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The encounters I have with creepy men and shitty lovers are tragic for their normalcy, shattering the image of sexual freedom and power that I imagine with the help of Wizkid’s music. My experiences, in which my inflated expectations are met with, at best, indifference toward my pleasure and, at worst, the denial of it, confirm that the real world has not caught up to the worlds we can create in music. I consider two options. One is to throw away the music, believe nothing, trust no one. Another is to see the contradiction as instructive, for if I can’t imagine pleasure, how will I know when it’s real?
In time I look beyond myself, searching for critics who have more precise language on the subject; who have elaborated on the gap between the imaginative agency that popular music offers to women and the physical realities that take it away. I find helpful language in the work of Ann Powers, who, writing on rock, cites the “always partial and precarious” erotic freedom that many women, and young people in general, have experienced through rock and roll. “As great as it feels for a girl to let the noise and rhythm surge through her body,” she says, “that body still moves within a world where others wield all kinds of weapons to contain you.” Itching for parallel analyses in genres I feel closer to, I look to the work of Joan Morgan and the journalist Akoto Ofori-Atta, the latter of whom writes of the “gray area” that abounds in the hearts of Black women who love hip-hop, of the “contradictions of loving an art that is reluctant to include you; loving men who, at times, refuse to portray you in your totality; and rejecting sexual objectification while actively and proudly embracing your sexuality.”
But every now and then, if my father finagled his way out of his Saturday morning shift delivering packages for FedEx, he’d stroll into our apartment on a Friday night, toss his keys on the table, lean his head past the doorframe to whichever room my mother was posted in and say, “We’re going out tonight.”
You’d think she’d find this sweet, the spontaneity of it. Like in those old-timey movies where the husband comes home to tell his wife to throw on her best clothes, they’re hitting the town, and the wife drops whatever she’s doing to turn on the stereo and put on her face in the bathroom, all while her husband admires her from behind, sways side to side, shadowing her tempo — both of them smiling at each other in the mirror.
But this was real life, and in my real-life home, my mother didn’t like surprises.
“You just telling me this now?” she said one night.
so good
In no time Ace had me on my back, pinned to the floor. His legs straddled around my waist, hands gripped around my shirt collar.
We were wrestling for real.
And that’s when I felt him. His belt buckle was still undone, and he was still somewhat firm, pressing against me, as if his anger sustained it.
And when I think about it now, maybe that’s when I knew. Knew for sure about myself. Because as much as it scared me, it didn’t feel wrong.
“You think you big now?” Ace said, shaking me.
I couldn’t put up a fight. Not that it mattered, and not that I wanted to. I had gotten almost everything I wanted. A reaction. Something to let me know that Ace still saw me.
Government officials come to the narrator’s workplace to warn his students of various sects operating contrary to Marxist-Leninist doctrine, the most dangerous of which is the mysterious Picketists, whose secret sign is an extended hand with an insect in its palm. Through Caty, one of his fellow teachers and a Picketist convert, he learns of their nighttime meetings, where they dress in black and march on local hospitals, cemeteries, and morgues, carrying signs reading Down with Aging!, Down with Cancer, No to Eternal Disappearance! It is an ongoing, recurrent, futile protest against the realization that:
you are living in a slaughterhouse, that generations are butchered and swallowed by the earth, that billions are pushed down the throat of hell, that no one, absolutely no one escapes. That not one person you see coming out of the factory gates in a Méliès film is still alive. That absolutely everyone in an eighty-year-old sepia photograph is dead.
jesus
If D loves H, then where does this prickliness — this obstinacy verging on imperviousness — come from? Watching her swing between secluding herself from H — physically, verbally — and clinging to him, I think of the painter Celia Paul, who became Lucien Freud’s lover in 1978 after meeting him at the Slade School of Art, when he was 55 and her teacher and she an 18-year-old student, and who has described young women in such circumstances as facing a “dilemma.” These women have “their own ambition for their art, and their need to be loved and desired. The two ambitions are usually incompatible.” This incompatibility has many causes, among them the duty that arises out of love, which, Paul testifies, makes it difficult to remain “dedicated to my art in an undivided way. I think that generally men find it much easier to be selfish. And you do need to be selfish.” I think of Alice Munro, who admitted to interviewers dispatched by the Paris Review that, while all young artists needed to be somewhat “hard hearted,” “it’s worse if you’re a woman. . . . When my oldest daughter was about two, she’d come to where I was sitting at the typewriter, and I would bat her away with one hand and type with the other.”
[...] Watching her alternate between naked woundedness and vehemence, I was reminded of Louise Glück’s description of the aspiring poet’s debased yearning — her “adamant need which makes it possible to endure every form of failure.” The harshness of that failure is as little veiled by Julie’s face as a flush.
<3
In the Julie Harte movies, the methods Hogg uses to make sense of her mother’s life are first exercised in the film-within-a-film in Part II, where Julie materializes in a hall of mirrors, by a misty river, and has to walk, like Carroll’s Alice, through an undersized door. The film is dreamily disjointed and obvious, filled with symbols of romantic intimidation, of the end of adolescence, of ambition. It has a kinship with the terrible brightness and emphatic, externalized rendering of the ballerina’s inner journey in The Red Shoes. The allusion reaches back both to Anthony telling Julie, in the first film, that he likes Powell and Pressburger (“I think they’re very truthful,” he says, “without necessarily being real”), and to the urgent journey of that film’s protagonist, an aspiring ballerina who is told by her impressive but dour mentor, “You cannot have it both ways. The dancer who relies on the doubtful comforts of human love will never be a great dancer.”
shook
But while Tillman admires aspects of her mother’s personality, she mostly feels the ambivalence of her book’s subtitle. Tillman does not love her mother — she writes candidly that she hasn’t since the age of 6 — but she doesn’t want her to die. She is therefore bound to help her live. “I performed the good daughter,” she writes. “My heart wasn’t in it, my conscience was.” The sangfroid is striking and refreshing, even uncanny at times. (It is also the predominant tone found in Tillman’s fiction, cut with mordant humor.) There is no breathless rendition of the cruelty of disease, or the pain of a loss that drags on over a decade. Sophie’s illness presents as a medical mystery at first, but the chronicle of her health has no narrative momentum. Instead, Tillman seems more curious about the strange condition her mother suffers from, offering diagrams of the working of brain shunts and the contraption’s medical history, signaling an intellectual remove from the circumstances in which she finds herself.
My own experience in that regard is somewhat typical of my generation and class. When I lived in Washington DC, circa 2017, I remember paying an exorbitant sum to live in a pretty nice apartment. I loved that apartment. I also furnished it pretty much exclusively with the most economical IKEA crap I could find. What was I supposed to do? After paying for the apartment itself, I didn’t exactly have a robust couch budget.
Make no mistake, I was in no sense deprived; I was a senior editor making a solid white-collar salary and living (as I said) in an apartment I really liked. But that’s exactly my point: when some of the basic elements of a professional-managerial-class lifestyle start to cost a lot more, members of the PMC are going to adjust by spending less on other elements. Some of them may develop the expertise and commitment to hunt out bargains on quality goods, but many more will default to what the market is most intent on serving them. Thus my IKEA and Amazon Prime furniture, my Uniqlo wardrobe and Warby Parker glasses.
Of course, it’s even more perverse than that. Because if the people with even a little bit of disposable income are spending it on fast fashion and fiberboard furniture, that’s going to further erode the economic basis for doing anything higher quality or more ambitious. The cheapo stuff wins.
This is all precisely ass-backward. Everyone should have housing and health care; these things should be cheap and abundant. If anything should cost more, it should be the optional purchases — the stuff that comes appended with a value-added tax in other countries. When you pay more for a pair of shoes, there’s at least the possibility that those extra dollars reflect the quality of the materials and the wages of the people who stitched them together. The price of my DC apartment mostly reflected the fact that there weren’t enough of them to go around.
it's annoying that the author (Ned Resnikoff) is the director of California YIMBY but this isn't wrong
Ganz’s explanation for “Why Culture Sucks” (as the post is titled) draws on Arendt and the destabilizing, ephemeralizing character of the internet. I think he’s more or less right, but his explanation is incomplete. Our broken phenomenology is inextricably bound up with the broken material basis for cultural production. Yes, the internet as it is shares some of the blame — but that’s the internet as it is, not as it had to be. Background economic conditions helped build that internet.
I don’t want to suggest that materialist explanations are the only explanations that matter. But I do want to argue that a nation’s material and economic circumstances have profound implications for its spiritual, moral, and artistic health. Sickness along one dimension leads to sickness in the other. And reinvigorating the cultural realm is going to require close attentiveness to the economic conditions that make certain types of culture possible.