Halfway Across the Atlantic Ocean

My deletion folder is littered with the bones of KRISTEENYOUNG song appreciation posts; I never capture what I love about this elusive band, but here’s another try (this one from Music For Strippers, Hookers and the Odd On-Looker).

As the album closer, “Halfway Across The Atlantic Ocean” is first remarkable for its placement – it follows “Protestant,” a mighty song which ends with a long, stately outro; to hear such a definitive album closer as “Protestant” suddenly give way to the much gentler opening chords of “Atlantic” is one sign that this unusual album is not going to die without a struggle. Nor does “Protestant” to “Atlantic” fall into the big-drama-into-cooldown-ballad pattern of record-ending; instead, there is a re-ignition of nervous tension which burns to the end.

The second remarkable thing about “Atlantic Ocean” is that it references “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” without irony – which is really the only interesting option these days. I can’t be sure that this was intentional; it’s a half-quote in the opening chords which recalls the song’s wavering bridge, rather than the famous melody, and I might not have sat up quite so suddenly had I not known that Young is a great fan of Garland’s, and has several times lyrically referenced her and Oz. But knowing this, it feels like a personal response to a performance most of us view through a vaguely academic lens -not even a campy lens so much anymore- and that made the original seem suddenly new to me.

Young begins “Atlantic Ocean” in reverie, a soft halting delivery (particularly on the word “clear”) giving way to a more confident, plaintive one: “The day…that it became… clear – was/the first time that I saw you for the hundred-and-fiftieth time – but can you blame me? I was reaching – reaching, halfway across the Atlantic Ocean.” Read the opening lines how you’d like; I think it lends itself to “I was too distracted by my efforts to reach you to notice that you were no longer there” and “can you blame me for wanting more than I’m given?” as well as “I’m trying to do something patently impossible; take a moment, gentlemen of the jury, to acknowledge the scale of my labors.”

But the lyric, while sometimes ambiguous, is not vague. The song has a plot. Love is found in the first verse, lost in the second; Young and her friend are in the water, attempting to cross it at first (it’s uncertain whether they start together or try to meet halfway); in the third, Young winds up diving under the water in an attempt to cross it alone, collapsing in exhaustion (possibly dying; in any case, she comes to rest “eternally reaching”) but in the process ending the built-up tension of the title (which ends each verse) by stretching her hand, finally, “more than halfway across the semantic ocean.”

(Was the ocean in question, therefore, meant to be read as a “sea of words” throughout the song? Or does she triumph -sort of- over the sea of words as consolation for not being able to bridge the Atlantic, whatever odd symbolism the song attaches to that act? Again, there could be a bunch of readings, all of them relatively straightforward and none of them contradictory, which is a mark of good writing.)

There’s also a cutting twist in the sped-up refrain, with the appearance of a second Dorothy -Mrs. Parker- whose most famous title is referenced in a long list of potential methods of suicide – “I have enough rope when you’re gone, gone, gone/the oven’s cozy when you’re gone, gone, gone,” etc. The list is sort of played for laughs, but it’s really a nightmare sequence. These dangerous objects surround the speaker with a friendly, domestic pull (“the traffic’s playful,” “my knives are sharpened,” “prescriptions filled”) and their threat is very active. It reminds me of the Smiths’ “the sea wants to take me/the knife wants to slit me,” but it has an air of desperate energy, rather than the dreamy passivity of “I Know It’s Over.”

Beyond that, I have to praise the song’s phrases and internal rhymes – I especially like “I will swim till my limbs are numb and dim” (which has not only the  -im/-im, but that pair of -mb words). Likewise, I love that each verse begins (and there is enough space separating the verses that this stays subtle) with “the day,” “the place” and “the time” respectively, as if to describe some final appointment either with death or with the lover/addressee. And the stretching-out of words (at the start of the song, she tests the water with her toe, and the word “toe” stretches and twitches, lasting nearly as long as it takes her to be grabbed into the water in the next line) elegantly demonstrates lapses and differences in timing.

But “Atlantic Ocean” doesn’t come down to any of that for me; it comes down to a strange ability to sincerely show a bad mental state to the listener without implicating the listener for being a voyeur. I really don’t feel awkward pointing out the technical achievements of a track about the breakdown of a life, because for me, despite its intense content, it doesn’t feel at all melodramatic (and thus you feel as if you can meet it on its own terms, looking at the emotion straightforwardly, which means seeing the form straightforwardly as well).

Responses to it will vary widely, I know, but as Wilde said, when critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. Except I don’t know of many artists who appear to genuinely enjoy being disagreed over, so maybe he should have put it slightly differently.

(If you are somehow read this whole thing without knowing the album, the blog Nine Bullets just also put up three other tracks from Strippers, with a very nice review.)

Lyrics under the cut.

Slate gets it right

I’m not the kind of person who knows much about this Mark Sanford thing, but John Dickerson’s brief piece in Slate sums up the Internet’s response to him and, in the process, sums up much about the Internet.

The overrated art of the lead

I taught writing for a couple of years, and I’ve been blogging for several months now -shifting in style, in the process, from an unread faux-professional music blog to a general unread blog about music and books- and I think, more than ever, that the punchy lead paragraph is an overrated concept. High-school students are still told to write them, and they shouldn’t be. Journalists are more likely to pull it off. Still,  I think it is vaguely magical thinking to imagine that any but the best or worst opening sentence will affect whether the article is read or not. Surely, unless the author is brilliant or terrible, the topic plays the biggest role.

If my subject doesn’t contain an obviously outstanding anecdote, these days, I just try to jump into the content as quickly as I can. For awhile, I tried to open with a “striking” statement of opinion, but since what strikes the writer and the reader may be very different, that meant trying to guess and directly address the reader. Some of my best writing is directly addressed to a reader, but that’s because I do some of my best writing in Emails and MySpace messages and IM. That’s different from addressing an infinite number of strangers as if all will share your careful judgement of what is a remarkable fact or hooky rhetorical question, which I think pulls you from the moment well enough that your style will stumble.

All of this will be truer for me than for you, as such things usually are. Some writers are great and effective producers of leads, but I don’t think enough people have that inherent talent for it to be the universal writing advice that it is. It’s like advising all writers to use simile heavily.

I give up on a pithy title; this is my All For Love followup post.

I know I don’t like All For Love because I’ve been putting off reading the last act for five days. I still haven’t, but it looks like I won’t until the followup-post pressure’s off, so let’s forge on.

Dryden underestimates his audience, I think. In riffing off Antony and Cleopatra, All For Love does the same things Antony and Cleopatra did -realistic characters, character-based comedy, a tragedy of misunderstandings- and presents it as a new take on the story, while in fact, all he’s really done is get rid of Shakespeare’s epic scale. He has made the characters more “realistic” (probably not the word Dryden would use, but I think that was his intent) in that he’s made them vague and easily manipulated, taken away their emotional extremities; he does not seem to believe that there are people in the world who act like Shakespeare’s characters, or alternatively, he doesn’t seem to see artistic potential in slightly overplaying.

However, there’s no real way for me to get into the author’s mind, so why don’t I talk about the book, where I’m on firmer ground? If that’s even a reasonable distinction?

Let’s start by praising Dryden. The incidents in the play are ingenious. They’re like incidents in a great movie; they’re visual, and they’re also heavily symbolic – not in a “daffodil means sadness” way, but in a “this shot compresses a larger conflict” way. This is not my favorite way to tell a story, but there is little doubt that Dryden is brilliant when, for example, he has Octavia come to plead with Antony to return – brings his kids – instructs the kids openly on how to cling to him for maximum bathos – martyrs herself obnoxiously (and is called on it by the helpless Antony) – all played as intentional emotional blackmail. We associate this kind of anti-sentimentalism with the modern world, and the modern world with the best of everything; I freely admit I’m probably tumbling into this fallacy when I call this scene great, but on the other hand, it is great. Maybe if I were living in 1850 I’d have to free myself from my times a little more to think so (actually, this is probably a big part of my resentment of All For Love: it too closely resembles what’s currently fashionable in thought, it doesn’t flatter me by demanding I work for it). But it is an objectively gorgeously-plotted play. I hope.

Dryden also does a fine job of retelling an epic as a drawing-room melo-comedy-something. He is formally brave. He reduces the characters to a few vital and thus more highly concentrated roles, in the process giving us the great characters of Ventidius, Alexas (who become increasingly obvious and annoying characters as the play runs on, but are still interesting and funny) and to a lesser extent Dolabella. Dolabella is a transparent plot device, actually, but Dryden does a nice job of writing him: a well-motivated, diplomatic youth in an awkward position. It doesn’t help, however, that Dryden tells him to be in love with Cleopatra. Dolabella’s passionlessness is so striking that it initially seems that Dryden’s setting it up so that he’s actually interested in Antony, and Antony’s blind to it. This could be interesting, but alas, the more time passes, the more this potential wrinkle smooths.

I was somewhat wrong in my initial assessment that Dryden is trying to be epic and satirical about the failures of royal leadership, and also that it’s not really about the leads (though it would still be better titled Antony and Ventidius or, The Room Mis-Judged). I’m completely convinced now that he’s focused on the formal tricks listed above: epic-into-personal-drama. That Shakespeare’s play already has a perfectly good personal drama is not Dryden’s problem.

I was completely correct in my initial assessment that Dryden really shafts Cleopatra, who has not yet demonstrated even a touch of the strength, wit, failings and personal power of Shakespeare’s, and even states (without irony) at one point that she was born to be an ordinary woman. I respect all that in theory; it’s the same thing Shakespeare does, sort of, giving these royal or martial characters strongly humanizing traits and really bringing home the fact that they can’t live inside their myths – but on the other hand, Shakespeare’s characters certainly live up to them. I don’t understand how Dryden’s Antony and Cleopatra have even held on to their thrones. It is fine to write about ordinary people (though if they lack remarkable gifts, they had better be in very interesting or pathetic situations) if the audience doesn’t know that they have extraordinary life histories, that in the case of these ancient politicians, these are people who’d be dead now if they weren’t extraordinary.

Part of this is the dramatic-unities thing. You can’t give it any real sense of history and these characters -without their history- are much weaker even if you change nothing else. In the end, I think, I continue to respect Dryden’s experiment, but I really can’t like it.

I don’t think I’ll write more about All For Love unless Act V really, really shocks me one way or the other. Like, if one of the leads suddenly says, “I’ve written a play about us, my chuck!” and produces a copy of Antony and Cleopatra, and then they perform that instead.

Dryden’s All For Love, Post 1

Antony and Cleopatra was the first book in a long time to appeal to both the literary and fannish sides of my brain, and as such, it leaves a terrible vacuum, which I have filled in a fannish way.

Specifically, I’m reading John Dryden’s All For Love or, The World Well Lost, written about seventy years later in explicit response to Antony and Cleopatra; a rewrite of the play, but with the additional, incredibly bravely-taken challenge of obeying the Greek tragic unities – distilling the whole sprawling epic (which makes so much of its years-long pauses, and its death scenes in which characters have to wait for hours until they bleed out) into a single day of defeat.

Thus far (middle of Act II) I’m not sure whether he’s going to make it. It doesn’t help that his versions of the characters are not so complex, fascinating and ultimately pitiful as Shakespeare’s; they’re literary-fiction characters, tight and satirical, not the sprawling edifices I’m used to. We are not meant to sit in their brains, but rather to watch them helplessly, aghast at the terrible decisions they’re making, and at the terrible effects their self-absorption will have on their subjects and companions.

Because the other thing about Dryden is that he refuses to participate in Shakespeare’s neutral view of history. His story is not actually about Antony and Cleopatra, but about Egypt and Rome, and he actively condemns the leads for putting their romance above the needs of their station; indeed, he presents them as somewhat clueless royal creatures, relying for motivation upon their retainers, Ventidius the Roman general (a strikingly modern character, a bit of a self-conscious parody of the macho, blinkered action hero, though also a very clever man) and Alexas the Egyptian eunuch (an urbane realist who smilingly accepts Ventidius’ jokes about his missing balls while coldly out-talking and out-maneuvering people of much greater manifest intellectual capability). (Ventidius and Alexas hate each other.)

Comparatively, when we first see Antony, he’s somewhat unsuccessfully (but with a fair degree of pathos and poetry, since the whole point of Antony is that he can pretty much do anything except get younger) Hamleting around an Egyptian stronghold, a man of action clumsily trying to get his fists around the idea of depression. On Dryden’s chosen day, his empire is already lost, and he flings himself down and delivers a long, passionate monologue in which he fantasizes about running off to live in the kind of woodland pastoral only a lifelong urbanite would imagine. When Ventidius, who’s been watching him secretly, finally reveals himself, Antony breaks off his ramble (which, through exhaustive description of the forest scene, is made to seem extraordinarily long and involved although it actually isn’t) and they share a beautiful moment of understatement:

ANTONY

Art thou Ventidius?

VENTIDIUS

Are you Antony? I’m liker what I was, than you to him I left you last.

ANTONY

I’m angry.

VENTIDIUS

So am I.

This is a great exchange, half restrained tragedy and half well-timed wry comedy, but again, Dryden seems removed from his characters, and it shows in the suddenness of the transition from a near-break with reality to a moment of total self-awareness. It’s not an insane thing to imagine, but it’s something Shakespeare finessed better (partly by keeping most of the transitions between scenes, and partly by establishing Antony’s character earlier, so that the different fragments refer to an earlier and more coherent self). Played out so baldly, and without setup, it doesn’t work as well, even though you have to admire Dryden for trying to lay the whole matter before you in such a transparent way.

His Cleopatra is, thus far, a disappointment: manipulative without mastery, melodramatic without strength, lacking any more than a practical Brutus’ wit. It’s difficult to believe that she’s a queen who rules by charisma, and Dryden also makes a couple of absolutely inexplicable decisions in his portrayal of her history. Foremost among these is the idea that Antony has been responsible for much of her rise to power. Apparently, he has admired her chastely from afar almost since childhood, and her earlier relationship with Julius Caesar was horrible rudeness on Caesar’s part (and not much more). This decision takes most of the agency from Cleopatra, which would be a legitimate character decision – except that it means we suddenly know nothing about her. If Antony has always had her life firmly in hand, if she started (indeed) as his de facto ward, then who is she, and what does she want? If you’re going to do it this way, then the whole play is now about Antony, and that’s a sad loss.

Though, again, so far the significant characters are Ventidius and Alexas anyway; even Antony’s level of agency is modest compared to Ventidius’ drive (why has he actually interrupted Antony’s forest reverie? To convince him to come and lead an emergency army he happens to have raised). In its relentless focus on the nominally minor parts, it’s almost a proto-proto-proto Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. I suspect Dryden (again, in a very modern way) is simply bored with traditional heroes in a particular way that I think shows limitation rather than imagination.

This is my response merely to the first act and part of the second, of course. I found this kind of early-impression post useful the last time I wrote about a play, so I’m putting it up even though I find it quite likely (since Dryden displays a good deal of intelligence and humor) that there are massively improving reversals and twists to come.

On the inevitable Tori Amos comparison. (Wrongly unmentioned: G. Kulka.)

I’ve always been annoyed by the critical practice of describing female performers by their relation to, and precise distance from, Tori Amos. Posting on it has been difficult, though. It’s hard to pin down exactly what bothers me about it.

At the most basic level, of course, it bothers me because an Amos comparison turns me right the fuck off. I’ve spent a solid decade in close, regular contact with a wide variety of Tori Amos fans, and as a result I’ve tried very hard to like her. I’ve heard every album. I’ve seen her live (and she was very good). I acknowledge her skill at the piano, her unique songwriting, her strong perspective; I see what the fuss is about, but that doesn’t mean I very often want to hear her. I’m not a fan. As a result, if I’m reading a review that compares someone to Amos at all, I don’t tend to follow up – and this is a shame, because pretty much every warbly female singer-songwriter gets the Amos-as-reference-point at least once.

Then there is the Amosing-as-dismissal. This started as a Kristeen Young thing. It’s strange, but almost inevitably, first-time listeners who like her call her “an angry Kate Bush,” while the ones who dislike her compare her to Amos. I heard it, too, at first. They do share an inborn vocal tone, and they both write unconventional piano parts. But where Young’s playing is loud and discordant, Amos’ is quiet, elegant and restrained; where Amos’ voice is naturally low and takes a complicated breathiness as its trademark, Young’s is piercing and sobbing, and makes frequent leaps from a mid-t0-high, almost falsetto rock belt into an extremely high classical note. Amos’ and Young’s classical training is respectively in piano and in voice, and that makes a vast difference in how they rebel against it.

All this is to say that, while I’m well-used to hearing this particular comparison, and to refuting it instinctively and at length, I also recognize its sway – its appeal to that lineage of female performers, running more or less from Kate Bush in 1980 to Bat for Lashes in 2009, and through Amos and Bjork somewhere in between. This appeal is a powerful method of dismissal: you are a child of this performer, a parent of this; I have now categorized you, and will therefore never see you as exceptional. This is particularly problematic because that lineage is not even real. It is an easy, false perception based on the (relatively) rational assumption, upon being shown the rock canon, that the few confessional women [or male New Wave moaners, or sweet-toned Northern Irish alternacrooners] in it must represent a distinct and specific plotline.

In turn, this type of perception is based on the common belief that artforms are collective – that it is possible for an unusual artist, for example (as I recently read a reputable person saying of Amy Winehouse) to represent “an aberration” against a more unified general narrative of collaborative progress.

I think that this is pure English-department crap, and I think so only because I spent many years fully convinced that I was very clever for thinking something like it.

So – yes; on one level, I’m just perpetually annoyed because a favorite singer sometimes gets a comparison I don’t like; on another level, I’m similarly snitty because I don’t really like Tori Amos, and if I see Hanne Hukkelberg compared to her, than I’m less likely to seek out the interesting work of Ms. Hukkelberg, even though I know better. On yet another level, it bothers me because it exposes my own willingness (as earlier) to believe in ideas, like quantifiable artistic lineages, which I actually think are nonsense. It’s also annoying for much more universal reasons.

This entire post goes double for Bjork and, in fact, triple for Ms. Bush.

Double.

Triple.