Thinking about
I haven't felt particularly invested in any one piece of media this month, though I've continued on Les Miserables and Genshin Impact, which are the projects of many months. Otherwise watched a few loose episodes here and there of things I have already started, and finished The Left Hand of Darkness.
obligatory response to alien genders
I quite liked LHD; the tragic ending felt hopeful, still, gesturing toward a shared future even after unnecessary and tragic sacrifice. The long journey across the ice felt unreal, like something from a different book. I felt like the very conceit of the book, that there are other possibilities for sexuality and gender (even outside what is strictly human, though the book hints at a long-ago human diaspora). I think the thoughtfulness about how biology shapes gender and society was interesting too — a more nuanced take on the obviously-true-but-also-a-transphobic-dogwhistle "Biology Is Real".
The book clearly has a politically-minded imagination, being in part about a society changing into something more hostile and threatening to its own citizens, and even though the political machinations felt somewhat far away and glossed over it still felt real. I thought of it contrasted to Game of Thrones, which takes place very much inside the engines of power even as it occasionally aspires to show the on-the-ground consequences of those decisions; LHD takes place at successively further distances from the centers of power, from a seat next to the sovereign all the way out to the fringes of the habitable zone of the planet. It's almost symmetrical, Hero's-Journey-style, ending again in the throne room as the king acquiesces at last to the alien ship landing and to Gethen joining the Ekumen, but there is a sort of epilogue which recenters Genly's journey from his political purpose to a personal one. He goes to the ancestral home of Estraven, his traveling companion and first believer, and meets Estraven's child. I don't think this is meant to be a reveal to us, as we are by then familiar with the outlines of Estraven's tragic incestuous past, but Genly is moved by the meeting, in a somewhat ambiguous way. I think after assuring the future of the planet writ large, he returns again to the scope of his aborted relationship with Estraven, and must mourn.
the author is undead
I attended a Will Wood concert, opened by Fish in a Birdcage, this month as well, which was outstanding in both acts. Fish in a Birdcage is one absolutely virtuosic vocalist/multi-instrumentalist, who is apparently relatively new to live performance, which is stunning based on the quality of said live performance. I had medium-high expectations based on this band's recorded music and these expectations were wildly exceeded.
Will Wood I have already seen in concert once, a few years ago, memorably about a week after getting top surgery (remarkably, I felt fine). He was at that time touring with a band (I'm not sure if this band was still called "& the Tapeworms" for this tour but such was the band's kind of unfortunate original name), and playing at a kind of anti-parasociality that refused to explain or illuminate his musical intent, and half-sarcastically putting up a front of audience hostility (responding "No you don't!" to cries of "we love you," etc). He has always blurred the boundaries of fact and fiction in his self-mythologization, (tumblr-)famously inventing a daughter to discuss in interviews and on social media, but never aging her consistently with the passage of time. There is, too, the self-produced "documentary" and concert film, The Real Will Wood, on the cover of which is, it will be noted, someone other than Will Wood. ("You're trying to replace yourself...") The last tour's refusal to engage with any intrusion into the personal life "behind the music" felt like a natural step, and the one moment of seemingly honest self-disclosure during that show was about having revealed too much on social media and starting unfortunate backlash.
This new tour was titled "Mr. Wood Is Dead," seemingly another gesture at the death of the author as an enforcement of professional boundaries. Given all that, then, the show was surprisingly personal, or at least some facsimile of it. Will sat at a piano alone on stage or played ukulele, and between songs told stories to discuss the origins of each song. An absolute reversal of his previous commitment to letting the songs speak for themselves, assuming any of it were true -- several moments of the show had Will pulling surprising standup-esque reversals or hinting that there was more beneath each story. One of the most memorable moments, to me, was a tangent about playing doo-wop music at a nursing home, and being interrupted by a woman in the throes of dementia. "She was in the middle of slowly exiting the world, in a maelstrom of loss." I don't exactly remember the abrupt, awkward punchline shortly after this, something that contained the information "that was my grandma and I told her to shut up until I see her at Thanksgiving." I vividly remember the effect of being yanked from a slow, lyrical meditation on the nature of memory disorder and deterioration ("she was the human embodiment of the impermanence of all things") to a slightly awkward joke as the end of the episode, a deliberately uncomfortable humor to avoid dwelling too long on the melancholy of aging and decline. Bo Burnham came to mind, as did Hannah Gadsby's Nanette, comedy as a way to be cruel and withholding, the storyteller's prerogative to control the audience.
I do, at the same time, really like this move: the obvious construction of a fake stand-in to bear all the critical speculation that it would be awkward to perform on a real human personality. This is, I suppose, what celebrity always is, but with more or less distance between the "true" interpersonal identity and the celebrity consumable. I feel a lot more at license to have an opinion about Will Wood, the Stage Character, than I would about Will Real-Last-Name the Actual Human Being. I feel relatively confident and at least I hope that we, the audience, are only given what is freely offered of Will the Human Being, given the visible control he exerts over how much basic reality informs Will the Character.
how many years have you been on that couch?
I was also struck by this seemingly late-career/retrospective style auteurishness, only Will and his music and his words, walking through the eras of his music and interrogating the origin of the major themes on each album. This clashed a little bit with the youthful punk-like intensity of his earliest work; the lyrics and themes revel in madness, dysfunction, ego. The multilayered instrumentation and the often-shouted vocals seem calculated to invoke rather than merely evoke mania.
The change to the quieter "in case I make it" album, thematically about growing up and learning how to engage with other people honestly, seemed a little bit more complete in this style of show than in his last, more traditional concert. Making the older, more evolved version of his stage character re-engage with the former madness of the first iterations of his persona, screaming maniac visions and then composing himself again to reflect over and over, felt fascinatingly jarring! It was perhaps a little bit like the process of therapy, of honestly facing what one is and used to be, and deciding to be different. His first albums contain a lot of DSM-speak and name-drops a number of psychiatric drugs, but "in case I make it" has an earnestness about things like quoting AA slogans which feels markedly different from the first era.
In fact, directly contrast Everything is a Lot's "The First Step", which uses a recording of the serenity pledge played backward to begin the song and is at least a little bit ambivalent about the promises of recovery ("I'd try to see the glass half full / But I'd probably just drink that too") with "Cicada Days", a cry for personal change that includes the explicit reference "And my sponsor said 'do nothing, nothing works'" and ends with other AA-isms: "Keep coming back, it works if you work it / so work it, you're worth it, it won't if you don't / One day at a time, tomorrow's too late, amen." Another song on "in case I make it" is helpfully labelled "Half-Decade Hangover," so the progress of this particular theme across his oeuvre is relatively clear.
will wood eras tour i guess
The lyrics on Everything is a Lot mostly scream or growl, and revel in rebellious dysfunction (legal and medical):
Cellmates scrapin’ upon the bricks in the basement
Tryin’ to escape this probation generation
Too late, crazy fucker’s gotta do the time
Committed to the mental ward, committing all the crimes
I’m alive and kickin’ till the split ends fray
Maybe plead insane, guilty, but I’m not to blame
Everything is a Lot is furious, caustic, sarcastic, almost gleefully hopeless. SELF-iSH is ... a lot of the same things, including explicitly yearning for rock bottom on "Hand Me My Shovel, I'm Going In," but it begins to be plagued by existential doubt and dread:
What you feel and what you do
Are those things really you? And if not, then what is?
So, my God, what’s wrong with you?
And I’m still asking who that is
SELF-iSH also starts to be more obviously concerned with psychiatry and the medicalization of identity as a theme:
It just seems unlikely that it's me who was to blame
So I bookmark my DSM 'cause I need to remember my place
Wood says of the title of "Mr. Capgras...":
"It just comes from my own life of hypochondriasis, hypochondria? I don’t know what the word is. Um, and self-diagnosing and bullshit like that where I’ve worked myself into an anxious frenzy, trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with me." (quoted in an interview which also has a long and interesting meditation on "death of the author" in a comment from Will himself, who clearly thinks a lot about this.)
The Normal Album is a fuller exploration of this theme, almost entirely consumed by interrelated questions of identity, mental health/illness, medicine. "How many milligrams of you are still left in there?" says "Marsha, Thankk You for the Dialectics..." "BlackBoxWarrior" is almost entirely diagnostic manual word-salad.
'In case I make it' mostly gives up all the anxious DSM-divination in favor of, well, apologizing and doing better:
Oh, I'm sorry, I promise, I'm doing my bеst
I just haven't learned how to be human as you are yet
Let all my red flags fade to white, yeah, I give up
Don't let me leave, I'll only take more than I gave
Okay, I'll pack my stuff
Here at the end of days, my god, what have I done?
While also occasionally poking fun at the melodrama inherent in making a big deal out of and/or making art about trying to be a better person:
Well, here we go, I'm turning over
The same old leaf again
And write a fucking song about it! 'Cause it has to be all about Will's fucking drama! God damn it!
The completeness of the arc feels kind of nice. I think about The 1975, and how much they're still lyrically a little stuck on the heroin thing, and maybe will be forever, artistically. From inside the drug addiction perhaps only the drug addiction is interesting.
Philosophically, then, I really want to like the album about recovery best, but I love the climax of the arc, The Normal Album.
give me your half-life crisis
The Normal Album's title suggests both "normal" as in "free of dysfunction" and suggesting conformity and the dead normality of suburbia. Given the more explicit early rock / doo-wop influences the whole album sort of feels like a concept album about the dark underbelly of mainstream culture's mythology of 50s suburbia:
Wide-eyed and wired, the snap-crackle-pop of the Geiger
Camouflage billboards for lead-lined Brooks Brothers
You elbow the jukebox and sing “Duck and Cover"
And of course one of my personal favorite lyrics of all time:
'Cause back in my day we didn’t need no feel-good pills and no psychiatrists
No, we just bled out in our baths
And god damn it, we liked it
A useful reminder that we love to reminisce about Good Times that are a myth, a story simplifying a real past containing a lot of suffering. Relatedly I think often of a conversation between two acquaintances, one of whom was arguing for not taking her child to the dentist for a tooth infection. She challenged the gathered friends, with the assurance of a checkmate, "and what did people do about tooth infections before modern dentistry?" and another person responded simply, "they died?"
There is also a more personal reading of the music style's thematic purpose, as Wood explains in his own Genius annotations on Suburbia Overture: "All you want to do is go back to the time before the damage was done. I use a lot of retro sounds on this album to kind of express the feeling that maybe “normal,” to each of us, is just our past, from before things got hard." Certainly the point about mythical good times is well-taken both socially and personally. There is probably no perfect Golden Age in one's own life any more than in American history, that is.
vampire reference in two keys, or: ok this is the last thing i'll say about will wood i swear (lying)
The personal and societal meet again in the two mentions of vampires in the Will Wood canon. Interestingly, the vampire can be presumed to be the speaker in both, and each addresses the listener directly in the second person. (Arguably both listeners are presumed to be women, addressed as "girl" in Vampire Reference and asked "were you mother, daughter, subject, and author" in Vampire Culture.)
Vampire Culture (part of Suburbia Overture suite) is about being sucked dry, desensitized or otherwise made "cold" by mainstream culture:
Blood, didn’t they want your blood?
So don’t apologize for being blue and cold
The shock-value-packed opening lines suggest cruelty and violence intertwined with phrases and images of more wholesome culture:
I dropped my eyeballs in the bonfire, we fucked on a bed of nails
I caught Kuru from your sister and died laughing in jail
Smell those screaming teenage sweetbreads on the 4th of July grill
Smile and wave, boys, kiss the cook, live laugh and love, please pass the pills
("Screaming teenage sweetbreads" on its own is a really masterful distillation of the whole verse, I think, containing the forced-wholesomeness of "teenage sweethearts" and linking it with cannibal "sweetbreads." The "screaming" first forms "screaming teens" a la Beatlemania then responds to the cruelty later in the line.)
The first vampire revels in violence, invites us to "Go on, drink that / Blood," repeats "don't apologize" for what culture has made us. Reads into the audience his own monstrosity ("You learned to torture / House cats like vultures") and declares "your lack of empathy." Vampire Culture is a blood orgy, dead to the very idea of consequence.
Vampire Reference instead shows some idea of remorse, "And I'm sorry for the things I've done / And all I ask of you." Even more specifically, and momentarily stripping away the vampire metaphor:
Well, maybe I should switch up
The style of my mistakes
The hearts and promises
I tend to prefer to break
Both of these lines are followed by calls to "squeeze it in rhythm / Prevent my heart from stopping" and "stop the world and melt with me," goth-core begging for sex/love which perhaps cheekily undermines the sincerity of the apology. This vampire isn't, at least, begging the listener to join the bloodsucking revelry (minus the "blood-", though? "No I ain't begging, I'm just saying / It's an option"). And the sexuality implicit in "squeeze it in rhythm" is a far cry from "we fucked on a bed of nails." Musically, the Reference vampire is more tender, romantic, seductive, a "pseudo-bolero" per Will's own Genius annotation. Presumably this is a manipulator more than a ravager, but one who is, if we take his begging at face value, ready to change:
Hold my hands
We'll dance the 12-step on my grave
I'd kill the man I am
For one more chance to be yours, babe
That "kill the man I am" is the only thing approaching violence in the song (unless "raise hell for you" counts, but it's certainly no "teenage sweetbreads" or "pulled the trigger with your foot" or "learned to torture cats"). The vampiric character of Reference as a whole seems much more clearly a metaphor than Culture, in the sense that surface-level interpretation as an apology from an *emotional* vampire seems immediately available. (In fact if you take out the "coffin" image, it's almost entirely a regular apology.)
The figure of the vampire himself is perhaps less clear-cut as A Type of Guy in Culture compared to Reference: "Culture" is a little more intertwined with the vampire-as-character, with a big chunk of the lyrics doing (horror story) scene-setting, and the "it's only culture" sections forming a character voice/perspective. If we take the connection between the repetitions of "culture" and the intentionally entwined lines "Go on, drink that / Blood, didn't they want your blood?" seriously, though, the Culture vampire might operate on the level of analogy as well as the level of fiction. In other words, if the song uses the loss of "blood" as an analogy for a loss of humanity or empathy, what then is the vampire that takes this away? Perhaps anyone who stops "apologiz[ing] for being blue and cold," who disavows their own agency in their mistakes ("it's only culture"), becomes the monster who invites others to do the same.
You can read Vampire Reference, then, by contrast, as a valorization of the act of apology itself. I really like how it emphasizes this musically; it's a little bit campy and silly, but also actually pretty sexy. (Symmetrically true to its theme it feels like listening to Suburbia Overture/Vampire Culture too many times in a row runs the risk of pulling me into a spiral of madness.) It's easy to picture a ballroom pair dancing to the Spanish guitar on it, which is also appropriate, as an apology is a dance for two, a conversation rather than monologue.
The self-involved dramatics of "I'll be in my coffin" are perhaps still a little much, and suggest perhaps that we are still dealing with a monster, but this song certainly offers a better model of monster to be than the unrepentant and callous first vampire. An intermediate, only semi-monstrous step before learning "how to be human as you are."
