mom wasn't there, they'd be chomping cigars in a smoke-filled room.  The camera continually sweeps slowly around the table, never pausing, ever restless and unresolved, as Michael and his buddies are undeniable jerks to Elliott, even as Elliott is undeniably annoying.

I'm also thinking of when the kids are all crowding, pushing, and shoving onto the school bus, throwing paper-balls at each other, Elliott shrieking that the goblin was actually a space-man, Michael both teasing yet also sticking up for his younger brother, while another kid keeps repeating "Uranus! Get it?" over and over and over.  There's just this casual chaos about these scenes, which nails the feeling of childhood perfectly.

Also noteworthy is that, with the significant exception of the Mom, almost all of the adults in the film are portrayed from low camera angles, making them appear all the larger and more menacing.  Their faces are almost always hidden, either from the camera cutting off at their chests, or obscured by shadows, or faced away from the camera, or hidden behind medical masks and space-helmets.  Adults in E.T. are the actual aliens, dark invaders from another world.  E.T. does not need to feature malevolent space invaders like most sci-fi, because the human adults already fulfill that role.  The seemingly-omnipotent terror of adults is a very real part of the childhood experience.

This is no rose-colored nostalgia for childhood, but a dead-on depiction of how we all more or less behaved as children and perceived the world, one way or another, however embarrassing it may be to recall now.

Yet Spielberg has real affection for all these children, too; he does not render them more precocious than they should be--they are not mini-adults, in other words--but nor does he make caricatures out of them.  Michael's jerk-friends become the heroes and helpers in the climax; Elliott learns to love others rather than just act out.  Spielberg's children are real human children, in all their messiness but also in all their fundamental decency.  You can't have one without the other, is the implicit thesis of E.T., which is a balance no other film starring kids I can think of has been able to hit since; most directors usually just opt for either straight brats or lil' angels (that may be perhaps why Jake Lloyd was so terrible as Anakin in The Phantom Menace...well, one of many, many reasons).

That balance between messiness and decency is ever harder to maintain as adults, as we quickly try to forget all about our ridiculous childhood selves.  I remember liking the film just fine as a child myself, but I don't remember falling in love with it--perhaps because, as a child myself, its world view was so identical to my own that it didn't occur to me to recognize how singular, how rare, for children to be so perfectly represented on the screen.  But now I am a jaded adult, and I get it now, what an achievement E.T. was and is; this is why it raked in a billion dollars; it reminded adults exactly what it was like to be a child in the best way possible, warts and all.

Digital Inhumanities: The Poverty of Quantification

Recently I attended a conference wherein a major focus was upon the "Digital Humanities," the latest cause célèbre in English and Philosophy today, oft hailed as the coming savior of our collective disciplines.  In one panel, the presenter showed a digital map of the Book of Matthew, with an interconnecting series of dots of various sizes representing the Book's proper names.  "Can you guess who the biggest dot represents?" asked the presenter.  "Um...Jesus?" we finally said.  "Yeah," he chuckled, "Newsflash, I know, Jesus is the most important figure in the Book of Matthew."

The next day, in a different panel, a different presenter showed a similar digital map for the Book of Luke.  "Can you guess who the biggest dot is?" she asked.  "Um...Jesus?"we said after an awkward long silence, scarcely believing that this was happening again.

It was cute the first time it happened; but by the second time it was already highlighting some serious shortcomings concerning the "Digital Humanities."

Because, yes, computer models can certainly quantify that Jesus Christ is the most central figure of the Four Gospels...but that ain't exactly news to, well, everyone who's ever read the Bible ever.  Moreover, that statistical data point still tells us precisely nil about how the staggering number of Christian sects over the past 2,000 years have interpreted and reinterpreted his role in the Trinity, the physicality of his Resurrection, how he accomplished the Atonement, what was considered heretical, what doctrines were considered dying for, etc, etc, etc.  These have been and remain highly contested controversies within Christendom, which a statistical word count is highly unlikely to resolve (to put it mildly).

Before proceeding, I must first make clear that, despite my own weak math skills, I do believe that statistics are absolutely critical, that computers are amazing resources, that the Medieval monks who had to walk on foot across war-torn dukedoms towards the next-nearest monastery to gain access to a meager collection of maybe 200 worm-eaten manuscripts hand-copied in dead languages would all have committed cold-blooded murder to have access to the digital resources we have today, which we mostly just use today to download pics of funny cats.  We absolutely should be using computers and stats more often in the Humanities.

But my problem isn't with the tools, it's when the tools begin to be fetishized as the ends unto themselves, as opposed to a mere means to an end, one of many valid approaches.  For though computers are priceless resources for gathering information, they do jack-all for interpreting information.  Scientists (whom we're clearly trying to ape here) already know this, by the way; the world's most powerful telescopes can gather us data from the far reaches of the universe, but it is all mostly meaningless till someone actually sits down with the data and interprets what the heck all those numbers even mean.  And those interpretations often differ between scientists; and they must constantly make arguments to each each other about why their interpretations are more accurate than others'.

Scientists are engaged in the interpretation of texts, in other words.  

Which you'll note is what the Humanities are supposedly trained to do from the start.   A text is placed in our hands; what does it mean?  Can you justify your readings?  Why or why not?  Finding new ways to re-categorize and present the text is not the same as actually interpreting it. 

The irony is that it is usually the older scholars who really foist the "Digital Humanities" upon us; the younger grad students, the ones who have been raised on computers and therefore are the most intimate with their limitations, are the ones in my observation listening with the most skepticism, folded arms, and cocked eyebrows.  Most of us entered the humanities because we dreaded a dull life of clerical data-entry, because we actually wanted to think about the data for a change--specifically, about what's happening to us when we enjoy a really good book, about what that experience reveals about us and the world we live in.

We didn't major in English to just do data-entry; what's more, we didn't need to major in English to just do data-entry--something the extollers of Digital Humanities as the hope and salvation of the English major would do well to remember.

David Bowie's Blackstar

While I've always liked David Bowie--several of my all-time favorite songs are David Bowie songs, in fact--I certainly would never describe myself as any sort of mega-fan.  Some Greatest Hits and the obligatory copy of Ziggy Stardust were all I was ever really content to engage with; I generally found his output to be a skosh too uneven (especially the '80s!) to bother delving deeper. Nevertheless, the man's death last January hit me far harder than I ever thought it would, and I've spent an inordinate amount of time since trying to figure out why.

Many mourners have cited Bowie's ability to endlessly reinvent himself as what was most precious about him--we lost not one David Bowie but many (though I doubt we'll similarly mourn Madonna).  His chameleon-like changeability was inspiring to every Queer kid who ever sought to forge a new identity--which is also an apt description of every teenager ever.  I do agree that changeability is part of his appeal (though Queen is who most helped me navigate my own teenage identity crisis), but that still doesn't explain exactly why his death hit me so hard.

Other mourners have pointed to how he still felt vital in a manner that no one else of his generation does anymore.  The Rolling Stones were already a parody of themselves before I was even born; Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan still record, yes, but they tour primarily behind the classics.

By contrast, when Blackstar debuted 2 days before his death, the reviews were trying to place it within the context of his larger oeuvre, which albums it sounded like, built off of, what new directions it was pushing in.  People were still talking about what he might do next, as though he still mattered, which is not something we do with, say, a new Paul McCartney album (who, though I'm sure I'll be sad when he passes too, nonetheless I doubt it will hit me, for he hasn't recorded anything of note since Michael Jackson was still Black--which is another death that didn't hit me).  That explanation felt warmer, and it was at this point that I finally decided it was high time to hear Blackstar for myself.

[I love that this video grants us one last Major Tom reference for the road!]

What can I say?  I haven't heard an album this gorgeous in a long time.  It sounds classically-old and cutting-edge new, all at once, fusing together Jazz and EDM in a manner that I've never heard before, that I found myself dancing to, wild, passionate, and free, in spite of myself, within my room.  It has a sense of wonder about it, it hints at infinite possibilities--like only one who is already at the doorstep of eternity can hint at--with an assurance that such things are still possible.

As I've related before, just last Spring, I was lamenting with an old friend about how the perennial experience of our early-20s--that of discovering a gorgeous new album that transports you outside yourself--was one neither of us had enjoyed in awhile.  Indeed, we worried that we would never have that experience again, that maybe we couldn't again (studies have shown most folks don't get into anymore new music post age 34).  Maybe, sadly, we had finally outgrown the possibility of having that experience with new music, as our brains slowly calcified into old age.

But now here I am having that transportive experience, in 2016--and what's more, it is not some long-lost classic from a bygone time, nor is it by some young artist before all their fresh ideas petered out, but by a 69 year old, literally on his deathbed, 25 albums into a long career, someone who had every right to just rest on his laurels, rich and fat and old, and churn out one last quick cash-in.

And I think that that's what most struck me about Bowie, and why I felt his death so acutely--not for what he represented to all the frightened kids out there, but to all the frightened adults!  For what is it that most scares us about the aging process?  That our bodies will give out?  That we won't save enough for retirement?  I offer that on top of all that, what most scares us most about ageing is that we will finally cease to grow--that at some point our current political opinions are the only ones we'll ever have; that our current wardrobe is all we'll ever wear; that our current musical collection is all we'll ever listen to; that our current reading level is all we'll ever read at.

Some people, too many people, are comfortable with that stasis, and that's fine; but I for one quietly fear that from here on out it will only be a struggle to keep expanding my artistic palette, that every innovative idea I had in my 20s will be the last ones I ever have, that any attempts to keep up with the times will only come off as desperate, that I will settle into middle-age respectability far too comfortably and predictably.

But lo, here is David Bowie, a man who never ceased to be innovative!  And don't speak to me of your insipid "innovative" businessmen who only know how to create new ways to exploit workers (as though there were anything novel about that), I'm talking about someone who actually does something new!  He did not resist the ageing process, forever and pathetically trying to grasp after some long lost youth, but instead used his age to explore new ways of feeling, of thinking, of being!

Even when some of his artistic experiments failed (again, see the '80s--ye gods, the '80s...), still he never ceased to experiment--and what's more, he did it to the very end, on his own terms!  18-odd months ago, when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he chose to "curate his own death," to rage against the passing of the light, to dispense with every maudlin impulse and stare his own impending mortality square in the face, and what's more, to make something genuinely beautiful and new from it! 

How few artists do that, how few get to do that!  It's the promise to grow old gracefully, that one can still choose to be vital, creative, free, and daring, right to the very end, that David Bowie represented.  Men like that are far too rare, and hence we feel their loss all the more profoundly when they are taken from us.  He's a blackstar (the transitional state between a collapsed star and a singularity), and even better, he invites us to be blackstars too--for we will all be on the doorstep of eternity swifter than we suspect, as well.