My endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact my only home.
Alicia was down from NYC this weekend, and we finally got a break in the rain.
Most of the leaves are down, except for a few gingko trees and maples.
Alicia IS, in fact, that excited about this leaf. Liz, not so much.
Liz said, “I don’t think you could ever be unhappy if you lived next to a river. You would always be able to think clearly.”
I think I would vote for the ocean, but looking at this, it’s hard to argue.
I’m not very good at writing about music. I have tried. I don’t usually know how to describe what I’m hearing, I don’t have great recall of musical history (pop or otherwise), and I can barely follow a meter. The thing I DO know is lyrics and stories. Lucky for me, xx are as good at building their music lyrically as they are melodically. This means I can tell you why their new album (also titled xx) is dismantling my theory that Silversun Pickups’ Swoon is the best thing I heard all 2009.
Swoon is about responsibility and who is to blame for the dissolution of a relationship (“Don’t say I didn’t tell you so/ Maybe I didn’t but you’re taking it”), as much as anyone can be when aging is the real crime, but The xx might find that question asinine: the slow devolve taking place here has no agent. But their debut album is blindingly honest in the same way. In “Shelter,” Romy Croft asks, “Maybe I have said, something that was wrong/ Can I make it better, with the lights turned on?” The answer xx provides is probably not, since lies are not the problem.
“Crystalised,” which I’ve included above, is the album’s anthem of trepidation. This song, with one player as the sun and another as the glacier, reverses roles frequently, as Croft and Sim remind each other to “go slow” and the music oozes down to a finish. Like the rest of the album, these songs are quiet, like a set of conversations we’re overhearing from another room, and any disturbances are spoken as quietly as confessions. But “Fantasy” is the real turning point of the album. It’s the shortest track aside from the intro, and the least coherent, but perhaps the most important in terms of the record’s narrative. Placed right in the middle of the album, it lacks much in the way of melody, the few lyrics reverbing and almost lost, like the rhythm. This is where time has stopped, or perhaps reversed: “I’ll see you August, see you June.” And in this careful dismantling, each chord, each word bears more weight, and the whole thing shuffles, one uneven synth glide at a time, towards a climax: “I’m burning to impress / It’s deep in the middle of me/ I can be fantasy.”
This confusing of time, of the real sequence of events, is one of the recurring themes of the album, and might also be my favorite thing about it. “Stars,” the last track, is really its own beginning, a first date, or maybe a second or a third or fourth first date– it doesn’t really matter. The more time is rearranged, the better: this story doesn’t have to follow a line, as long as it’s played out with the beloved. “But if stars, shouldn’t shine / By the very first time / Then dear it’s fine, so fine by me / ‘Cos we can give it time / So much time / With me.” “Infinity” continues to develop this theme, but after all the dates have failed. It’s endless and slow, with Oliver Sim’s voice more mumbly than we thought possible so far, and a drumbeat that sounds at first like a death march. We’ve reached stasis, and time has stopped for real, in the absence of the ability to move on: “I can’t give it up / To someone else’s touch / Because I care too much.” After the superstar hope of “Vcr”(which sounds a little like something The Cure would have dreamed up) and relief implicit in “Islands,” it’s easy to believe that neither of these singers will be able to move on.
So, it’s not a very optimistic album. The minimalism is taken almost to an extreme in both note and narrative, and the space that it occupies, cycling between dawn and dusk, is in the end negative. Each choice on the part of the to withhold is an act of self-preservation, crystallized like a statue’s hand raised in warning or refusal.
But that’s really the point. Basic Space, one of the jauntier tracks, with the kind of hook that indie popsters dream of, talks about being dipped into wax, stopped in a moment of bliss (“I’m setting us in stone / Piece by piece, before I’m alone / Air tight, before we break / Keep it in, keep us safe”), although the album’s other time-traveling tracks jumps show this to be explicitly impossible, both on the album and in the real world. Even the title may now be suspect: xx was chosen because all the band members would be turning twenty by the time of its release, which of course they all are now, since time won’t stop even for a record this good.
This is the last piece of mail I received from him:
And this is his favorite band:
I’m sorry if you’re one of the 12 people that came here today looking for that. I don’t have any.
I finally saw Where the Wild Things Are. Given the emoting you’re used to from me, you might be predisposed to think that it dissolved me into a puddle of tears, but guys, I made it almost all the way through! Which is sort of unexpected, not only because it’s me but because everyone in the film spends so much time being sad.
Here’s what I liked about it, and let me be clear that this is what most people DON’T like about it: Max reacts to his situation not by running away so much as by reliving it with giant clawed monsters. The island of the wild things is a deep, deep dive into Max’s problems, but with way cooler houses, and while this seems to be one of the most recurrent criticisms of the film (not fun enough for actual children! too much psychological projection!), I actually thought it was the only way this movie could make sense.
Because an unfortunate truth of my own life is that even as a kid I was limited by my own imagination. The stories I made up, and the ones I wrote down, were the products of what I’d lived and done and read. Even my dreams were made up mostly of things I remembered from my waking life, if much weirder, what with that sailboat coming out of the bathtub drain and all, and that’s true for all of us, I think. I mean, I could imitate, I could rearrange, I could come up with things that felt new, but all stories are essentially inseparable from their sources.
Jonze makes this angle clear: Max’s creations haven’t emerged from the ether. Monster Carol behaves like Max, and KW often seems like a mash-up of his sister and his mom. Everyone speaks in the kind of simple sentences a kid would use, or that adults use when talking to kids. Since this world is of his making, it’s only logical. And despite the truly excellent rumpus at the beginning, things devolve into tantrums pretty quickly, just as they did before he ran away.
Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro’s dark fairy-tale set in fascist Spain, was no idyll, either. Both movies start with a story: Max runs full-tilt down the stairs after the dog, fork in hand, hunting his dinner, and Ofelia’s books tell of a lost underworld princess. We quickly learn the miserable circumstances of each, and of their growing separation from their parents. Most importantly, both kids are extended an invitation to an otherworld in which they must prove themselves as royalty. (Ofelia has a harder time of this last task.)
Neither kid finds much in the way of solace in these new homes, because they are exactly as dark and difficult as the ones they’ve tried to avoid. Max’s situation is obviously not as dangerous as Ofelia’s, and his monsters are correspondingly much cuter, if a little mopey. But that dirt clod fight is basically the episode with the snowballs writ large, just as the Pale Man’s test of Ofelia’s character is a banquet only because Ofelia was sent to bed without supper that night. In each, the fantasy world’s rules always follow from what’s happening in the concrete.
The distance between what’s real and what’s imagined is so much bigger in movies ABOUT children than in movies FOR children. This is why 25-year-olds don’t watch those old Winnie the Pooh movies or go to, like, G-Force when they’re feeling nostalgic, and why WTWTA has been such an advertising juggernaut. If you’re six and you’re watching Winnie the Pooh, you’re in the woods with him. But the problem of being an adult is that you can’t really enter that world without a proxy, which is why Max and Ofelia exist.
That’s also why kids don’t get this movie. They shouldn’t. They don’t need proxies. WTWTA is not made for them, even if it was erroneously marketed to them. This movie is partly for people who know who Spike Jonze is, but more so for people sufficiently removed from being an actual kid that they can look back and now realize–much much later–that the igloo wasn’t any more awesome than the world outside it, and in fact the angle from which you see the world must necessarily triangulate your dreams.
So, I did tear up a little, which is what I started this post with and I’ll come back to it now. But not when Max and Carol are gazing soulfully at each other over the waves. I didn’t lose it until he finally makes it home, when mom collapses to the ground, pulling him in, so full of words that in the end she can’t use any of them and just drinks him in with her eyes: her child returned. Her own fantasy– one I never thought I would be boring enough to share, let me add– is the one where everyone makes it home safe, everyone gets out alive. It’s a mundane daydream, maybe, but has its own wildness to it: remember how she yowled and chased after him when he ran out the door?
Shut out of Neverland, now I’m the Max who sits next to Alexander and makes a clumsy effort to apologize. And it’s not as much fun as throwing dirt, not even close. But I crossed that boundary a long time ago: if I were to make a blanket fort now, it’s not because I believe I can hide there.
Just watched the first episode of Friday Night Lights, and I know I’m super-behind the times and all that, but I blame everyone who DID NOT TELL ME HOW EXCELLENT IT IS.
I don’t even like football.
more soon…
I just saw this. Let’s break it down by assuming that you, dear reader, write for DoubleX and found some juicy little studies that might appeal to your oh-so-educated audience of liberal arts-educated secular women, who are the only readers who might matter, because they (like you!) are smart. Please note that this post could also be acceptable at Jezebel. Here’s how you write it:
“Even when men and women had the same response in the brain, women were more apt to attribute it to something divine, “out of body.” Other scientists have found these limbic tendencies particularly pronounced in adolescent girls, concurrent with the final stages of brain development. As Barry Kosmin, a coauthor of the new Trinity College study says, “That’s why when anybody sees the Virgin Mary, it’s a couple of young girls on a mountainside in Southern Europe.” (Nota bene: This week, Sam Harris—who gained fame by authoring The End of Faith but is by training a neuroscientist—released his new findings on the neural correlates of belief. He told me in this case he found no difference between the workings of the female and male brain.)”
“Some researchers hypothesize that women are hardwired to believe because of evolutionary imperatives. Belief in God— or the Mount Olympus ensemble cast, or a phalanx of wood spirits, and so on— has long been connected with tribal ritual, and formed the center of communities. Women relied on these communities for the survival of their children, while men were off spearing buffalo, pillaging neighboring settlements— or whatever the caveman business trip furnished.”
“Not a single major faith is led by members of its female flock, and the more deeply adherent a religious group becomes, the less freedom it offers its women, not to mention power. It’s hard not to compare women sticking with faith to wives confined to bad marriages: They’re so committed to the institution that they’ll willingly shrink under mistreatment just to maintain their own status quo.”
“atheism is from Mars, Wicca is from Venus.”
