At times, Dan Deacon's music is only obnoxious. The repetitive, high-register sounds and strange artificial beats can get on the listener's nerves very quickly, and sometimes seem gimmicky and amateurish. However, there are moments of real transcendence in his electronic sounds and looped vocals, and his methods for creating the music are countercultural on their own.
Deacon captures rapture in "Snookered" as well as anyone can, and he does it his own way. By layering his vocals to harmonize and keeping a strong bass line under his whirling electronic giggly noises, Deacon makes use of the wall of sound technique to blast the listener into his joyful, playful and nostalgic world. While most of his lyrics are indecipherable, the line "I've been wrong so many times before/but never quite like this" truly captures a childlike wonder that embodies his approach to music. The soundscape is his playground, and he strolls the merry way across it.
The fact that Deacon does his own production and performance is a testament to his artistry and his position outside of the mainstream. His ability to conjure such complex musical arrangements from computers is staggering to someone like me, who records MIDI tracks with an amazed look on my face the entire time because of my ignorance of technology.
Also, Deacon had a hand in the viral video "Drinking out of cups," which I find hilarious and frighteningly weird.
Spike Jonze is a complicated filmmaker. Not only are his films themselves complex in their subconscious depths, especially Adaptation and Being John Malkovich, but his different paths are mind-boggling.
Jonze started out as a punk, a straight-out rebel skater kid at heart who made skateboarding films that echoed the early MTV frenzy (before MTV stood for "Make TeleVision?"). There's no doubt that this Spike Jonze was a rebel against mainstream culture, but his music videos for the Beastie Boys and REM could never suggest where his career was headed. Yes, Jackass made a lot of sense, but despite the obvious and very legitimate arguments against such a ridiculous show, I'd argue that there was a certain genius in the idiocy of that program.
Most of the stunts are adolescent, testosterone-filled, and disgusting, but some of the pranks are quite brilliant. By creating ridiculous situations for normal people, such as a fat man chasing a dwarf through a public street in diapers, it went further than any hidden camera show had gone before, and there really is a certain joy and innocence in testing the limits of public behavior.
Where he went from there, though, is hilarious all on its own. Though Jonze has only made a few full-length films, each has been met with critical acclaim only comparable to the occasional films of Terrance Malick or a director of that stature. He went from punk kid to working with John Cusack, John Malkovich and Catherine Keener in the blink of an eye. And in partnership with Charlie Kaufman, as I've discussed before, he drew an actual acting performance from Nic Cage. Not a bad start for a skater.
His films are unorthodox and haunting, hilarious and mind-bending. His best work has been with Kaufman, which I pointed out in an earlier post, but I would argue that the film that most evidences his countercultural style is Where the Wild Things Are. No other director could have, or would have dared to, make that film. Never has a children's book been adapted into such a complex and haunting film, which examines childhood itself and appeals to all ages for all reasons. A strange and drifting film, the beauty lies in the examination of fantasy rather than fantasy itself. By drifting through this dream, Jonze forces his audience to confront their own insecurities, something that no children's film besides the Toy Story series has dared to try.
Jonze makes me happy. Talent knows no bounds.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Every once in awhile, there comes a singing voice that truly shocks audiences. David Byrne had it, Jeff Mangum had it, Van Morrison had it and now John McCauley has it. As the lead singer and songwriter of Deer Tick, McCauley projects the insane energy of a man with hope, but losing it fast. His throaty growl can transform into a wildcat roar in just a few notes, and his clear influences stretch from Hank Williams to Elvis Presley.
McCauley is not a countercultural figure just because of his wild voice, which sounds like a boot heel crunching a whiskey bottle into a dirt road, but due to the way in which he faces the norm straight on and screams in its face. McCauley, and the band as a whole, defies his roots and pursues an America that is today treated like a thing of the past—the rural small town. He is from Rhode Island, hardly the gritty rural environment he sings about. He was 20 years old when he recorded the band's debut album War Elephant, but on the recordings he sounds about 65. Despite his usual scowling scream, he chose to cover a Sammy Davis, Jr., song to close out his first album. Plus, Deer Tick's live show features the only time I've seen a man with a rattail play the upright bass.
Lyrically, McCauley sounds like someone who has been through everything and still sees a lot ahead. At 20 years old, he opened his debut album with the line, "I am the boy your mother wanted you to meet, but I am broken and torn with heels at my feet." Words like this reveal the vulnerability hidden beneath the veneer of screaming rocker that McCauley puts out in his stage performances. He's not afraid to examine big problems, and he's also not afraid to pervert cliche love songs, to add an alcoholic troublemaker element.
His most personal exploration is in "Christ Jesus," where he examines his intense struggle with his spirituality, screaming Jesus' name from the bottom of his despair, and admitting, "As I'm drowning and I struggle to breathe it's your face I don't see." The intensity of his longing is something lacking in most of today's music. The passion behind his words and his voice overshadows the simple musicianship in most of his songs, whereas most mainstream music shoots for style over substance (call me pretentious, but repeating the word "umbrella" over and over doesn't do it for me as much as crying the lord's name repeatedly).
I hate McCauley's subdued fury. It makes me think I'm not angry enough.
The practical jokers of Hollywood are the best rebels. Andy Kaufman was not exactly the first, but he pioneered the idea of entertaining your audience by tricking them into thinking they have been tricked. From the very beginning, with his "foreign man" standup routine, Kaufman shocked his audience and twisted their expectations for how celebrities are meant to act, up to the point where they had no choice but to laugh or vehemently hate him. And he received both reactions.
One of Kaufman's greatest gags, in my opinion, was in a performance at a university where the audience heckled him, asking for his "foreign man" impression. In response, Kaufman began reading The Great Gatsby into the microphone until half of the audience had left. At that point, he said he could either keep reading or he could play a record. The bored crowd cheered for the record. When Kaufman touched the needle to the vinyl, it proved to be a recording of him reading The Great Gatsby—exactly at the point where he had left off. By the end of the performance, he had read the entire novel through.
It's this type of dedication to a gag that propels Joaquin Phoenix to the top of my list of counter-cultural figures. An outstanding actor, nominated for two Academy Awards (one of which he should've won for Walk the Line), in 2008 Phoenix suddenly announced his retirement from acting, his dedication to a hip-hop career, and by all outsider accounts went completely insane.
His transformation from dark, brooding actor into dark, brooding homeless man that mumbles Bible verses on the corner caused a huge stir in the entertainment industry. The brilliance of his charade is not just that he fooled people, but that he drew such a strong reaction from his audience. Kaufman described himself as a "song and dance man" rather than a comedian, and if Phoenix's performance as his incoherent, inarticulate, confused and cocky alter-ego is not a "song and dance," I don't know what is.
Phoenix completely lambasted what it means to be a celebrity. His mockumentary I'm Still Here (the title of which I assume is a brilliant joke on the ever-so-serious Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There) raised the bar for picking apart our assumptions of what a celebrity is while still drawing a lot of emotion from its audience. I must say here that Phoenix's Bob Zmuda was his brother-in-law Casey Affleck, who proved beyond any final doubts that he is infinitely more creative than his older brother (though in recent years, Ben has showed some promise).
Jim Carrey's brilliant portrayal of Kaufman in Man on the Moon
I've always said that true art is something created that draws a strong emotional response from its audience, as long as that response is not pure revulsion. In that respect, Phoenix's con is truly art. The audience hates his character for his vanity and reckless behavior, but he draws more sympathy than anything else for his character's struggle for acceptance when it is clear that he's simply not talented in hip-hop. It's a hoax, like Kaufman's many gags, but unlike Kaufman, Phoenix digs into the heart of what it means to be a celebrity. Kaufman used his fame as a platform from which to expand into even greater cons, but Phoenix used his fame to force people to realize how human celebrities are, and how we all crave acceptance in whatever niche we find fit.
Phoenix infiltrated the system and then attacked it from within. He pulled a con that no other celebrity of his stature has dared to pull, and he pulled it off perfectly. He risked his entire career in order to pull a prank that made a point, and this makes him a bigger rebel and all-around badass than can be found almost anywhere in Hollywood. He became the culture and then turned it on its head.
I hate Phoenix's daring. It makes me feel like I'm not there.
Charlie Kaufman has been crafting this type of cinema for years. His screenplays can only be executed by specific directors, such as Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, who hold his worldview of subjectivity and the complexity of the human psyche. Basically, directors who are as crazy as he is and have his same lust for life.
Kaufman's scripts question memory and how it affects our decisions. Stories like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (which I admit, as a grown man who considers himself fairly stoic and tough, is one of the five films in which I cry each time I watch it) are literally timeless. The emotion that he invests in our memories and our perceptions of reality reaches far beyond that of filmmakers who ask similar questions.
Kaufman is clearly a neurotic on par with Woody Allen, but he lives with his characters and waits for them to die. While Woody cares about his characters and crafts beautiful stories around them, Kaufman works through the eyes of his characters rather than trying to figure them out from an outside perspective. Plus, his script for Adaptationdrew the first performance from Nicolas Cage since Raising Arizona when Cage didn't come off as the biggest asshole alive.
Kaufman fights the cinematic norm by using the fourth wall as a plot device, by making fun of filmmaking itself, by assuring his audience that everyone is as confused as they are, that the world really is as complicated and beautiful as reflective people think it is. His first, and hopefully not last, dive into the world of direction, Synecdoche New York(the second Kaufman film in my crying five), is such a life-affirming and absurd cry for respect for life and memory and reflectivity over daily experiences, it attacks head-on the idea of watching a film and instead forces the viewer to be a part of the film.
A few days ago, I walked into a gas station and saw an Amish couple at the counter. From what I gleaned from their conversation, the Amish folks were asking the clerk for directions to a doctor's office. The clerk looked perplexed, turning from side to side as if he would find the office if he looked hard enough at the spinning taquitos. He then asked the ultimate question: "Well, did you, like, mapquest it?"
Again, they were Amish.
Kaufman uses moments like this to explore the pathways of our psyches. The absurd and hilarious ways in which we assume the world works, and then the real lack of self-assuredness most of us possess. Kaufman hates when we don't appreciate every moment we're given, and he wants so much to overcome those ideas of linear experience and human reason being logical.
I hate Kaufman's brilliance. He makes me wish I knew myself.
Unrelated, here are two photos from my actual life when I realized that my writing set-up was incredibly perfect. So here is writer heaven.
Outside of the frame there's also a mug of coffee. Writer's heaven.
George Saunders is a fiction writer and
professor at Syracuse University.
George Saunders can call people stupid to their face without their realizing it. He can make people think while telling them that they never think. He can draw people into a story so deeply that by the end they believe in ghosts and fantastic memory-removal machines and modern-day cavemen.
A friend of mine is a creative writing major at Columbia College in Chicago, and the day after I lent him Saunders’ collection Civilwarland in Bad Declinehe called me. The conversation began with nearly a minute of silence on his end of the line, punctuated with him muttering, “I…I, uh…” and then laughing maniacally.
He finally managed to get out that he’d stayed up half the night reading the book through, and he described Saunders’ style best when he said that Saunders was the only writer he had read who can make him laugh at the beginning of a sentence and then begin to cry by the end.
Saunders was born in Texas but raised in Chicago, and it shows. His writing shows a Midwest sensibility that questions everything about the American lifestyle, from media to consumerism to daily interactions. And like many Midwesterners, Saunders is indeed weird.
His birthplace lacks influence in his writing, as there is no real Texan bravado. No offense to Texans of course, as Texan bravado is just A-okay in my book (if I ever visit Texas again and I encounter a blog-reader, I’d like to make sure that blood is the only substance coursing through my veins).
Saunders is clearly a student of Vonnegut in his sparse prose and ironic droll, but his criticisms are so much more specific and biting, whereas Vonnegut attacked the larger culture. Also, Saunders attacks without being obvious, as it seems more that he is wandering through American culture wild-eyed and just as confused as the rest of us.
I have nothing against Vonnegut—my facebook religious views are listed as Bokononist-Catholic—but let’s face it, he was an amiable asshole. Saunders pulls off amiable and emotional and intelligent all at once while railing against the arbitrariness of American culture. And he manages it without an ounce of preaching, as the reader is too caught up laughing and crying for his characters to even realize how the story is forcing them to question their assumptions.
With the obstinateness in American government growing more unbelievable by the day, Saunders' work becomes even more important. When the culture is absurd—and it is truly absurd what is happening with our political culture—the only weapon that can slice through is more absurdity. By suggesting insanity as if it were an acceptable way of life, we can show how insane our ideas of what's acceptable behavior have become.
In today’s confused culture, it’s easy to ridicule. It’s easy to criticize critics and point out pointlessness and laugh at the ludicrous television that many people laugh at (Two and a Half Men, someday I shall destroy you). However, it’s not easy to care about what you’re criticizing.
This is Saunders’ forte. He cares deeply about his characters even while criticizing their actions. He ridicules the mainstream by diving into it and trying to figure out each of the weird fish he swims past.
My Columbia friend has taken this method to heart. He recently sent me a text at 3 a.m. that read: “I would love you even if you weighed a thousand pounds. How’s that for poetry?”
By entering these weird mindsets, these perceptions of people as good or bad based on what our culture has taught us, Saunders (and my Columbia friend) make an earnest effort to understand while exposing the absurdity behind our preconceived notions.
As a writer and fan of counterculture, Saunders makes me furious. I wish I had written his stories first.
At times, Dan Deacon's music is only obnoxious. The repetitive, high-register sounds and strange artificial beats can get on the listener's nerves very quickly, and sometimes seem gimmicky and amateurish. However, there are moments of real transcendence in his electronic sounds and looped vocals, and his methods for creating the music are countercultural on their own.
