in which a fictional woman hoards power December 31, 2011
Posted by theidentitythief in fiction.add a comment
The Profit Motive
She knew she was beautiful. It was a simple fact, not a distracting one. Her expenditures on clothes and accessories were investments, investments free of any apparent risk. She could see this in the forcibly suppressed jealousy of other women, and in the pitiful complaisance of men.
There were a handful of men she kept around. They all seemed happy enough to spend money on her, happy also because she kept them all unaware of each other’s existence. Each thought himself indispensible to her; each remained inexplicably convinced of his own importance. They offered of themselves in pride, and she accepted their offerings with an artful sense of grace.
She had a younger sister who lived at home and took care of their sickly mother. The old woman’s descent into ill-tempered senility strained not only her relationship with her two daughters, but also the reationship between the daughters themselves. The younger sibling nursed hidden feelings of frustration and resentment, which began to manisfest themselves in the brusque manner with which she questioned her elder sister’s way of life.
“When are you going to settle down and lead a reasonable life? You aren’t getting any younger, you know.”
“Women aren’t built for monogamy. I don’t need a husband. Men have their own needs, and as far as I’m concerned, they can keep them.”
Some of the men she saw were rich and successful, while others lived in contented poverty. She knew how to keep them satisfied, and allowed them to believe that they satisfied her, although none was interesting enough to sate her restless thirst for fresh diversions. She sometimes suffered twinges of a nameless desperation, but she never felt powerless. She didn’t know how to explain this to anyone. There wasn’t anyone she wanted to explain it to.
“It’s not fair to treat people like that,” her sister complained. “You should be honest with them. You owe them that much, at least.”
“Men lie to me in order to sleep with me. I don’t owe them anything. I give them what they want, but I hide them from what they don’t want to know.”
“Which is what? That you don’t really care about them? That you’re stringing them along to amuse yourself?”
She answered questions like this with a crooked, sardonic grin.
Sometimes she pondered the men she knew: their thin, shallow senses of bravado that always collapsed like sand castles beneath waves of lust and wishful thinking. None of them wanted what they pretended to want; they preferred instead to dissimulate, to repeat rehearsed fantasies in order to make themselves seem interesting. Who did they think they were fooling?
On good days, such delusions amused her; other times, she found it difficult to conceal the disgust with the fact that these men had long since rendered themselves incapable of self-respect. The haze of pornography and video games clouded their vision. They stank of self-perpetuating ignorance.
“You’re not even being fair to yourself,” her sister scolded. “It’s not healthy that you can’t stand the thought of being alone. What kind of person are you going to be, ten years from now? You can’t decide what you want, and if you keep everyone around you in the dark, when you finally realize you can’t figure things out for yourself, no one will be able to help you.”
“I know what I want. I want power.”
“I remember how you used to be,” she continued, shaking her head sadly before turning to look her sister directly in the eye. “You used to be happy.”
“I remember too,” she replied quietly. Unable to meet her sibling’s steady gaze, her own eyes drifted away, up toward the ceiling. “I used to be a lot of things…”
in which a fictional woman dreams of her own anxiety December 30, 2011
Posted by theidentitythief in fiction.1 comment so far
I was standing in my kitchen, but it wasn’t my kitchen. I had a roast cooking in the oven – I don’t remember preparing it; I just remember that I was waiting, not in the anticipation of enjoying a meal, but under the weight of the need to feed my family. But they weren’t waiting like I was; my son was gone and my husband was just sitting at the table, glaring – not always directly at me, but I couldn’t ignore my awareness of a dark aura emanating from him, an aura of demand. He was radiating a negative energy that paralyzed me. I wanted to focus on it to figure out why, so I could decide what to do, but then I noticed the lawyers.
I was dressed casually, but both my husband and the two lawyers were wearing suits. They seemed calm, stern, businesslike. They had placed an enormous stack of papers on the table, and while I paced the kitchen, worried about the roast and whether it was going to burn, they just kept trying to get me to sign the papers.
“We need you to sign,” the first lawyer said. “Things will be a lot easier on all of us if you just sign.”
“A lot easier on all of us,” echoed the second lawyer, nodding in agreement. The first lawyer stared at me, holding an expensive pen. My husband was looking off into space.
“I need time to read it first. I don’t sign anything before I read it,” I protested. I wanted to mention the roast, but I was afraid.
The first lawyer looked disappointed and impatient, replying: “It’s just a standard contract. Boilerplate, really.”
“Just boilerplate,” the second lawyer said. My husband’s eyes flashed at me, and I approached the table, following a compulsion that violated both my will and all my natural instincts. The stack of papers seemed to have grown thicker and more imposing since I had last noticed it, and the pen the first lawyer brandished had also grown larger, its glossy faux marble finish appearing shinier and more elaborate. I looked at the words on the first page, trying to scan them for kernels of meaning, but the letters shifted into unintelligible shapes like figures underwater. While I tried to swallow through the growing knot in my throat, the first lawyer shoved the pen into my hands, thrust his index finger toward an empty line at the bottom of the paper, and quietly demanded, “We need your signature here.”
I hesitated. “Sign there,” said the second lawyer. I took the pen. My hand tried to sign my name, but all that came out was a nervous scribble. I felt torn between two urges: the urge to revise what I had written, and the urge to check the oven, but no sooner had I interpreted my own thoughts than the first lawyer had flipped through several pages and demanded my further compliance. “Initial here.”
“It’s just boilerplate,” said the second lawyer. I glanced toward my husband, whose slow reciprocation of my gaze filled me with an absurd conviction: I had to sign. I didn’t have a choice. Even though I didn’t want to, there were men in suits sitting around a table. Obviously, this was bigger than me. I still felt panicky about the roast, but my tongue was tied, and in my anxiety, I could barely keep up with the first lawyer, who continued to rifle through the document’s gibberish-filled pages, demanding more signatures and initials. Not only did I not understand what I was doing, what process I was aiding, or what sort of document I was signing, but my desperate indignation did nothing to weaken the compulsion to obey. I wanted to speak, to address the fact that the room had begun to smell like burning and it was the roast, that I had to take the roast out of the oven, but my tongue was tied, and I was afraid of being ridiculed by the men in suits. So I signed everything, but there were always more pages. And my husband just sat there, glaring into space. He never said a word.
almost pop December 12, 2011
Posted by theidentitythief in music.add a comment
- So I’ve been reading Pitchfork again. When I was in college, I savored their high-concept prose like good wine. I revered their elevated critical perspective, holding it at arm’s length like something holy and dangerous. It was a while before I began to resent Pitchfork’s contented position as part of the Internet Tastemaking Machine, before realizing that the task of assigning value and context to art is a task that gets you drunk on imaginary power. After becoming something of a music writer myself, spending most of 2010 writing two or three reviews a month for Tiny Mix Tapes, I realized how strange it is to pass judgment on the work of people who you will never meet, whose perspectives will never become real or threatening to you. I realized how easy it is to dismiss something that you misunderstand as if it is unworthy, how easy it is to applaud something simply because it meets you where you are and fills you with a shallow sense of satisfaction.
As difficult as it is to sculpt a coherent written judgment of a (presumably) coherent work of art, the struggle for clarity sometimes masks the fact that criticism never exists on the same plane as the art it criticizes. The only way to really judge a work of art is by making another work of art. Revision cuts deeper than commentary. Criticism sometimes pretends to support art in its aim of embodying beauty; other times, it plays at being art’s enemy. Neither stance withstands scrutiny.
This compulsion to evlauate is located…in the works of art themselves….they refuse to be compared. They want to annihilate one another….Beauty, as single, true and liberated from appearance and individuation, manifests itself not in the synthesis of all works…but only as a physical reality: in the downfall of art itself. This downfall is the goal of every work of art, in that it seeks to bring death to all others. That all art aims to end art, is another way of saying the same thing. It is this impulse to self-destruction inherent in works of art, their innermost striving towards an image of beauty free of appearance, that is constantly stirring up the aesthetic disputes that are apparently so futile.
-Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
This is what my intuition whispered in my ear: in the same way that art suggests its own death, criticism suggests its own futility.
- There’s always a gap between what exists and what can be said about what exists. So while I read Pitchfork’s review of Emika’s new self-titled album, already being sufficiently acquainted with the over-discussed genre of dubstep and the well-developed but underappreciated identity of the Ninja Tune record label, my intuition whispered to me that although I had never heard Emika’s music, there was a fundamental disconnect between her self-titled album and all the things Jeff Weiss was saying about its origins and influences. Not that this was the fault of either the artist or her critic. Who can blame a critic for looking for sources? Who can blame an artist for trying to mask and evade them? But these aims contradict each other; the critic and the artist both seek the end of self-definition, and if they dream of success, they seek the realization of that dream through their chosen craft.
- I listened to most of Emika’s album on YouTube, and after reading Jeff Weiss’s Pitchfork review about the uncommon breadth of her influences, about her subversion of convention, and about a personal endorsement from Thom Yorke, I was disappointed to find that her music didn’t provide the synthesis I expected. Not that I felt the reviewer was exaggerating, that Emika’s aesthetic sense was off-balance, or that Yorke was amiss in endorsing her. I decided that my expectations had wandered astray. Her music synthesizes a lot, but the synthesis is merely a process; it’s not the point.
- While watching the video for “Double Edge,” I realized two things: Emika herself is the subject of this music video, and Emika is using the music video to hide. By “music video,” I mean both the music and the video. The song itself uses a shallow but elegant melody as a bewitching charm, juxtaposing the strange vocal stutters and silences with the unwavering emotional directness of Emika’s lyrics, framing the fragile simplicity of the lite classical piano melody against the aggressive futurism of the rhythm track. She murmurs her threats instead of snarling or shouting; her words creep out of her mouth like clouds of smoke while her drum patterns and bass lines punish the ears with unblinking violence. And the video itself fixes its eye on her face, on an expression that might be considered vulnerable and honest if its owner didn’t allow digital postproduction to drown out the implications of both eye contact and implied nudity.
This whole thing is about image, it’s about product, even though in this case, every relationship between subject and object is a negative one. Emika negates image by denying herself, she negates the power of her production by hiding her emotions in her voice, and she negates the power of her voice with her guarded, understated singing, and by letting the track’s low end dominate the entire sonic texture. There’s not much going on musically, and the music itself doesn’t have any message or intent besides provoking a profound effect on the listener.
This content-poor, effect-oriented existence is what links Emika’s music to pop, but the fact that her music achieves this end through negation rather than affirmation is the reason I bothered to listen to it and think about it. It’s the only reason I give a shit.
study for a poem December 3, 2011
Posted by theidentitythief in philosophy.add a comment
- ARCHITECTURE: There are some forms of art from which we expect a reflection of our selves, the conscious selves we carry around with us, the ones we try to project to the surrounding world. And the world watches, but not in the way we expect; others understand and judge us according to an impossible variety of perspectives, testing our image against their own thoughts and decisions, according to ideas and information unknown to us. To expect art to mirror consciousness, even the unachieved consciousness of our ideals, is to expect too little, to wallow in the shallow end of inner psychology.
Our architecture reflects the structures that support and define our conscious selves. Our buildings are the skeleton of civilization. They don’t merely provide shelter against the elements; they provide the spaces in which we perform our daily activities, the spaces in which we move and live and have our being.
Buildings express a conscious order as much as other forms of art, but the order is a higher one, since its purpose is to facilitate other routines. Ideally , it is invisible to us. It gives us the freedom to not have to think about it, even as we live with and within it.
We willingly subject ourselves to the harsh right angles, the opaque walls, the latched doors, the unavoidable patterns suggested to us by each particular arrangement of rooms.
We think of life as a flowing, organic whole, something that follows the ebb and flow of our thoughts and inclinations, something that responds naturally to the gentle shifts of our inner will. But a brick wall, for example, fulfills its function without doing any of these things. It stands as a mute, uniform plane that turns a deaf ear to life’s subtle, flowing music, one that welcomes our weak-hearted changes of mind with an inhuman stubbornness. The offset rows of small heavy bricks betray our illusions of individuality, suggesting instead that the strength of each body is an absolute only as an absolute part of a larger and more imposing unity, however little we may be aware of this unity at any given time. This rigid geometric truth exists at every level, from the individual brick, to the row, to the plane of the single wall, to the whole of the overall structure. Its existence is inescapable; you may be able to avoid it within the unrealities of the mind, but not in the world of real movements and actions.
- IVY: The dark fingers of ivy embrace the bricks in their own way, curving along its surface but never against it, ignoring the grid of interlocking rows but fulfilling the truth of the plane, with the passive incompleteness of veins.
Each brick is necessary, but the ivy is innocent of necessity. Each brick is strong, but the ivy relies on strength, and without envy, without consciousness. It snakes up from the ground with the laziness of honesty, thinning as it ascends, like a genuine achievement. And while it may fill in the details later, if it happens to eclipse the expanse of mortar and clay, it will be because of the abundance of nature, not because of the artificial completeness of ambition.
The order we achieve is a whole that defies us. The lives that we lead are partial fictions that may never reach their natural climax. We rely on what exists beyond the narrow walls of waking consciousness, but this not mean that we ever become its equal, or even ever learn its name.
